Most Influential Movies of the 00's - Introduction
The world breathed in deep and held its breath in the final minutes of December 31st, 1999, expecting or convinced the world was going to end. The hype around the Y2K bug was rampant, making us think the worlds power would go out for good and planes would drop from the sky. 5, 4,3,2,1…. Happy New Year! We didn’t die. It was January 1st, 2000, and nothing happened. Life continued as normal, and we escaped Doomsday once again.
The year 2000 had a nice ring to it. It was a milestone year for many reasons. No longer would we have to say the year 19 something-something, and the Future was Here! I remember watching a TV show as a kid in the early nineties called, “Beyond 2000” as many of my fellow Aussie readers will recall. It predicted the technology, trends, fashions and breakthroughs we would apparently see once the year 2000 came around. But oddly enough, none of that happened.
The mobile phone revolution was in full swing, and I purchased my first one in late 2000. Some kind of Nokia, I recall. A flip phone (so cool, I know), with a little aerial that had to be pulled out before making a call. In my spare time I amused myself with it’s total of seven ringtones and the greatest mobile phone game of all time – Snake!
I also finished high school this year and was in the select group known as “The Class of 2000”. No other graduating Year 12 class will ever sound that cool., sorry.
The newest movie medium technology was of course, DVD -The Digital Versatile Disc, although everyone thought the V stood for video. As this technology rose, video tapes were still available to buy and rent, but they would be quickly overshadowed by the slim, sexy case and the special features of the DVD. The picture was clear, crisp and sharp, and you could skip scenes in your movie, never worrying about the time-consuming fast-forward button ever again. I remember the very first DVD’s I bought, as toward the end of 2000, I had put a new TV and DVD player on layby with the money from my casual job. It would take me 6 weeks to pay off the lay by, so in anticipation I bought two DVD’s ready to go once my new entertainment system was ready. The titles were “American Beauty” and “Gladiator”, both great movies; one the Oscar winner for Best Picture earlier that year, and the other would go on to win Best Picture at the 2001 Oscars.
2000 and the first half of 2001 brought some good movies, and some bad ones. Movies no one expected would be good or do well did, and the big blockbusters with big name stars and directors tipped to take the box office by storm, tanked! Most notably “Pearl Harbor” and Tim Burton’s rendition of “Planet of the Apes”. Despite those failures, life moved along as normal, and the dawn of the 2000’s didn’t seem to be all that different from the 90’s. Until…
Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. That evening, I was at the movies with a friend, and driving home heard some shocking news on the radio. One of the towers of the World Trade Centre had collapsed! I drove home and watched the rest of the events unfold live on TV. I couldn’t believe it. A scene out of a movie it seemed to be, playing out on TV, over and over again. The world changed in an instant. To read more about how 9/11 changed the movies, you can read a special series of reviews here. And as the world started to pick up the pieces after the attacks on America, the movies changed.
Some movies being filmed in New York City at the time halted production. Other movies planned to film there, using the buildings and streets as their setting had to change scenes or cut out parts of the film entirely. And some other films delayed their release due the sensitive nature of stories focusing on terrorist attacks, ala Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Collateral Damage”.
It wasn’t long after the assault on the United States, soldiers were sent into Afghanistan to track down and eliminate Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network. Terrorist attacks continued around the world, and it seemed nowhere was safe. A grim and constant reminder that the world had been forever changed after that day in September.
With another Bush in the White House, George W. decided it was time to declare war on Iraq, again. And he sent in thousands of US troopers, followed by their ally’s. Day after day, the news reported stories of bombings, raids and soldiers killed in action, coming out of Iraq and its neighbouring countries in the Middle East. The motive for the war; to remove weapons of mass destruction from the clutches of Saddam Hussein. He was finally caught, tried and hung for his atrocities. And were there weapons to be find in his country? Of course not. The true motive for the attack stunk of the pursuit for oil, and President George W. Bush showed his true colours, his limited intelligence, and made us all wish his second term in power would come quickly. I don’t ever recall another time in my life, where myself and the majority of people I knew, wished the years would pass by quickly. And this was supported by the glimmer of light heading our way in the Presidential Campaign of 2007/2008. Mr. Barak Obama.
After Bush pissed off, leaving Obama to clean up the mess, life seemed to look bright again. The dark years of the early 2000’s was fading away, as it seemed the threats launched against the world in 2001 were being eliminated, in part.
Back to the world of movies, and as the internet grew in speed and accessibility, the newest rage of downloading movies illegally began, and Hollywood was hit hard by Piracy. The year 2005 still holds the record for the lowest turnout in cinemas worldwide ever, with movies planned and hoping to do well financially, not getting enough bums on seats to earn back their budgets. Why go out to the movies, when our laptops could connect to the internet in a flash, find any movie in a minute, and download it for our easy viewing pleasure in a matter of hours? These were the days before streaming keep in mind, back when we had the patience to wait a few hours for a movie to be available in our home without going out. Where has that patience gone now?
I opted not to download any movies illegally, although I was given some. I still went to the movies and hired out DVD’s from the slowly diminishing video stores. They were around but getting quiet.
YouTube launched in 2005, but it was several years before people started exploiting it the way they do today. Prior to this website juggernaut showing us movie trailers and clips on demand, you had to watch a movie trailer online via Apple Trailers, which I visited on a daily basis. As time passed by, people were uploading entire movies to YouTube, which would be taken down just as quick. Then some clever people saw the opportunity to do this legally and build business on the social media platform. Channels like “Watch Mojo” and Movie Clips” took up residence on YouTube, offering our favourite clips from our favourites films, preventing people from having to cue up their DVD players and skip to those scene’s. Granted we were still watching entire movies from start to finish in the early 2000’s before our need for instant gratification and quickly digestible content had developed.
The other enemy stirring in the weeds and threatening to make movies and going to the movies obsolete, was Reality TV. If you can really call it “Reality” TV; don’t get me started on that topic. With the original reality TV show “Survivor” being the one that started it all in the late 90’s / early 00’s, it seemed any topic or subject matter you could think of was ripe for the picking, taking normal, everyday people and turning them into stars just for being themselves in front of a camera. No acting. No scripts. No boundaries. And when shows like “Big Brother” came along, revealing society’s voyeuristic pleasure, experienced by sitting in houses watching TV shows about people sitting in houses, the cinemas were getting less relevant. Still, you would get people heading to the movies on Friday and Saturday nights to see the big blockbusters on the big screen. If they had a big enough star, an interesting enough premise, or there were just a Superhero or Action movie in general, they sold tickets.
But the smaller, independent, arthouse films made for people who like to watch carefully, think deeply and discuss what they’ve seen afterward over a Chai late, were lucky to see their film in the theatres for more than a week or two. To counteract the increase of movie piracy, movies were being released simultaneously around the world on the same date, and for smaller films, a limited run in theatres was upheld, with a quick progression to DVD to capitalise on the films newness and sense of quality before the movie pirates copied it and sold ten for $30 on the streets of Thailand and Bali.
As 2010 drew near, movie stars were quickly becoming a thing of the past, and the general movie going audience were teenage boys. They all went and saw movies like “Iron Man” or the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, but for the wider audience of the general public, going to the movies didn’t seem that enticing. The brains of Hollywood must have put their thinking caps on either in their offices or secret boardroom meetings to tackle this issue, given their million-dollar lifestyles were at stake.
The solution, it would seem to be, meant reconnecting the public with the real reason we all went to movies in the first place. To be entertained. To see something amazing on screen we hadn’t seen before. To feel overwhelmed by the size, sound and scope of a spectacular story on screen. After twelve years in hiding, playing with his billions of dollars and diving deep into the Ocean to make documentaries, James Cameron decided he would fix the problem. The self-proclaimed King of the World had an idea; bring back 3D movies. But not the gimmicky kind with the blue and red lensed glasses. This would be fully immersive 3D, making audiences believe they were being transported into another world. That film would be “Avatar”, which saved the film industry from going broke, but then created its own curse by encouraging every big movie to follow to cash in on the 3D craze, which quickly wore off.
So in review, the 2000’s were an uncertain time in the world, and the movies, which have the job of reflecting the world and how we see it, had a hard time keeping up. It was a diverse mix of films that decade, and in this series of reviews I will present to you, the twenty-one most influential movies of that era. These won’t be long reviews, as several of these titles I’ve already reviewed in length on this blog, and you know the movies well, so I don’t want to rehash what you know. The reviews will be short and snappy.
Sit back, relax and enjoy a stroll back eighteen years ago to begin with (yes, 2000 was that long ago), and all the way up to the final days of 2009.
Let’s look at “The Most Influential Movies of the 00’s”.
In no particular order...
Gladiator
Transformers
Shrek
Taken
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Scary Movie
Brokeback Mountain
Twilight
The Fast and the Furious
Saw
28 Days Later
The Polar Express
Save the Last Dance
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone
Spider-Man
The Dark Knight
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Donnie Darko
The Bourne Identity
Avatar
The world breathed in deep and held its breath in the final minutes of December 31st, 1999, expecting or convinced the world was going to end. The hype around the Y2K bug was rampant, making us think the worlds power would go out for good and planes would drop from the sky. 5, 4,3,2,1…. Happy New Year! We didn’t die. It was January 1st, 2000, and nothing happened. Life continued as normal, and we escaped Doomsday once again.
The year 2000 had a nice ring to it. It was a milestone year for many reasons. No longer would we have to say the year 19 something-something, and the Future was Here! I remember watching a TV show as a kid in the early nineties called, “Beyond 2000” as many of my fellow Aussie readers will recall. It predicted the technology, trends, fashions and breakthroughs we would apparently see once the year 2000 came around. But oddly enough, none of that happened.
The mobile phone revolution was in full swing, and I purchased my first one in late 2000. Some kind of Nokia, I recall. A flip phone (so cool, I know), with a little aerial that had to be pulled out before making a call. In my spare time I amused myself with it’s total of seven ringtones and the greatest mobile phone game of all time – Snake!
I also finished high school this year and was in the select group known as “The Class of 2000”. No other graduating Year 12 class will ever sound that cool., sorry.
The newest movie medium technology was of course, DVD -The Digital Versatile Disc, although everyone thought the V stood for video. As this technology rose, video tapes were still available to buy and rent, but they would be quickly overshadowed by the slim, sexy case and the special features of the DVD. The picture was clear, crisp and sharp, and you could skip scenes in your movie, never worrying about the time-consuming fast-forward button ever again. I remember the very first DVD’s I bought, as toward the end of 2000, I had put a new TV and DVD player on layby with the money from my casual job. It would take me 6 weeks to pay off the lay by, so in anticipation I bought two DVD’s ready to go once my new entertainment system was ready. The titles were “American Beauty” and “Gladiator”, both great movies; one the Oscar winner for Best Picture earlier that year, and the other would go on to win Best Picture at the 2001 Oscars.
2000 and the first half of 2001 brought some good movies, and some bad ones. Movies no one expected would be good or do well did, and the big blockbusters with big name stars and directors tipped to take the box office by storm, tanked! Most notably “Pearl Harbor” and Tim Burton’s rendition of “Planet of the Apes”. Despite those failures, life moved along as normal, and the dawn of the 2000’s didn’t seem to be all that different from the 90’s. Until…
Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. That evening, I was at the movies with a friend, and driving home heard some shocking news on the radio. One of the towers of the World Trade Centre had collapsed! I drove home and watched the rest of the events unfold live on TV. I couldn’t believe it. A scene out of a movie it seemed to be, playing out on TV, over and over again. The world changed in an instant. To read more about how 9/11 changed the movies, you can read a special series of reviews here. And as the world started to pick up the pieces after the attacks on America, the movies changed.
Some movies being filmed in New York City at the time halted production. Other movies planned to film there, using the buildings and streets as their setting had to change scenes or cut out parts of the film entirely. And some other films delayed their release due the sensitive nature of stories focusing on terrorist attacks, ala Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Collateral Damage”.
It wasn’t long after the assault on the United States, soldiers were sent into Afghanistan to track down and eliminate Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network. Terrorist attacks continued around the world, and it seemed nowhere was safe. A grim and constant reminder that the world had been forever changed after that day in September.
With another Bush in the White House, George W. decided it was time to declare war on Iraq, again. And he sent in thousands of US troopers, followed by their ally’s. Day after day, the news reported stories of bombings, raids and soldiers killed in action, coming out of Iraq and its neighbouring countries in the Middle East. The motive for the war; to remove weapons of mass destruction from the clutches of Saddam Hussein. He was finally caught, tried and hung for his atrocities. And were there weapons to be find in his country? Of course not. The true motive for the attack stunk of the pursuit for oil, and President George W. Bush showed his true colours, his limited intelligence, and made us all wish his second term in power would come quickly. I don’t ever recall another time in my life, where myself and the majority of people I knew, wished the years would pass by quickly. And this was supported by the glimmer of light heading our way in the Presidential Campaign of 2007/2008. Mr. Barak Obama.
After Bush pissed off, leaving Obama to clean up the mess, life seemed to look bright again. The dark years of the early 2000’s was fading away, as it seemed the threats launched against the world in 2001 were being eliminated, in part.
Back to the world of movies, and as the internet grew in speed and accessibility, the newest rage of downloading movies illegally began, and Hollywood was hit hard by Piracy. The year 2005 still holds the record for the lowest turnout in cinemas worldwide ever, with movies planned and hoping to do well financially, not getting enough bums on seats to earn back their budgets. Why go out to the movies, when our laptops could connect to the internet in a flash, find any movie in a minute, and download it for our easy viewing pleasure in a matter of hours? These were the days before streaming keep in mind, back when we had the patience to wait a few hours for a movie to be available in our home without going out. Where has that patience gone now?
I opted not to download any movies illegally, although I was given some. I still went to the movies and hired out DVD’s from the slowly diminishing video stores. They were around but getting quiet.
YouTube launched in 2005, but it was several years before people started exploiting it the way they do today. Prior to this website juggernaut showing us movie trailers and clips on demand, you had to watch a movie trailer online via Apple Trailers, which I visited on a daily basis. As time passed by, people were uploading entire movies to YouTube, which would be taken down just as quick. Then some clever people saw the opportunity to do this legally and build business on the social media platform. Channels like “Watch Mojo” and Movie Clips” took up residence on YouTube, offering our favourite clips from our favourites films, preventing people from having to cue up their DVD players and skip to those scene’s. Granted we were still watching entire movies from start to finish in the early 2000’s before our need for instant gratification and quickly digestible content had developed.
The other enemy stirring in the weeds and threatening to make movies and going to the movies obsolete, was Reality TV. If you can really call it “Reality” TV; don’t get me started on that topic. With the original reality TV show “Survivor” being the one that started it all in the late 90’s / early 00’s, it seemed any topic or subject matter you could think of was ripe for the picking, taking normal, everyday people and turning them into stars just for being themselves in front of a camera. No acting. No scripts. No boundaries. And when shows like “Big Brother” came along, revealing society’s voyeuristic pleasure, experienced by sitting in houses watching TV shows about people sitting in houses, the cinemas were getting less relevant. Still, you would get people heading to the movies on Friday and Saturday nights to see the big blockbusters on the big screen. If they had a big enough star, an interesting enough premise, or there were just a Superhero or Action movie in general, they sold tickets.
But the smaller, independent, arthouse films made for people who like to watch carefully, think deeply and discuss what they’ve seen afterward over a Chai late, were lucky to see their film in the theatres for more than a week or two. To counteract the increase of movie piracy, movies were being released simultaneously around the world on the same date, and for smaller films, a limited run in theatres was upheld, with a quick progression to DVD to capitalise on the films newness and sense of quality before the movie pirates copied it and sold ten for $30 on the streets of Thailand and Bali.
As 2010 drew near, movie stars were quickly becoming a thing of the past, and the general movie going audience were teenage boys. They all went and saw movies like “Iron Man” or the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, but for the wider audience of the general public, going to the movies didn’t seem that enticing. The brains of Hollywood must have put their thinking caps on either in their offices or secret boardroom meetings to tackle this issue, given their million-dollar lifestyles were at stake.
The solution, it would seem to be, meant reconnecting the public with the real reason we all went to movies in the first place. To be entertained. To see something amazing on screen we hadn’t seen before. To feel overwhelmed by the size, sound and scope of a spectacular story on screen. After twelve years in hiding, playing with his billions of dollars and diving deep into the Ocean to make documentaries, James Cameron decided he would fix the problem. The self-proclaimed King of the World had an idea; bring back 3D movies. But not the gimmicky kind with the blue and red lensed glasses. This would be fully immersive 3D, making audiences believe they were being transported into another world. That film would be “Avatar”, which saved the film industry from going broke, but then created its own curse by encouraging every big movie to follow to cash in on the 3D craze, which quickly wore off.
So in review, the 2000’s were an uncertain time in the world, and the movies, which have the job of reflecting the world and how we see it, had a hard time keeping up. It was a diverse mix of films that decade, and in this series of reviews I will present to you, the twenty-one most influential movies of that era. These won’t be long reviews, as several of these titles I’ve already reviewed in length on this blog, and you know the movies well, so I don’t want to rehash what you know. The reviews will be short and snappy.
Sit back, relax and enjoy a stroll back eighteen years ago to begin with (yes, 2000 was that long ago), and all the way up to the final days of 2009.
Let’s look at “The Most Influential Movies of the 00’s”.
In no particular order...
Gladiator
Transformers
Shrek
Taken
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Scary Movie
Brokeback Mountain
Twilight
The Fast and the Furious
Saw
28 Days Later
The Polar Express
Save the Last Dance
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone
Spider-Man
The Dark Knight
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Donnie Darko
The Bourne Identity
Avatar
