[COLUMN] In 2025, Movies Embraced Modernity | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

One of the most striking trends in the bigger and better movies of this year was the sense of modernity underpinning them. Many of the best and most compelling films of the year felt consciously engaged with the current moment in a very real and tangible way.

It is a cliché to point out that many of the great auteurs have become obsessed with the past. Steven Spielberg is a prolific director, but he has not made a movie set in the present day since War of the Worlds in 2005. Over the past two decades, Spielberg’s films have been fantasies like Ready Player One, period pieces like The Post or a combination of the two like The BFG. Since The Departed in 2006, the closest that Martin Scorsese has come to the present day is in the bookends to The Irishman.

This cinematic disconnect with modernity seemed to happen around the turn of the millennium. Quentin Tarantino’s last movie to be set contemporaneously was Kill Bill. However, if one discounts the “movie world” of Kill Bill, one has to travel back to Jackie Brown to find a Tarantino movie set in something approaching the contemporaneous real world. The trend applies even outside the world of legendary filmmakers and in broader pop cinema.

Manohla Dargis wrote in December 2003 about “Hollywood’s steady retreat from the recognizably real world – the place where people work, pay taxes, raise families and struggle along without Viking stoves and BMWs – into false worlds.” That seems as good a turning point as any. That same year, Pirates of the Caribbean trounced Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World at the box office. Return of the King was both the highest grossing movie of the year and it won Best Picture.

There are any number of factors that contributed to the shift that saw Hollywood slip into worlds of magic and superheroes. Some of the shift was simply technological, with special effects reaching a point where that level of spectacle could be effectively realized on screen. Some of it was cultural, with the United States responding to the trauma of 9/11 by embracing fantastical narratives with clearly defined heroes and villains.

Whatever the reason, it seems like mainstream cinema became untethered from the real world. It’s impossible to imagine a mainstream blockbuster today that would dedicate as much time as Enemy of the State does to its lead character (Will Smith) buying a Christmas present from his wife (Regina King) while trying to repair his marriage after an affair with his work colleague (Lisa Bonet). This sort of humanity used to be baked into these films, but has been stripped out over the decades.

There are exceptions. Steven Soderbergh has been making contemporary-set movies at an impressive clip. Spike Lee alternates between period pieces like BlacKkKlansman and modern films like Highest to Lowest, often blending past and present in movies like Da 5 Bloods. Recent years have seen a number of pressing and urgent contemporary films garnering critical and awards contention: Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once, Todd Field’s TÁR.

Still, this cinema of this past year felt particularly present in a way that it hasn’t for quite a while. When Paul Thomas Anderson directed One Battle After Another, he had not made a contemporary-set movie since Punch Drunk Love in 2002. While the actual internal chronology of One Battle After Another is somewhat hazy, its world is recognizable. It is a world of border camps, rogue government agencies, sanctuary cities and masks.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is technically set in the recent past, in the midst of the global pandemic, but that past still haunts contemporary politics. If anything, Eddington’s cynicism about data centers and social media speaks more to the current moment than the near-past in which it unfolds. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia perfectly captures the insanity of the current moment, the paranoia and miscommunication that defines modern culture.

This shift was also apparent in other media. This was the year that Stranger Things, a flagship show for 1980s nostalgia, came to a close. In contrast, some of the biggest shows of the year felt more grounded and contemporary. The Pitt was old-fashioned television, dealing with contemporary issues like the fallout from the global pandemic and mass shootings. Adolescence spoke to contemporary anxieties over raising children in the modern world.

Even high-concept shows like Pluribus, Severance and Andor felt firmly rooted in the insanity of the current moment. Pluribus invites readings as a show about post-pandemic grief or the current boom in artificial intelligence. Severance is a series about the split consciousness of life under late capitalism. Despite unfolding in a galaxy far, far away, Andor is perhaps the most politically urgent series of the year, the story of a democracy collapsing into fascism.

Even in comic books, the year’s biggest success stories had a palpable sense of urgency to them. The Ultimate line at Marvel and the Absolute line at DC reimagined iconic heroes for a new generation, speaking to a younger generation of readers who felt that their future had been snatched away from them. These comics were vital and exciting, and very much a product of this precise moment in history. There was a real energy to that work.

Even the year’s big period pieces are framed in conversation with the present. The Brutalist closes on a retrospective of László Tóth’s (Adrien Brody) work decades after the events of the film, retroactively imposing meaning on that earlier drama. The post credits scene of Sinners finds Stack (Michael B. Jordan) and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) visiting an ageing Sammie (Buddy Guy) decades after the events of the film. Sammie has aged; they have not. Sammie accepts his looming mortality.

Even a period piece like Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is haunted by visions of the future, the 1952 setting juxtaposed against a 1980s soundtrack and a protagonist (Timothée Chalamet) with a very modern “grindset.” There is a sense that the current moment exerts a strong and inescapable gravity, that these films are caught in the pull of some greater inescapable force that threatens to break through the screen.

Even a post-apocalyptic horror like Danny Boyle and Alex Garlands’ 28 Years Later is still firmly rooted in the present. The bulk of that legacyquel unfolds in the ruins of a Britain stuck in 2002, decorated by monuments to that millennial moment where everything froze. However, the arrival of Swedish soldier Erik Sundqvist (Edvin Ryding) confirms that life went on past the end of the world. Beyond the shores of Great Britain, the rest of the world has smart phones, delivery drivers and lip fillers.

This is perhaps part of the subtext of One Battle After Another, which finds former revolutionary Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) living in seclusion trying to protect his daughter Charlene (Infiniti Chase). Pat has been hiding, stuck in a band that aspires to the musical styling of 1970s icons Steely Dan. However, when the American government descends on their local community, Pat realizes he cannot exist independent of the world. In the film’s closing scene, Pat plays clumsily with an iPhone.

In some ways, it feels like culture has perhaps finally had a chance to catch its breath and to come to terms with the insanity of the past couple of years. This is perhaps most apparent in the recurring theme of grief and loss that permeates films as diverse as Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and Hamnet, but which feels like a delayed response to the horrors of the massive global pandemic sublimated into art. Fantasy is no longer an escape.

Blockbuster cinema has been a bit slower to embrace modernity. The post-racial romantic presidential fantasy of Captain America: Brave New World was hopelessly tone-deaf in the modern political moment. Fantastic Four: First Steps created a pocket universe to indulge in its retrofuturist nostalgia, but was underpinned by an anxiety that even superheroes cannot punch time into submission. Thunderbolts* spoke to the moment, but it was the exception that proved the rule.

Many of the year’s big fantastical blockbusters had an elegiac feel to them. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning occasionally felt like the dying dreams of the last movie star, the fantasy of a man committed to bringing the world back to the pre-internet age through sheer force of will. James Cameron’s Avatar films feel like the culmination of a certain form of fantasy spectacle, the upper limit of what is possible in that filmmaking mode. Fire and Ash, in particular, feels like a modern biblical epic.

This is perhaps reflected in audience response. Disney made $6bn this year, the first studio to do so since 2019. However, the combined gross of the studio’s three comic book films comes in under the haul of Zootopia 2. F1: The Movie outgrossed every superhero film this year. The studio recently launched its promotional campaign for Avengers: Doomsday, saturated in nostalgia for the franchise’s heyday, but the reaction seems decidedly lackluster from all but the most devoted of fans.

It is, of course, premature to write the eulogy for this kind of filmmaking. Next year will see the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday. It seems likely that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie will be among the biggest movies of next year. This year’s box office top ten includes the live action remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, along with a new Jurassic Park sequel and A Minecraft Movie.

Still, it does feel like something has shifted. It is too much to compare this moment to the emergence of the New Hollywood movement in the late 1960s, as lumbering studio westerns and biblical epics gave way to a new generation of more contemporary and urgent movies from hunger filmmakers. That sort of shift can only really be narrativized in hindsight, context only constructed once the full arc of history can be observed. It seems more that chaos will reign for the next few years.

Still, this past year the silver screen has felt less like a portal than a mirror, holding up a reflection to a disorganized and uncertain world.