10 Biggest Movie Tropes Of 2017
Stick on your awesome mix, grab your lasso and tell your step-dad you love them.
Hollywood loves nothing so much as doing the exact same thing as in some other popular movie. Which is why, if you've spent a lot of 2017 watching a succession of suspiciously similar cinematic storylines, you may have started getting an odd sense of deja vu.
This was the year, after all, in which the blockbuster season offered up not one but two riffs on Apocalypse Now played out entirely as reimaginings of classic ape movies. Meanwhile, sports movie fans have waited forever for anyone to take a shot at a passable tennis movie, only for two true life biopics of 1970s on and off court rivalries to come out within a few weeks of each other.
Right now you can pop into your local multiplex and take your pick of two festive sequels to parental rivalry comedies, both of which attempt to stave off their increasingly stale formula by bringing in an extra generation of bad parents for the holiday season.
This isn't one of those lists that just looks at instances of two movies doing the same thing at the same time, though. No, this is about those strangely specific trends, concepts and images that cropped up again and again over the past twelve months; tropes that were as inescapable as being bound by Wonder Woman's lasso or Spidey's webs. Speaking of which...
[Oh, and obviously spoilers ahead for virtually every major movie of 2017]
10. Rope Was The Action Heroes' Weapon Of Choice
Seen in: Wonder Woman, Justice League, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Atomic Blonde
More than any other hero, 2017 belonged to Wonder Woman. The most iconic female superhero of them all finally got to make her live action big screen debut in a film that was both critically acclaimed and a box office smash. Meanwhile, the rest of the year also saw her step up as the de facto leader of the Justice League (no doubt given some extra material in reshoots after her solo movie became the DCEU's one unqualified success) and a very loosely true-life biopic about her creation with the polyamorous bondage-themed Professor Marston And The Wonder Women. So it perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise that Diana's weapon of choice - the lasso - also had such a starring role in this year's movies.
Indeed, the Year of Wonder Woman had so little time for the phallic weapons of man's world - the gun and the sword - that even the presence of a kickass gunslinger with guns crafted from the melted steel of King Arthur's Excalibur couldn't save The Dark Tower from being one of the year's biggest flops. (Diana's own sword, meanwhile, only exists in her movie as a red herring to divert attention from the god-killing power within her).
The Themysciran princess wasn't the only comic book hero to take on all comers with weaponry that ties and swings rather than cuts or shoots. Pedro Pascal's whip-cracking lasso-swinging double agent Whiskey was one of the highlights of Kingsman sequel The Golden Circle, while the brutal action of Atomic Blonde featured Charlize Theron's super spy taking on a host of East Berlin cops armed with little more than a length of hose-pipe.
Even the only superhero picture to take home more money than Wonder Woman - Spider-Man: Homecoming - featured a hero who's all about using his rope-like webbing to hang or swing from or to tie his enemies in. Yes, if you were the kind of villain that prefers being bound to being shot, then 2017 was definitely the year for you.