The 2000s were a decade of huge potential, with the turn of the millennium causing many to expect huge progress in the evolution of movies. Whether or not the decade achieved this as a whole is a matter for debate, but progress can still be clearly seen in certain titles. There’s no decade like the 2000s for movies in many ways, as there were many clear attempts to deliver iconic and innovative stories on the big screen. While not every attempt came off perfectly, there are many movies from the ten-year span that continue to stand out as being more than a little exceptional.
There are many movies from the 2000s that people have forgotten actually had a major impact on their respective genres. By delivering something that felt entirely fresh or exciting, or by taking a new approach to an already established genre or subgenre, these movies managed to redefine how fans feel about their successors. Each of the following movies is sadly underrated, but has a legacy of impact on their respective genres that cannot be denied.
3) The Descent (2005)
While it’s often considered one of the best horror movies of the 2000s, The Descent is still criminally underrated. Neil Marshall’s sophomore directorial effort follows a group of female spelunkers who enter an unmapped cave system, where they encounter bloodthirsty creatures living in the dark. Claustrophobic and visceral in its presentation, The Descent is a terrifying experience whose story also boasts a considerable amount of deeper narrative themes that have kept audiences talking ever since its release.
Beloved though it may be by horror fans, The Descent rarely gets the credit it deserves for its impact on the horror genre. Its female-centric cast and its reliance on psychological elements as much as any other type of horror helped usher in a new era of elevated horror movies. The incorporation of deeper themes into its story, which also works as a great surface-level horror, established just how clever horror movies could be, bringing about a huge shift in how directors went about delivering powerful stories through the medium of the genre.
2) Moon (2009)
Duncan Jones has quietly become the king of the cult classic, with many of his movies securing relatively small but incredibly loyal followings. Chief among them is 2009’s Moon, which stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, a lone technician on a small mining facility on Earth’s Moon who is nearing the end of his three-year stint of solitude. He slowly learns that his circumstances aren’t quite as he first believed, which poses an incredibly powerful ethical question to Moon‘s audience.
The revelations and complexities of Moon‘s story make it a sci-fi movie that’s even better the second time around, and that’s part of the reason it helped shape the future of sci-fi. It proved that more introspective storytelling and a focus on human emotion rather than major set pieces or scientific jargon work brilliantly, and its influence can be seen in many of the great sci-fi movies released since. It’s another movie that doesn’t get the credit it deserves, but it’s a certified 2000s classic.
1) Brick (2005)
Long before Rian Johnson was making high-concept sci-fi or oft-maligned Star Wars movies, he made his directorial debut with 2005’s Brick. It follows Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Brendan Frye as a high-schooler drawn into the investigation of the murder of his ex-girlfriend. Part teenage drama and part hard-boiled noir detective story, Brick is perhaps one of the most unique movies of its decade and cemented Rian Johnson as a filmmaker with huge potential.
Brick managed to do more than just influence one genre: it influenced how directors approach blending different genre tropes. Transposing a noir detective mystery into a high-school setting was not something that was considered widely appropriate for a successful movie, but Johnson’s debut proved not only that it had potential, but that it made for gripping cinema. Its effortless blurring of the lines between vastly different genres made Brick an underrated 2000s classic, as well as a far more influential movie than it has ever widely received any credit for.
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