FirstPerson Shooter’s Top 10 Nerd Movies of the 2010s

And I thought winnowing down the Fave TV Shows list was tough. In the same vein as TV and streaming services discovering the financial power of genre entertainment (shows for nerds) in the decade about to end, the film industry realized that movies for nerds could be be more than just blockbusters and still be successful. That includes critical success as well as financial.

So what counts as nerd entertainment? Genre stories, but specifically science fiction, fantasy or comic book inspired tales. Horror is a genre as well, but it is so well established as its own thing that I didn’t count just horror movies. With its somewhat science fiction-like underpinnings, Get Out was on the list for quite a while, but got dropped in the final cut for movies more fully in the genres above. And The Social Network was a strong contender, but ultimately a story about a nerd is not the same as a story for nerds.

Once again, this is just my opinion, and not intended to be any kind of definitive list. So in no particular order, here are my 10 favorite nerd movies of the 2010s

Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse (2018)

Many excellent animated movies came out in the past decade, such as Kubo and the Two Strings, How to Train Your Dragon, Big Hero 6, Inside Out, The Emoji Movie (OK, not that one). But none of them had the amazing and varied animation style of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. In addition to being visually more innovative than any piece of animation in decades, it also featured an outstanding voice cast and writing that captured the characters perfectly — most of all Miles Morales. And hey, Gwanda is actually the name of a town in Africa.

Inception (2010)

I really like Christopher Nolan as a director, despite a big swing and miss with The Dark Knight Rises. And Inception is one of his best films to date. The cast is outstanding, the story is ridiculously complex yet never trips over itself, and that wonderfully ambiguous ending is … wonderful. Because Nolan makes movies about people, it’s often easy to forget that Inception is at its core a science fiction story. Of course, the Hans Zimmer score gives it away every time that artificial booming bass sound hits.

Arrival (2016)

Science fiction movies about actual scientists doing real scientific investigations during the bulk of the film are a rare breed, and compelling, interesting stories like Arrival especially so. One of the earliest examples of this style movie is The Andromeda Strain from way back in 1971, which might have established the rule that hazmat suits are a requirement for such films. Denis Villeneuve’s brilliant Arrival also includes aliens that are truly alien, not just in looks and technology but right to the core of how they think. Villeneuve appears on this list again, and I have no doubt he will be in the 2029 list.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

No film in the past decade was as surprising as Mad Max: Fury Road. George Miller’s previous movies in this dystopian future are pretty simple, dude-bro action fests. And then he went on to make movies like Babe: Pig In The City and Happy Feet. So when Miller returned to the future Australia with a hallucinating, borderline insane Max as not the main but the second lead character in a feminist film that out-actions every previous film, it would be an understatement to say I was blindsided — delightfully so. This movie is the polar opposite of “mediocre!” Witness me!

A Silent Voice (2016)

By my criteria above, the anime film Your Name would seem to be a better fit in this list. But I count the mere fact that A Silent Voice is anime as a qualifying factor, even it doesn’t have the fantastical elements of Your Name. What it does have is a gut punch of a story that — trigger warning — contains suicidal thoughts and brutal bullying. The characters are complex and while there is some redemption to be found (I won’t spoil anything by getting specific) the writer dares to have some bad people stay mostly bad — even if their reasons for doing so are explained, they don’t get off the hook (I’m looking at you Bakugo you turd). Also, while I always choose watching subtitled versions over English voice dubs, a wonderful friend recommended watching the dub of A Silent Voice because the deaf female lead Shoko is voiced by deaf actress Lexi Cowden (now Lexi Marman), and Shoko’s plaintive struggles to shout her words are even more heart-wrenching to an English speaker when shouted in English.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Comic book movies prior to Captain America: The Winter Soldier were basically upscaled comic book stories. Sure The Incredible Hulk was a love story and Thor was a Shakespearean family drama, but those were secondary story lines. Winter Soldier showed that a comic book movie could also be an excellent movie of a second genre at the same time — in this case a brilliant political thriller. And it ramped up the quality of the action to a level not seen yet in movies that are pretty much all about action. Oh, also it placed the Russo brothers at the creative helm of what would become a decade-spanning interconnected story that runs through 23 films that made a combined $22.5 billion.

Logan (2017)

While Deadpool proved that an R-rated comic book movie could both work as a film and be a success, Logan proved that a serious R-rated comic book movie could work, and work spectacularly. To be clear, this movie couldn’t work without the previous Fox X-Men films, but it stands head and shoulders above every single entry in that franchise. Ultimately the plot is a simple comic book story, but the world, the evolution of the familiar characters and the excellent writing makes Logan the bleak and tragic best X-Men movie made.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Denis Villeneuve’s second entry in this list is the most stylish and most challenging movie among the 10. It is also the only sequel (neither Logan nor Rogue One are direct sequels to previous movies), and to say that anyone could make a sequel to Blade Runner that was every bit as good would have been heresy before Blade Runner 2049 came out. Not just a stylish visual masterpiece, Blade Runner 2049 expanded on the first movie’s core themes of identity and humanity, while answering some of the long-simmering questions left behind.

Ex Machina (2015)

Sticking with the questions of identity and humanity, Ex Machina is one of the best ever first directorial efforts. Writer and director Alex Garland has written some of the best genre movies of the 21st century, including 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd. Unlike some first-time directors, Garland chose a fairly simple story with just three characters to launch his directorial career. But what characters, what a cast, and what nail-biting tension for a movie that mostly consists of pairs of people talking. I can’t wait for the Ryan Reynolds sequel, Two Guys, a Girl-bot and a Turing Place (not an actual film).

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story finally put the “war” in a movie franchise that has born that name for 40 years. It is amazing that a movie this good could be developed from literally a single toss-off line of dialogue from the movie that launched the Star Wars juggernaut 4 decades ago. It is also amazing that a movie could be this good after massive rewrites and reshoots by someone other than the credited director Gareth Edwards. While not being as bleak as Logan, Rogue One similarly succeeds by adding some seriousness and realism. In this case it helps ground a movie series about space wizards by almost completely removing the space wizardry in favor of a reluctant war heroes buddy story. I can’t wait for the Cassian Andor series on Disney+.

I’ve seen lists that count the entire Marvel Infinity Saga as a single entry, and that strikes me as cheating. That said, Marvel achieved something never seen before in movie history, so picking one film out of the 21 released in this decade seems unfair. But rules are rules. And I really wanted to include Under The Skin, but even after six years I’m still not sure how to categorize that movie aside from “brilliant” and “science fiction” and “really weird.”

In case anyone reading this hasn’t yet seen Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse, here’s a clip of when Miles first meets “Gwanda.”