Top 6: Trilogies Worthy of a Sunday Marathon

For the last several weekends, my brother and mother in snowy Colorado have been having movie marathons wherein they watch all three parts of selected trilogies (i.e. ones they have) and it got me thinking, as most things do. There are a great many trilogies out there these days, but only a few of them are uniformly good. Take for instance, Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" saga: the first movie is excellent, the second movie is even better, and the third movie is a pile of undigested goat meat. It's so bad in fact, it nearly taints the other two films, which is sad. "Indiana Jones" has the same problem, with "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Last Crusade" actually being quite good movies, and "Temple of Doom," however enjoyable I now find it after the smoking turd that was "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," is very obviously the weak link. A grip of other trilogies may be enjoyable throughout, but only one part could actually be considered "good," in the classic movie sense, such as "The Matrix," where the first movie is the game changer, or "X-Men," when the second part stands head and shoulders above the others.

It seems it truly is difficult to find a series of movies where all three are actually worth watching over and over, but I'mma gonna find six and list them for you below. These are the Top 6 trilogies worthy of a Sunday marathon.


VI - THE BOURNE TRILOGY
Despite the second two parts having a different director (Paul Greengrass) than the first (Doug Liman), the spy actioners starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne are surprisingly consistent. All three employ frenetic editing and camera movement (some would argue nauseatingly so) and all three have plots that both make sense and are easily followable, within reason. It seems there's no limit to the depths Jason Bourne has to dig to learn what a bastard he was before he lost his memory, nor how much worse those who employed him were. All three were based on books by Robert Ludlum, whose entire canon have similar titles employing "The" followed by the name of someone or something and ending with an impersonal noun. Such as, "The Osterman Weekend," "The Rhinemann Exchange," "The Holcroft Covenant," and "The Scorpio Illusion." These movies are like more believable James Bond adventures, though admittedly without some of the fun, and they are all as exciting as the last. Just take some Dramamine and enjoy.


V - BACK TO THE FUTURE
I wore the tape out of these movies when I was a kid and made me want a Delorian to this very day. Michael J. Fox stars as Marty McFly who thanks to his friend, the inventor Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown, travels through time and changes his family history and eventually future, all in the course of a week. He starts in 1985, travels to 1955, heads to 2015, to a tangential 1985, back to 1955, and then to 1885 before finally returning home. The more I learn about the theory of time travel makes this far less plausible (like how if he traveled back to 1955, then he will have always been in 1955 and his future couldn't possibly have changed...wrap your head around that) but no less enjoyable. Also, why is Marty seemingly a loser and a cool guy at the same time? And why does he hang out with an crazy, white haired guy in the first place? That all aside, these movies have plenty of humor and Alan Silvestri's score is a gold standard for film themes. I actually saw Back to the Future 2 in the theater and remember being scared to death of the big Jaws thing and completely confused by what "Son of a Bitch" could mean. Ahh, good times.


IV - THE EVIL DEAD
You could not have three less similar horror movies, and yet, thanks to Bruce Campbell's shrieking and silly portrayal as Ash, they hang together very nicely. Like all of these movies so far, they all depict a lead character put in a strange and dire situation mostly through bad luck, and no one is less lucky or less equipped to fight the legions of evil than Ash. The first film plays like a melodrama which leads to all out gory terror as a cabin-in-the-woods weekend goes from kind of okay to the worst thing ever to happen to anyone ever. Ash's friends are slowly picked off and possessed by Kandarian Demons leaving him to fight them off and dismember them. The second one is somehow scary while being purposely sillier. It's often been described as a demonic Warner Bros. cartoon, which is very fitting. "Evil Dead II" is my favorite of the series and is not, I repeat NOT, a remake of "The Evil Dead" as many have claimed. The first ten minutes or so are a rehash because Raimi & Co couldn't get the rights to show clips from their first film, so they had to make do. They changed Ash a bit to make him more in line with who he'd be in the new film, and instead of four friends, it's just Ash's girlfriend who gets possessed. The third film, "Army of Darkness," is a complete departure. After being sucked into a time portal (like ya do) Ash and his Oldsmobile Delta 88 end up in England in the middle-ages being proclaimed as the savior from the Deadites. "Army" forsakes most of the horror for swashbuckling and is really like a low budget Ray Harryhausen movie. I've watched this trilogy many many times and it's always a good one for a large group.


III - THE DOLLARS TRILOGY
All one really needs to make a trilogy is a strong central character, and Sergio Leone certainly got that with Clint Eastwood in these films. Eastwood's "Man With No Name" as he was dubbed in the States is a drifter and works as a mythical trickster character, getting involved in the action for his own gain while also helping a few people along the way. His character does have a name, in fact a different one in all three films. He is called "Joe" in "A Fistful of Dollars," where he enters a town beset with two criminal families and plays the sides against each other until he is the only man standing. In the sequel, aptly titled "For a Few Dollars More," he is a bounty hunter chasing an escaped bandit with a tentative partnership with an older rival and is called "Manco," (essentially "Lefty"), and in the best movie of all time, "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly," he is throughout referred to as "Blondie." It could be easy to claim these are not related films at all and are just all westerns starring Clint Eastwood, but Leone does the interesting thing of letting visuals connect the films and not overt narrative. At the end of the first movie, Eastwood's hand is crushed and stomped on, in the entire second film, he wears a brace on it that is eventually a giveaway to the baddies that he is who he is. The third film, we find out, is really a prequel for two reasons. Firstly, it takes place during the Civil War, which is very much finished in the first two films, and second Eastwood starts the movie in a completely different costume and as the movie moves along, picks up the various pieces of his familiar garb until the very end he is the man with the poncho and the brown hat. Three of the best movies of all time and I can watch all of them at any point in my life, though I tend to watch the last one the least because it's my favorite and I want to savor it.


II - THE LORD OF THE RINGS
You have to get up very early in the morning to watch all of these movies in one day and be prepared to dedicate the next 14 hours of your life to it, if you watch the extended editions as I do. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote this as one giant tome and the publisher is the one who split it up into different volumes, thinking no one would want to sit down and read an 1150 page book in one go. Yet in the case of both the books and the movies, that's exactly what people do. These movies are the Alpha and Omega of the sword and sorcery genre and despite being close to ten years old, still benefit from extremely believable visual effects. Many fans of the book complained about certain changes and the removal of some characters and events, and even though I can spend hours on how irritating it is when people deride movies for not being page-for-page depictions of the books, I think the films are nigh-on perfect to maintaining the heart of the novels while making them easier for a film crowd to digest. Each movie has a memorable battle scene (or nine) and are chock-a-block of lush landscapes, miraculous sets, and fantastic makeup. One feels like they really are in a different world from a different time. As far as watching them in one day, it's easy to hit the Rings Wall, but if you make sure you have plenty of Lembas bread you should be able to make the journey.


I - THE STAR WARS TRILOGY
Not the fucking prequels, okay? The TRILOGY. There are trilogies today, in such ridiculous numbers, due almost entirely to these movies. The sense of wonder that one gets when first watching these movies cannot be underplayed. You can sit any child down with "Star Wars" and they'll have the best time ever and want to be jedi or rebels or what have you. George Lucas seems dead set on tinkering with these movies to be more in line with the prequels, but why doesn't he change the prequels to make them more in line with the originals? They're the ones everybody likes after all. And even with the unnecessary additions and CGI replacements, "Star Wars," "The Empire Strikes Back," and "Return of the Jedi," remain indelible pieces of pop culture and film history. They had heart, character, awe, and fun. Good movies are not made by having the newest special effects or the greatest amount of crap moving in the background, good movies are made by having a universal story and memorable characters you care about. It's easy to forget that the first "Star Wars" was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won six of them, and if not for "Annie Hall" would probably have won all of them. I can't overstate this enough, a bigger budget does not mean it's a better film. Take a year or three to let the stink of Episodes I-III wear off and then go watch the originals again and try to recall the day when "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" was just called "Star Wars."

And there you have it, friends. Let me know which are your favorite movie trilogies in the comments below.

You're welcome.
-Kanderson