Though, according to the hivemind of IMDB, The Dark Knight is the best film of the 21st century: the 6 21st century films in the top 20 are in order The Dark Knight, Return of the King, Fellowship of the Ring, Inception, The Two Towers, and Interstellar.
Other than the criminal lack of Terrance Malick's work, I am pretty OK with that.
Man that's funny.
1. A decent Batman sequel film enlivened solely by the big final performance of an excellent young actor that is vastly creatively inferior and technically to the more recent The Batman. If Ledger was still around it would probably have been downvoted from this position because Ledger would have said something rude about a certain orange man or the like.
2. A sequel to Fellowship that is inarguably worse and far less important or impressive than Fellowship but inexplicably rated higher.
3. An actually-good and innovative LotR movie which was important and impressive on a number of levels.
4. Christopher Nolan's only genuinely interesting/good blockbuster. I had so much hope for him after this. None of his movies since have been close, and his most recent one was full-on "vanishing up own arse" territory (Tenet).
5. The worst of the three LotR movies, and not even a good-good movie.
6. An extremely unintentionally funny and incredibly just
outright stupid space movie that thinks it's a profound philosophical statement or at least "the new 2001". It is neither. There are comedies which wish they could get close to the humour of the Matt Damon helmet headbutt scene though!
But we can be real about IMDb here. All IMDb's scores measure is how middle class 50+ white American males feel about something, because that's about 70% of the people who vote on IMDb (more like 90% if you allow people drop any one of those five qualifiers for each individual).
LotR and Inception are the only movies that remotely deserve to be on a top-20 list of movies of the 21st century, let alone top 6.
It's notable that IMDb's ratings have become
intensely racist and often homophobic or misogynistic (particularly for anything after about 2016) and dislike anything involving young people. Malick isn't on there because your average middle class 50+ white American male has no idea who he is, despite many of them having seen
The Thin Red Line or the like. Also if they knew about
The Tree of Life about half of them would immediately mentally dismiss him entirely for reasons best not gone into.