15 unofficial movie trilogies

Movie trilogies — from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings to The Before Trilogy — are good. So, I made 15 new trilogies out of existing standalone movies.

What bugs me about trilogies is that the stakes often don’t get real until the third installment. Whether it be Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or The Hunger Games, trilogies often struggle to manufacture real stakes until the final movie rolls around and they suddenly no longer have to keep characters alive for the sake of the sequel. I didn’t watch the Star Wars sequel trilogy thinking Rey or Kylo could be killed … until The Rise of Skywalker. I never thought Frodo would die … until The Return of the King. I knew Katniss had impenetrable plot armor … until Mockingjay Part 2 — and yes, this is the very moment I realized that The Hunger Games isn’t a trilogy, but a tetralogy, because they turned the third book, Mockingjay, into two movies. But my point stands.

I still love trilogies. If you’re here reading this, you probably already know my feelings toward things like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and The Hunger Games. I am the target demo for epics told in multiple segments. But you also might know that I like stories that have a beginning, middle, and end — standalone features. After all, my favorite movie in the Star Wars saga is Rogue One, which had the luxury of not worrying about sequels, because one already existed. As a storyteller, I guess it bothers me when I can recognize that a natural ending to a movie exists, one that doesn’t set up additional installments, but the movie is forced to be a slave to sequels and as a result, finds a way to sidestep the natural ending to set up another movie for which we’re forced to wait two years. The best trilogies — the one that first came to mind was The Before Trilogy, a trilogy that was never supposed to be a trilogy, but came to be one organically — are usually made up of three movies that can each stand on their own.

So, with all that in mind, I decided to create my own unofficial trilogies from standalone movies. Below, you’ll find 15 trilogies that I assembled using movies that aren’t already part of an existing trilogy. All three movies in each trilogy are tethered by some common thread, whether it be the subject matter, a theme, the tone, or an actor. Beyond that, there are no rules.

The 9/11 Trilogy

1. United 93

2. Zero Dark Thirty

3. The Report

The 9/11 Trilogy is not an easy watch. It begins on 9/11 itself with United 93, Paul Greengrass’ masterfully told biographical drama-thriller about the commercial airliner that was hijacked but never reached its intended target because of the passengers onboard who fought back. It’s lean, clocking it at 110 minutes, and it never feels like its wasting breath. It’s devastating.

In the middle is a movie that is not what I’d call lean. Zero Dark Thirty is a slow burn. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know that I don’t consider slow burn to be an insult. I love slow burns that are seeped in atmosphere, anchored by a mesmerizing performance, and most importantly, explode brilliantly at the end. This is one of those movies. Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller dramatizes “the greatest manhunt in history,” as the U.S. spends a decade searching for Osama bin Laden. The movie begins on 9/11, but almost immediately skips ahead to the aftermath, when we meet Maya, a CIA intelligence analyst played by the great Jessica Chastain, who carries the movie through a grueling investigation involving the horrifying torture of several prisoners. Its brilliance is in its final act, when the CIA locates where bin Laden has been hiding in Pakistan. A slow burn is only as good as its explosion. I’m not sure there’s been a more explosive final 45 minutes to a movie than ZDT — from the stealth helicopters the SEALs use to sneak into Pakistan undetected, to their night vision goggles that illuminate the dark compound in a field of green, to the way they methodically clear the compound of hostiles until they get to bin Laden himself. Regardless of how you feel about the movie’s take on torture, you can still appreciate the movie from a filmmaking perspective. It’s a masterpiece in tension before an incredible release. But ZDT does not give us a happy ending. In addition to being a dramatized version of the hunt for bin Laden, it’s also a movie about obsession. Watching Maya realize that her life’s work is suddenly over is both haunting and devastating. Killing bin Laden doesn’t bring her the catharsis she thought she’d get. It only brings her emptiness. She can’t fathom what comes next.

The trilogy ends with the most understated of the three movies. The Report, released in the fall during peak Adam Driver SZN (and available on Amazon Prime), is in many ways a rebuttal to the narrative presented in Zero Dark Thirty. At one point during the movie, a trailer for ZDT is shown on TV. An investigative Spotlight-esque drama, The Report follows a Senate staffer who investigates the CIA’s use of torture. As was also the case in ZDT with Chastain’s Maya, Driver’s Daniel Jones (not the fumble-prone NFL quarterback) allows his work to swallow his life. Like Chastain, Driver carries the slow burn of a story. Unlike ZDT, The Report never explodes. But that’s emblematic of the movie’s strength. Zero Dark Thirty is a better movie, but The Report tells a more important version of the story.

The Sad Love Trilogy

1. Like Crazy

2. Blue Valentine

3. Marriage Story

At some point I’ll recommend a trilogy that isn’t depressing. This isn’t that point. All three movies here are love stories lacking happily-ever-after endings.

Like Crazy is one of those movies that features a stacked cast that now seems impossible: Jennifer Lawrence — prior to her breakout — in a supporting role, Anton Yelchin (who tragically died in a car accident a few years later), and the great Felicity Jones prior to her Oscar-nominated performance in The Theory of Everything and subsequent leading role in Rogue One. It tells the story of a British exchange student (Jones) who falls in love with an American boy (Yelchin) in Los Angeles. It’s very much a movie about long-distance relationships and how difficult relationships can lose their luster to the fault of no one involved. What’s unique about the film is that every line was improvised. The movie, which was made on a budget of only $250,000, very much hinges on the chemistry between Jones and Yelchin. Which is why it works.

The final two movies (both are available on Netflix) are about the dissolution of marriages. They’re both devastating in their own unique ways. What they also have in common is that the performances are powerful. Blue Valentine pairs Ryan Gosling with Michelle Williams while A Marriage Story pits Adam Driver against Scarlett Johansson.

The Jessica Chastain Is On A Mission Trilogy

1. Zero Dark Thirty

2. Miss Sloane

3. Molly’s Game

Jessica Chastain is one of my favorite actresses not just because of her talent, but because of her taste in movies and roles. She chooses to play the types of characters that I’m drawn to. The Jessica Chastain On A Mission Trilogy features three of her best performances that are all operating on the same wavelength. She’s on a mission and everyone standing in her path is just an obstruction for her to smash to smithereens.

In ZDT, she plays a CIA analyst so obsessed with finding bin Laden that she’s not afraid to tell the CIA director that she’s “the motherfucker that found this place, sir.” It’s the first time she speaks to him. In Miss Sloane (available on Amazon Prime), she plays a lobbyist who cares more about winning than ethics. She seldom sleeps. She views all of her relationships as transactions. She’s running a marathon on a sprained ankle. Finally, in Molly’s Game (streaming on Netflix), Chastain plays a woman who runs her own underground poker game. It starts small, but eventually turns into an empire that she slowly loses control over.

The I Think I’m Alone Now Trilogy

1. I Am Legend

2. Cast Away

3. The Martian

The common thread of isolation is easy to identify. During quarantine, what trilogy could have more resonance than this one?

In I Am Legend (streaming on Amazon Prime), Will Smith plays a doctor who desperately seeks a cure to a disease that turned humanity into vampire-like monsters. His only companion is his dog. In Cast Away, Tom Hanks is stranded on an island in the South Pacific. His only companion is a volleyball. In The Martian, Matt Damon is stuck on Mars. His only companions are potatoes, painkillers, and disco music.

Cast Away is the best movie of the three, but The Martian is the most rewatchable, because it’s lighter and funnier than Cast Away, a grueling grind of a movie that give us a happy ending, but not the one we’re expecting. As for I Am Legend, it’s a good movie, but one that squandered a chance to be great.

The Die Hard, but not actually Die Hard Trilogy

1. Air Force One

2. Taken

3. Upgrade

I’ve long believed that Air Force One — Die Hard, but on an airplane, with Harrison Ford as the President of the United States instead of Bruce Willis as a cop — is an equally good version of Die Hard that has aged remarkably well since its release in 1997. Taken needs no introduction, but it’s also the definition of rewatchable. Finally, there’s Upgrade, a movie that blew me away when I saw it in theaters without knowing what it was really about. The movie is best experienced this way. Go in blind if you can. Just know that it takes a science fiction angle to the Die Hard genre. It was one of my favorite movies of 2018. More people should see it (it’s on HBO Go).

The Did You Know Ben Affleck Is From Boston? Trilogy

1. Good Will Hunting

2. Gone Baby Gone

3. The Town

All three movies are set in Boston featuring characters that are very much defined by Boston. They also all happen to feature Ben Affleck in a variety of ways. Affleck co-wrote Good Will Hunting (streaming on Hulu) and played a supporting role alongside Matt Damon. He co-wrote and made his directorial debut with Gone Baby Gone, which stars his brother, Casey. And he directed, co-wrote, and starred in The Town (available on HBO Go).

All three movies are very much Boston movies, but they all pay tribute to Boston in different ways. Good Will Hunting is about a genius from Southie. Gone Baby Gone — the darkest of the three — is about a kidnapping in Dorchester. And The Town is about bank robbers from Charlestown. All three movies are seeped in the atmosphere of Boston. They couldn’t have been set in any other place without losing their identity.

“I'm proud to be from Charlestown,” a Charlestown man says in the opening to The Town. “It ruined my life, literally, but I'm proud.”

The Nature Is Metal Trilogy

1. The Shallows

2. Crawl

3. The Aeronauts

Blake Lively vs. a great white shark. A father and daughter vs. alligators during a hurricane in a movie that Quentin Tarantino once called his favorite movie of 2019. Felicity Jones vs. the elements during a historic hot air balloon ride (available on Amazon Prime). None of these movies are great movies in an award-winning sense, but they’re all great at what they’re trying to be: fun flicks about women vanquishing nature — and along the way, the demons from their past.

The Fight Off Your Demons Trilogy

1. Destroyer

2. Lucy in the Sky

3. The Way Back

Speaking of demons, all three of these movies are about broken people. As I’ve repeatedly said in this space, I like stories about broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

I’ve already written spoiler-free reviews about Destroyer (a cop reckoning with a past mistake) and The Way Back (more of an addiction story than a sports movie). Lucy in the Sky, starring Natalie Portman and Jon Hamm, was not at all well received by critics, but I adore it. It tells the true story of an astronaut who begins to lose her mind — not in outer space, but back on Earth as she longs to feel again what she felt in the expanse. She’s the diaper astronaut you’ve probably read about, but if you want to watch the movie for the diaper, you’ll be disappointed.

“I was taking a story that had been a tabloid story, a tabloid story defined by me as a story about human beings with dignity who have made mistakes and ruined everything and been reduced to a punchline — in other words, a tragedy,” director Noah Hawley told Sean Fennessey on The Big Picture podcast. “And my goal was, can we restore their dignity? Can we remind the audience that their punishment was the fact that — her punishment was the fact that she lost everything that she cared about. We don’t have to humiliate her on top of that.”

The Dunkirk Trilogy

1. Darkest Hour

2. Atonement

3. Dunkirk

In late May of 1940, Allied soldiers were trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk between the sea and the German army. What followed was the improbable evacuation of 338,226 soldiers that kept the Allies very much alive in the fight for Europe. The Dunkirk Trilogy shows us the evacuation of Dunkirk from three different perspectives. In Darkest Hour, for which Gary Oldman won a Best Actor Academy Award, we witness Dunkirk from Winston Churchill’s perspective. In Atonement, more of a love story (that very easily could’ve been part of The Sad Love Trilogy) than a war movie, we see the evacuation of Dunkirk from a very personal perspective; we only care about the survival of one soldier. Finally, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk takes a unique approach to the evacuation. Rather than viewing the harrowing events through a personal lens, we watch it from a collective lens. There’s very little character work. But we do get to see the evacuation from the perspective of the soldiers on the beach, the Royal Air Force fighting above the English Channel, and the civilians who risked their lives to help rescue the soldiers in their own personal boats. We save the best — “the miracle of deliverance” — for last.

The D-Day Trilogy

1. Overlord

2. Saving Private Ryan

3. Inglourious Basterds

Taking place the night before D-Day, Overlord (available on Amazon Prime) is not at all realistic after the opening few minutes. It tracks a group of paratroopers dropping into France behind enemy lines to destroy a German radio tower before the armada arrives in the morning. They end up encountering Nazi zombies. Euron Greyjoy is the villain. Saving Private Ryan, a movie that peaks in the opening 30 minutes (to no fault of its own, it’s just that good of an opening 30 minutes), depicts the actual invasion of Normandy. Inglourious Basterds (on Netflix), an alternative history of World War II, never shows D-Day, but it is mentioned a few times — the Basterds are dropped into Nazi-occupied France a little before D-Day and the movie ends some time after D-Day. Watched in the order listed above, The D-Day Trilogy takes you on a journey that begins the night before D-Day, shows you D-Day itself, and then concludes with the Americans ending the war — albeit, in unrealistic fashion.

The Tarantino Revisionist History Trilogy

1. Django Unchained

2. Inglourious Basterds

3. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Tarantino loves himself some alternative history. This trilogy shows us a former slave getting revenge on a slave owner just before the Civil War breaks out, the assassination of Hitler during World War II, and a fairytale version of the Sharon Tate murder. With Tarantino writing and directing all three films, they flow together remarkably well despite being three separate entities that were released years apart. Additionally, you’ll see a ton of familiar faces. Christoph Waltz delivers two Oscar-winning performances in the first two installments, Leonardo DiCaprio gives a twisted performance as the villain in Django Unchained before submitting the best performance of his career in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, while Brad Pitt is at or near his peak in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, for which he won his first acting Oscar, and Inglourious Basterds, my favorite Brad Pitt performance.

The Taylor Sheridan Trilogy

1. Sicario

2. Hell or High Water

3. Wind River

Taylor Sheridan wrote all three of these films and made his directorial debut with Wind River. What I like about Sheridan’s movies is that they are always absorbed by atmosphere and seeped with dread. Sicario is consumed by the U.S.-Mexico border. Hell or High Water (available on Netflix) makes West Texas feel like a foreign country. Wind River gets lost in the blizzard of Wyoming. All three rely on vast, empty stretches of land that make the characters feel tiny. They feature at least two incredible action sequences per movie. In Sicario, it’s the border sequence and the underground tunnel sequence that gives off serious Zero Dark Thirty vibes. In Hell or High Water, it’s the closing battle and any one of the bank robberies. In Wind River, it’s Elizabeth Olsen storming a home after getting pepper sprayed and a confusing shootout in the snow involving a camouflaged Jeremy Renner. They’re all well acted, shot, and written. They all represent the best kind of smart thrillers that Hollywood produces these days — smart, tense, dark, and grisly while at least trying to highlight important real-life issues.

The Stranded In Space Trilogy

1. Apollo 13

2. Sunshine

3. Interstellar

Despite what Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse wants you to believe, the universe is not shaped exactly like the Earth, and if you go straight long enough you will not end up where you were, you’ll just end up getting lost. On that note, here’s a trilogy about getting stranded in space.

The trilogy begins with a realistic movie, starring Tom Hanks, about the aborted 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission. For the middle movie, I went with Sunshine, a still somehow underrated flick about astronauts trying to reignite the Sun. This one isn’t at all realistic. But if you’re a fan of science-fiction thrillers, Alex Garland (who wrote the movie, but is better known for projects like Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Devs), or Danny Boyle (who directed the movie, but is better known for movies like 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, and 127 Hours), this is the movie for you. It’s not perfect. The first three-fourths are better than the finale. But it’s well worth a watch. The trilogy ends with Interstellar. You could very well substitute The Martian here, but for the sake of variety, I went with Christopher Nolan’s space epic that some find deep and others find dumb. It straddles a fine line. The important thing here is that Jessica Chastain is, once again, in yet another one of my trilogies — regardless if you pick Interstellar or The Martian. As I said, she has tremendous taste in movies.

The End Of The World Trilogy

1. San Andreas

2. 2012

3. Armageddon

The End Of The World Trilogy goes from a California-sized disaster in San Andreas, to a global catastrophe in 2012 (on Netflix) that takes the characters from Los Angeles to Yellowstone to Las Vegas to China to South Africa, to a movie in Armageddon about an asteroid that’s heading straight for our planet.

All of these movies are dumb. But they’re the good kind of dumb.

Shoutout to my friend Seung who might be the only person on the planet who genuinely loves San Andreas (to an annoying degree).

anti-social social distanseung @seungylee14

@seanjwagner review San Andreas

anti-social social distanseung @seungylee14

@seanjwagner I'm going to rip my shirt and beat my bare chest if the san andreas fault swallows whole a bart train and/or station

Personally, I’m partial to Armageddon, which might just be the best bad movie ever made.

Sean Wagner-McGough @seanjwagner

The end of the world reminded me again that Armageddon thought training oil drillers to be astronauts was easier than teaching astronauts to be drillers. Honestly, what a great goddamn movie.

The only way Armageddon could be worse is if Big Dumb Internet Idiot Aubrey Huff rewrote it as an Armageddon-Contagion crossover event.

The Driver Trilogy

1. Drive

2. Baby Driver

3. Ford v Ferrari

This is not a trilogy about driving. This is a trilogy, instead, about drivers: Ryan Gosling in Drive (available on Netflix), Ansel Elgort in Baby Driver, and Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari.

Drive and Baby Driver are both stylish movies to the point where they could annoy you. The difference is that Drive is quiet and understated whereas Baby Driver is a loud embellishment. As for Ford v Ferrari, it’s a formulaic movie, but not in a bad way. This is a film that’ll have plenty of rewatch value once it hits streaming services and cable. Above all else, these movies look and sound fantastic. Drive and Baby Driver rely on killer soundtracks while Ford v Ferrari embraces engine noise. Not much else is needed.