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American History X
You think people missed the point on that one? Or that racists watched the first 10mins and were satisfied without finishing the movie?
Racists watched the whole movie but the ending whooshed right on past them.
I know some people that had the sarcasm and satirical nature of Starship Troopers fly right over their heads.
It’s got to be The Matrix.
These red pill people view “liberals” as the Matrix they’re escaping…when the film explicitly says the opposite.
Do red people know that both of the writers are trans…?
They spell it out in plain words in the 4th movie too lol
They never read the article. Ever. Doesn’t matter if it’s the bible or playing Born in the USA at a rally.
Planet of the Apes… People still don’t grasp the twist ending.
I can speak from personal experience on this one: Taxi Driver (1976)
When I first watched it (admittedly I was only 13 or so at the time) I pretty much took it as a story about
spoiler
a socially-warped but well-meaning hero who stood up against the baddies and won, and saved the girl in the process.
Watching it a few years later, the true horror of it became clear to me, and the contemptible piece of shit Travis Bickle is was made obvious. I think I was just too young to get it, but I was also a huge De Niro fan and so, whatever his character was, I was ride or die with him.
Travis Bickle predicted incel mass shooters. People seem to think he was the cool antihero he thought himself to be, I often see his face in people’s profile pics and on cringy self-aggrandising quote memes. He was a disgusting pig of a man and the film is not a celebration of anything he did. On the contrary.
V for Vendetta. V was the bad guy.
V does some fucked up shit (IE locking Natalie Portman up and torturing her the same way he was, which kinda brainwashes her into taking his side; even tho his side is otherwise morally justified).
The government is the bad guy.
Not sure this is the full story.
V is a flawed character and throughout the story he does some despicable things. But he was definitely shaped by the actions of the dystopian fascist government that he lives under, and his actions are in response to people who have committed violence against himself and the people. He is not a good man, but it doesn’t make him the ‘bad guy’ of the story.
I can recognise that his actions are intense, and the things he does to Evey in the film are horrific, but I can’t in good conscience consider him the villain of the film when he stands against a form of fascism that is becoming all too familiar these days.
Yep. He’s a “Punisher” character, often just as bad as the people he’s fighting.
Anti-hero maybe – he’s insane and does some incredibly fucked up things. But I’m pretty sure the “Nazis with a different name” government and its toadies were infinitely worse.
I just reread the plot synopsis, still don’t get it, how is V the bad guy?
He’s not, but he does some questionable to fucked-up things.
American Psycho
apparently there’s communities that take Patrick Bateman as some kind of role model
Fight Club, but to be fair there’s a lot going on in the film. The book makes the many themes more apparent.
Princess Bride. Every single person I talk to says it’s about true love but it’s really the most important lesson is to never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
I don’t know, seems pretty inconceivable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It’s about fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…
AND KISSING
ew
Some day you might not mind so much.
lol - I love the lack of context the inbox gives so I was thinking “…what did I say???” - makes me laugh every time something like this happens. :)
Misunderstanding The Princess Bride is one of the classic blunders, right up there with getting involved in a land war in Asia
I’m sad he never ended up completing the sequel Buttercup’s Baby. I read the sample chapter ages ago and was very excited about it, but I’m pretty sure the author has died since.
Then again we already have The Fitz and the Fool books by Robin Hobb, which I think hit a lot of the same notes we would have gotten.
Maybe when Stephen King finally finishes his abridgement.
Am part Sicilian, can confirm.
I’m gonna go in against you because death isn’t on the line.
V for Vendetta. Even the director missed the point of an anarchist revolution story.
The obvious one for me would be Wolf of Wall Street. Clearly tried to exaggerate excess and hedonism, but people praised the lifestyle and tried to think “that is what I want to be one day”
Same with the movie Wall Street: it was meant as a cautionary tale about greed and callousness in modern society, but Reagan era yuppies ended up identifying with the villain.
Several decades later, they made the atrociously titled sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” which had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the genitals and Trump cult members STILL managed to consider the obvious villain admirable.
500 Days of Summer.
Everyone thinks it’s another one of those “manic pixie girl” rom com movies that were all the rage in the mid 00s but it’s not. It’s more of a story about Tom’s inability to have a healthy relationship with just about anyone. He builds this ideal girl in his head for Summer, falls for her, but she’s just not into him. For her Tom is just a fling, that’s it. People wanted the two to be together but she just never had feelings for him. And he doesn’t learn his lesson at all because at the end he does the same thing again with another woman named Autumn thus further proving it’s all going to happen again. they meet because they have a similar interest in ONE topic and she even initially declines his offer for coffee. He builds these women in his head without actually taking them for who they are. He constantly falls for the wrong women. like the changing of the seasons.
Starship Troopers I think, though that’s a bit of a weird one since I remember that the movie is a lot more antifascist than the book it’s based on.
The book is fine. The opening pages tell us clearly that we are nuking bugs on planets with intelligent beings, using all the ammo (because it’s too expensive to return with nukes) and leaving for another planet with bugs.
After that we jump to our protagonist, who is being brainwashed in high school.
Finally, Heinlein was writing his father’s worldview and wanted to take it to its logical end.
I love that book and movie.
So how do you rate it as an adaptation?
Good but not great. They dump the battlesuits entirely. For budget reasons this makes sense at the time but that investment in equipment (and to a lesser extent the soldiers within) shows the cost of space travel and how we are spending insane amounts to kill space bugs that are on most worlds.
But they, in turn, use the infantry rush of unarmored soliders pretty well to show the cost of war.
The use of propaganda in the media mirrors the indoctrination well enough. It keeps the audience from completely getting on board with the propaganda since it’s so on the nose. (Some will still swallow it, the same way some people saw The Boondock Saints as an awesome hero flick rather than an over-the-top action comedy.)
In a lot of ways the movie is a spoof of the book. Verhoeven famously hated the book and it’s depiction of military fascism.
The book doesn’t so much promote fascism as explore it. It’s more obvious when you read his other works that that’s just what he does, explore premises.
Stranger in a Strange Land came out less than 2 years later and depicts the creation of a free-love hippie space religion.
Dune 1 and 2.
Moral of story: beware blind loyalty to messianic figures
Audience reaction: Paul is so cool and admirable, I hope he wins!
This is the correct take of the message. It also, given the universe the story is set in, is the only way towards success. Within the big picture, I have empathy for Paul, as he is put in a situation he cannot win and has to follow for the better outcome (for himself, family, humanity).
Wishing for omniscience is like wishing for immortality. Be careful, you might get it. I love the scene after the awakening. Seeing all paths, knowing the only one that will work, and seeing its horror.
The books do a far better job portraying this. The characters tell the reader. The trilogy spends more time giving Momoa extra scenes than it does following the story. (Yeah, it could be worse, but they miss a lot of critical events).
It gets worse. Even Frank Herbert started having a cult, his answer was: “did you guys not read my book??”
I think he mentions it in one of the commentaries at the end (or beginning) of Dune Messiah.
In my experience, the fans of the Dune book series are pretty much always cultish.
More than any other book series, people think they’re special if they like Dune.
I’d put Enders Game as a contender, though the demographic obsessed with that book seems to be former gifted kids who somehow missed how screwed up Ender’s life was.
I love Dune, but Herbert was all the way up his own ass by the time he got to God-Emperor. The books were still good, but his giant ego wasn’t helping. I mean, he, and a bunch of his fans, thought, or still think in the case of the fandom, that Star Wars ripped off Dune when they only have some surface similarities at best. It’s like claiming that Sonic the Hedgehog ripped off Mega Man on the basis that they’re both sidescrollers that feature a blue protagonist. But he was really fucking adamant about it, so people still keep repeating it.
Holy shit, that checks out. The two most Dune-obsessed people I know well are both born-again Christians (previously agnostic/atheist of Catholic upbringing) and both initially fell into the MAGAsphere.
Ah yes, the original Imperial Truth -> Imperial Creed pipeline.
well Paul does have powers that no one else has …
No one else has -yet.
Fight Club
There’s a theory that the main character actually is suffering from cancer and that the love interest is also a lens for him to confront who he really is.
Fascinating how that upends it all, but I am not sure I believe it.
There’s also a theory that Tyler Durden is created in response to The Narrator’s inability to form a real personal relationship with Marla.
There are a million Fight Club theories. My favourite is that the narrator is Calvin and Tyler is Hobbes.
