RustyNails
Member
So Reddit had a very interesting discussion about meaning of some of the movies. I stayed up late in the night just reading through it because it was so damn interesting. Note, some of them are "no-shit sherlock" category, where-as others might be stretching a bit. For example, did you know that Signs is not about pastor redeeming his faith, but about return of demons? Here are some of the top rated ones (Warning: Total spoilers. Read at your own risk):
Gravelord-_Nito
Napoleon Dynamite. That movie is strangely unsettling to me, and I could never figure out quite why until I read this.
Quoted from u/Minsc_and_Boo:
Napoleon Dynamite is a movie that few people really got, IMO. It is one of the best illustrations of what it feels like to be lonely, that I have ever seen. The whole damn movie is about portraying the many forms of loneliness. All the main characters feel disconnected, misunderstood, and have nobody to relate to.
Napoleon has no friends and lives in fantasy land. He is shunned by everybody. His brother is self-deluded, wanting to be a cage fighter but staying home all the time desperately seeing love and attention on the internet. Their grandmother is never there for them, though she has a full life of her own ( a twist on real life situation of the elderly). They live next to a huge field... reinforcing the feeling of isolation. Almost every home in the film is shown isolated, actually. Their uncle lives alone on a trailer in the middle of nowhere, obsessed about the past. Pedro is latin and barely intellingible, oddly attired, alien in every sense of the word.
Not even the protagonists seem to truly connect... their dialogues are always a little awkward, as if 80% of the message was received only, often rolling along without any conclusions being reached. There are little details also... like how Napoleon seldom looks at someone in the eyes, in fact his eyes remain barely open throughout the film. Minor details that add to the sense of disconnection.
In the end the protagonists defeat their loneliness: the uncle gets a girlfriend and gets over the past, his brother gets a girlfriend who is clearly in love with him, Pedro becomes president and Napoleon's dance makes him popular, but even so you don't really get that great a sense of satisfaction by the time it's over. You get a sense that there's so much more that Napoleon needs and that it's not due anytime soon. In fact he does not embrace the popularity at the end, he runs away. He does not have the emotional tools to deal with any of this. He is still fundamentally an isolated creature.
In the end most people can never really put a finger on what made them feel odd about watching this film... while it is overtly a comedy, the circumstances presented leave you no choice but to feel disheartened... questions pop in your head which make you uncomfortable but are not ever addressed: where are Napoleon's parents, for instance? It is a plot point that could be cleared up with one short phrase but isn't. You're just left to wonder if they abandoned Napoleon, or died, or something of the sort. Whatever happened, we are given little closure, just a bit more discomfort with what we see. It is a discomfort that the filmmaker builds upon more and more, punctuated with absurdist humor which makes you legitimately confused about how you should feel.
It is cleverly disguised as a silly comedy but most people who watch it with that preconception end up a bit confused and with a bitter taste in their mouths... it's a bit too surreal and a bit too dark...
omegaterra
Scarface comes to mind. It's like the 2nd half of the movie doesn't exist for a lot of people. Tony is a tragedy, not a hero.
genericname
Inglorious Basterds.
There were a lot of themes going on in it, but the big one I took away was how the viewer is supposed to cheer on the horrible things that happen to the Germans, and yet be repulsed and offended when the Germans in the theater are having the same reactions to the Americans dying in the movie. And everyone misses that point as they cheer at Hitler dying and the theater burning down.
TheColorOfYourEnergy
Breakfast at Tiffanys: Most young women just idealize Audrey Hepburn and her fashion in the movie but it's actually a pretty sad movie about how terrifying and vulnerable relationships are.
dtg108
The movie Signs:
When I first saw this film, I didn't realize that it wasn't about aliens at all. It's about the return of demons. Notice it's all about a priest's resurgence of belief, and a preordained moment of redemption-if-dared-and-attempted. There is no alien technology or weaponry or clothing of any kind, only a clawed, naked beast creature and lights in the sky.
Furthermore: The running joke throughout the movie is that people see these "invaders" in a way that's related to their particular frame of mind: The cop sees them as prankster kids, the bookstore owners see them as "a hoax to sell commercials," the Army recruitment officer sees them as invading military, the kids see them as UFOs... and the Priest sees them as test of faith. This understanding of the film removed my hatred of the "You've got to be kidding me; they were killed by WATER!" concept. In fact, the priest's daughter had been referred to as "holy" (as revealed during Mel's key monologue)recognized by all who saw her at her birth as "an Angel;" and her quite particular relationship to water is shown to be very special and spiritual: In other words, she has placed vials of what are, essentially, HOLY WATER all around the house. (And the creature's reaction when coming in contact with this blessed liquid is EXACTLY like monsters/vampires being splashed by spiritual "acid.")
This view of the movie also explains the creature's actions: They act like superior tricksters, are not able to break in through closed doors, can be trapped behind simple wooden latches all mythological elements of demons and vampire-like creatures of lore. It also explains the news over the radio at the end of the movie that an ancient method of killing the creatures has been found "in three small cities in the Middle East" - one would suspect the religious "hubs" of the three main Abrahamic traditions, each discovering the "mystic methods" of protection-and-dispatch that Ive noted earlier.
Note also: All the Christian iconography throughout the movie, the references to "Signs and Wonders" (the true meaning of the title), the crucifix shapes hinted-at everywhere (check out the overhead shot, looking down on the street driving into town) and the ultimate fact that the entire movie is built around a Priest rediscovering he is not abandoned to a random, Godless, scientifically-oriented Universe but, rather, is part of a predicted and dreamed-of plan.
Now these creatures may for all intents and purposes be some sort of extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional "aliens" but the point of the movie seems to be that they are, in the ACTUALITY OF THE FILM WORLD, the dark stuff from which all the characters tales of devils and night-creatures were born.
ImADude
Into The Wild. Most people think it's all about how being alone in nature is better than being surrounded with people in civilization. They forget that the epiphany Chris gets at the end is "happiness isn't real unless shared." He realizes that all of the great things that happened in his journey happened with other people, not with nature.
Below is a response to a question about 2001: A Space Odysseelauraam
This has been discussed to death, but 500 Days of Summer isn't a quirky romantic comedy; it's a film about a guy who over-idealises a past relationship and doesn't really learn anything from it.
Finally Zero Dark Thirtytomrhod
I imagine you're saying, "I didn't get what the ending meant," because the opening scene and the future are both pretty easy to digest. In short (forgive me for forgetting a few details, it's been awhile):
The opening concerned early humans who were kickstarted into evolving higher cognitive functions after interacting with the black monolith. That's why they started using tools after it appeared to them and they touched it (one proto-human, in particular, was the focus of this jumpstart -- the others followed his lead through learning). More interestingly, one of the first things they do with it is kill.
The transition of the bone cutting to the space capsule (one of the most famous cuts in film history, btw, alongside the blowing-out-the-match cut from Lawrence of Arabia) is a clear reference to the evolution of technology over time. The beauty of the scene -- the majesty of space travel -- is viewed with bored eyes by the first modern human we see, who is sleeping soundly as the universe spins around him.
The recovery of the monolith on the moon is another piece of the tapestry, but we'll get to that later.
The middle section concerning the mission and HAL is once again exploring man and his place with technology. HAL was designed to be a peaceful servant to humans, always obeying but making sure not to harm. However HAL was given contradictory commands -- keep the mission a secret from the crew until it's time / follow the crew's commands. When the crew discovers something amiss during maintenance, HAL is placed in a difficult position: tell them what's happening to help the crew repair the ship (and thus violate command's orders), or tell the crew because they ordered him to (and thus violate the crew's orders). The solution HAL determines to be optimal is to kill the crew. If they can't receive the information, then neither order was violated. The tool built by man decides to kill him, even though it wasn't intended as a tool for violence, much like the bone wasn't.
Of course, this is imperfect rationale as anyone could see, but it goes back to humankind's generous spirit contrasted with his frequent inhumanity and violence, common themes of Kubrick's.
Now the ending is pretty simply summed up plot-wise by Kubrick himself:
You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.
When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he's placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny.
That is what happens on the film's simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.
However, the interpretation of what this reductionist view of the plot means doesn't relate to personal feelings on the philosophy behind it. Also from the filmmaker:
It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. [...] I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film -- and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level -- but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being.
And really, it's a film that deserves to be seen twice, or more. Quoting him again:
The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral entertainment rather than as a visual work of art. We don't believe that we should hear a great piece of music only once, or see a great painting once, or even read a great book just once. But the film has until recent years been exempted from the category of art -- a situation I'm glad is finally changing.
Hope that was helpful!
Zero Dark Thirty. It's a study of revenge. The main character spends ten years looking for bin Laden, and in the process she makes serious moral compromises and alienates her colleagues. The search consumes her life and results in the deaths of her friends. And when she finally succeeds, all she has to show for it is uncertainty as to where to go next. She cries after bin Laden dies because she basically sold her soul for revenge and she found out that it brought her no satisfaction, only a hollow place in her life where her desire for vengeance had once been. So it's not quite the "AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!" propaganda piece that many people think it is (including some people who didn't even bother to watch the thing).
