Some French guy once said it’s impossible to make an anti-war movie, and to be fair, that was in 1973, so he hadn’t seen Apocalypse Now yet. Still, he had a point. It’s just really, really hard to make military action not look sick as hell on film, and that goes for just about anything you want to depict as bad. It’s going to be staged in the most visually exciting way possible, with a bitchin’ soundtrack, and there’s a modern character actor drought, so it’ll be performed by incredibly hot people. It doesn’t matter how many arms get blown off. We’ll just respond, “Sweet! That guy’s arm got blown off!”
That means any movie whose point is “See this? Don’t do it!” is going to bound gleefully over the heads of a good chunk of the audience, but even non-cautionary tales are still liable to get misinterpreted because we’re just, you know, really dumb sometimes. That’s why, when Redditor MikeyTheCarGuy recently asked r/AskReddit, “What’s a movie most people completely missed the point on?” it was possible to answer “Every movie.” Thankfully, Reddit got specific anyway.
A Clockwork Orange
The Wolf of Wall Street
The Great Gatsby
The Little Mermaid
District 9
Goodfellas
Full Metal Jacket
(500) Days of Summer
Wall Street
Fight Club
The Last Samurai
Signs
Mulan
Whiplash
Into the Wild
Midsommar
Starship Troopers
Joker
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Scarface
Finding Nemo
The English Patient
