10 Famous Movies That Everyone Missed The Point of

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Taste of Cinema - Movie Reviews and Classic Movie Lists > Lists > Film Lists > 10 Famous Movies That Everyone Missed The
Point Of
10 Famous Movies That Everyone Missed The

Point Of
15 AUGUST 2018 FEATURES, FILM LISTS BY BEN SHERLOCK
Film is an artistic medium, and like all artistic mediums, there is the potential to use subtext
and allegories and re-appropriation of concepts to make a point about society or politics or
religion or culture or the media or, well, pretty much anything.
There are plenty of socially conscious directors, like Martin Scorsese or Oliver Stone, who
are always looking for the underlying point about American society that they can make with
their movies. Other directors, like Quentin Tarantino, are simply trying to make the best
movie they can, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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4/11/2018 10 Famous Movies That Everyone Missed The Point Of « Taste of Cinema - Movie Reviews and Classic Movie Lists
But there is one school of thought that if a movie is made without the director trying to make
a point, then, well, there’s no point. There’s no real reason for it to exist. Sometimes these
directors will make their message very on-the-nose and ham-fisted (see: The Purge
franchise), which ruins the whole movie – it’s not subtext in these movies; it’s just text.
Other times, however, the director will make their point a little too subtle – so subtle that its
meaning is either misunderstood or completely lost on passive, mainstream audiences. This
is a list of ten movies that, one way or another, everyone missed the point of.
10. First Blood (1982)
Everyone remembers John Rambo as the guy who flies helicopters into exotic countries and
carries around a minigun and doesn’t wear a shirt and does wear a red bandanna on his
head and guns down hundreds of people in a blind, Reagan-inspired, patriotic fury. But that’s
not what his first movie is about.
Audiences read First Blood as being a simple action movie about a lone wolf badass who
takes on a small-town police force that wants to bring him down after he evades capture. But
that’s not what it is. It’s not just an action movie. It’s about the Vietnam War and the PTSD
that soldiers suffered from when they came home.
Rambo returns from the horrors of ‘Nam and he doesn’t know what to do with his life. He
finds that his old war buddy died from the effects of Agent Orange – a sly dig at the
government there – and the local sheriff wants nothing to do with him. He picks him up and
drives him out of town.
When he walks back into town, the sheriff arrests him. Rambo hasn’t done anything wrong –
it’s just that this sheriff, like the rest of American society after the Vietnam War, wanted to
forget about the veterans and sweep them under the rug.
In First Blood, Rambo, who has since come to be known as a merciless killing machine
thanks to the bloodthirsty sequels, doesn’t actually kill anyone. There’s one guy who falls out
of a helicopter after he throws a rock at it, but it’s not even clear whether or not that guy
died.
Sylvester Stallone saw the injustice in how Vietnam vets were being treated when they
returned home from battle and he made a movie that pointed out the tragedy of their plight –
but this went over a lot of audiences’ heads, because they didn’t take Stallone seriously as
an artist.
9. RoboCop (1987)
The original ‘80s RoboCop movie directed by Paul Verhoeven is remembered as a dumb,
cheesy sci-fi action movie, but it is actually a scathing corporate satire. It’s about how big
corporations like Omni Consumer Products comfort us by telling us they will “take care of
us,” and then fail to do so with their misguided manufacture of weapons and surveillance
systems that are more of a danger to us than they protect us.
OCP is given complete control of the Detroit Police Department and sends officers into
dangerous areas in the hopes that one of them will be killed for them to try out their
“RoboCop” idea on. It’s a shady, heartless business practice that satirizes those of the real
business world – it’s not just the setup of a violent sci-fi actioner.
Verhoeven, who is known for the prevalent religious themes in his movies, has also said that
he intended the title character to be portrayed as a Christ figure. When Alex Murphy is
gunned down by a street gang, he is “crucified,” and when Omni Consumer Products brings
him back to life in the form of RoboCop, he is “resurrected.” Plus, visually, the scene in the
steel mill with the shallow water gives the impression that this robotic god among men is
walking on water.
The film is also a comment on masculinity in the sense that Alex Murphy is no longer truly a
man following his reincarnation as RoboCop. He’s a big, strong, effective killing machine
who gets the job done, but the point is that having the body of a man does not make you a
man. Even the violence in the movie is so absurdly over-the-top that it could be seen as a
satirical commentary on its own genre. Suffice to say, it’s not just a cheesy ‘80s action
movie.
8. (500) Days of Summer (2009)
A lot of audiences saw (500) Days of Summer as a quirky romcom with a relatable lead
character, but Tom is not supposed to be relatable. He’s supposed to represent everything
that’s wrong with the logic of Hollywood romcoms. Those movies give us unrealistic
expectations that can ruin real-life romances like Tom’s relationship with Summer.
Director Marc Webb himself has said that (500) Days of Summer isn’t even a romantic
comedy – it’s a coming-of-age film. Tom comes of age when he realizes he can’t kid himself
about who Summer is or what their relationship is. It’s not a movie about a relationship – it’s
a movie about one young man’s growing experience, which happens to come in the form of
a relationship.
Summer is based on the same unrealistic Hollywood version of a woman that we have seen
in pretty much every romantic comedy ever made. She is Tom’s idea of a woman – kooky
and beautiful and fun and ‘adorkable.’ That’s why she’s played by Zooey Deschanel.
Ultimately, the relationship failed, because Tom’s expectations of it never matched the
reality. The point of this movie is not to be a ‘more realistic’ romcom – it’s that you should
ignore romcoms altogether and just enjoy what you have.
7. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
A lot of people think that this movie makes Jordan Belfort’s lifestyle of financial excess look
glamorous, but Belfort’s story and Martin Scorsese’s telling of it overtly depict the flaws of a
capitalist society. Belfort is shown to get rich by defrauding hard-working, regular people and
is ultimately made to pay for his crimes. He has a great run on top of the world, but of
course, it doesn’t last. His mistakes and deceits catch up to him and he loses everything.
The film has been criticized for “glorifying psychopathic behavior,” but as the movie’s star
Leonardo DiCaprio has pointed out, the film “indicts” fraudulent activity – by having the
characters be quite literally indicted at the end of the movie.
DiCaprio said, “This film may be misunderstood by some. I hope people understand we’re
not condoning this behaviour…we’re indicting it. The book was a cautionary tale, and if you
sit through [to] the end of the film, you’ll realise what we’re saying about these people and
this world, because it’s an intoxicating one.”
It might seem glamorous from the comedic tone and the sheer lavishness of everything, but
that’s exactly how people like Jordan Belfort get swept up in this world in the first place.
They know that what they’re doing is criminal, but the rewards are so attractive that they fall
into it anyway.
The point of the movie – and the book that it’s based on – is to get the viewer to avoid
making the same mistakes that Belfort did. Scorsese and DiCaprio might use humor and
sight gags and naked women and party scenes and ridiculous amounts of money to prove
this point, but it is a movie after all.
6. The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick’s cold, unforgiving adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name
was initially judged back in 1980 as a simple horror film about a haunted hotel, but as years
of fan theories have shown, it is everything but.
One theory is that the movie is about sexual abuse. The chronology of that “one time” when
Jack hit Danny gets a little muddled. Wendy’s telling of it doesn’t line up with Jack’s telling of
it – and Jack is reluctant to even talk about it at all, denying it ever happened at first. Plus,
the movie shows that Danny is clearly psychologically scarred and he’s the first one to go
into Room 237, which is when things start to get creepy.
The film is also filled with sexual imagery that only a child’s mind would think of (naked
people kissing, for example, instead of actual sex), suggesting a history of sexual abuse.
The theory is that The Shining is really about the effect that this has had on Danny’s psyche,
rather than the spirits haunting the Overlook.
Another theory is that it is about the plight of the Native American people, since the hotel is
said to be built on an Indian burial ground (a common theme in ‘80s horror films, like
Poltergeist, which actually subverts it, and The Amityville Horror). The hotel is also filled with
Native American food brands and artworks, and yet there isn’t a Native American person in
sight – just a bunch of white people and one black guy. All the Native Americans are buried
under the foundations. So, the theory is that Kubrick made a movie about the American
killing of Native American people.
Jack’s signing of the contract at the beginning of the movie is seen as a metaphor for him
signing away his soul, since what happens after it seems to be a descent into a snowy hell.
Some people have even seen Jack’s use of the written word versus Danny’s use of visual
imagery as a battle between literature and film in a film adaptation of a book that the book’s
author despised.
It’s not clear exactly what Kubrick meant with the film. Perhaps he meant all of these things.
Who knows? He took it to his grave. But one thing is certain: it’s not just a horror movie
about a haunted hotel.
5. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
The main takeaway for horror filmmakers from George A. Romero’s seminal original Dawn of the Dead was the
gore and the brain-eating. Everyone who has attempted to make a zombie movie since then has focused on
making gory set pieces and picking an isolated location that hasn’t been tried before. But they all focused on the
wrong aspects.
What they should have taken on board was Romero’s use of zombies and a shopping mall setting to make a
comment on consumerism – his point was that we are already zombies swarming to the mall. The same goes for
Night of the Living Dead, which was really a commentary on the strained race relations in America (and this was
in 1968, when that was a much more controversial topic to attempt to comment on), but Dawn of the Dead has
become more of a template for the plot structure and underlying mythologies of zombie movies.
Newer zombie movies/TV shows like The Walking Dead and World War Z have been bereft of this kind of
commentary. And today’s divided political climate and the fact that everyone is glued to an iPhone really open the
world up to commentary-heavy zombie movies. If everyone hadn’t missed the point of Dawn of the Dead, then
we wouldn’t need to rely on The Purge movies for heavy-handed political commentary in horror cinema.
4. Finding Nemo (2003)

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Pixar’s delightful undersea adventure Finding Nemo was a monster hit back in 2003, when it grossed nearly $1
billion at the worldwide box office and spawned a belated sequel that grossed over $1 billion at the worldwide box
office in 2016. But unfortunately for the marine life that the movie tries so painstakingly to celebrate, a lot of
people missed the point that Andrew Stanton wanted to make.
In the movie, a scuba diver snatches up Nemo in a net, breaking apart a family and taking a fish away from his
home. Nemo ends up in a fish tank in a dentist’s office, where all of the other fish are miserable and desperate to
escape. There’s even a vegetarian shark character. The message is clear: leave fish alone.
And yet, after the movie came out, the sales of clownfish skyrocketed. Everyone wanted to have their own Nemo
as a pet, so his species was fished close to extinction. These people obviously missed how depressed Nemo
was when he was being kept in the dentist’s office and how the fish in the tank spent all day every day plotting to
get out – or they just didn’t care how the fish felt. Either way, it’s kind of ironic. A movie with an environmentalist
message becomes so beloved and popular that it destroys the environment. Tragic, but ironic.
3. Dirty Dancing (1987)
Dirty Dancing is not just an uplifting romantic drama about dancing that introduced the world to the song “(I’ve
Had) The Time of My Life.” That might have been what attracted audiences in such huge numbers – but that’s
not what the movie is about, thematically.
The dancing in the movie is a metaphor for women’s freedom to choose what they do with their bodies. That’s
why screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein decided to set it in 1963. Well, that’s partly why. It was based on her own
adolescence, which had taken place in real life in 1963. But 1963 was before the landmark Roe v. Wade court
ruling that made abortion legal in the United States, hence the controversial illegal back-alley abortion scene.
Penny is pregnant. She’s not ready to have a baby, the philandering father wants nothing to do with it, and a
pregnancy will threaten her burgeoning dancing career – three perfectly valid reasons to have an abortion. But
because it’s not legal, she has to take the money that Baby got from her father and get an abortion done, not by
a doctor with safe apparatus, but by a guy with “a dirty knife and a folding table.”
Bergstein explained last year while Dirty Dancing fans were celebrating the movie’s 30th anniversary, “When I
made the movie in 1987, about 1963, I put in the illegal abortion and everyone said, ‘Why? There was Roe v.
Wade – what are you doing this for?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know that we will always have Roe v. Wade,’ and I got a
lot of pushback on that.
Worse than that, there were also very young women then who didn’t remember a time before Roe v. Wade, so for
them, I was like Susan B. Anthony saying, ‘Oh, just remember, remember, remember.’” This issue continues to
be shockingly relevant as the years go by. Abortion was only legalised in Ireland a few months ago, while
women’s health clinics in America are closing faster than ever before.
2. Fight Club (1999)
This David Fincher-directed adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel with the same title is often seen as having
an anti-consumerist, anarchist message, because of Tyler’s viewpoints. The people who think this will come out
with quotes like, “The things you own end up owning you,” and “We are consumers – we’re the by-products of a
lifestyle obsession.” If you take these quotes on board, then you will get lofty ideas about the government and big
business and the systems that are in place and “The Man.”
But that is not the message of the film as a whole. It has those quotes and introduces those ideas and those
themes, but at the end of the movie, as the credits roll, the message that we are left with is not anti-The Man. A
lot of people forget that Tyler is framed as the villain of the story, and ultimately, the message peddled by Fight
Club is that as much as we would like to be free from the shackles of government and the systems they have
created, it would simply be too chaotic, and that we need those systems to be in place.
Fight Club doesn’t make a point against capitalism – it teases a world without capitalism and then makes a point
in favour of capitalism. Besides, is shopping at Ikea really the sign of a failed life?
1. Natural Born Killers (1994)

Oliver Stone’s satirical thriller was meant as a social commentary on the media’s glorification of killers and
violence. Throughout the ‘90s, people like O.J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding and the
Menendez brothers (all of whom are featured in a montage at the end of the movie) became media sensations as
a result of the accusations or even convictions of murder made against them.
Charles Manson’s followers, the Manson family, even joined in the killing. In Natural Born Killers, the followers of
celebrity murderers Mickey and Mallory are just fans. So, real life is even more ridiculous than the skewed world
that Stone portrayed in his movie.
After several school shooters in the ‘90s named Natural Born Killers as one of their influences, the media
condemned the movie for giving these kids the idea that murderers can become celebrities – but the point of
Stone’s film was that the media had already spread this idea by actually making real-life murderers into
celebrities.
Somewhat ironically, the media misconstrued the movie as a glorification of murderers, when it was in fact a
satire on their glorification of murderers.
Author Bio: Ben Sherlock is a comedian, independent filmmaker, and writer. He has contributed work to such
websites as Screen Rant, BabbleTop, and Entropy. Check out his website for standup comedy and short films:
https://www.ben-sherlock.com.

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4/11/2018 10 Famous Movies That Everyone Missed The Point Of « Taste of Cinema - Movie Reviews and Classic Movie

d Classic Movie Lists

10 Famous Movies That Everyone Missed The

10. First Blood (1982)

8. (500) Days of Summer (2009)

7. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

6. The Shining (1980)

5. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

4. Finding Nemo (2003)

3. Dirty Dancing (1987)

not what the movie is about, thematically.

2. Fight Club (1999)

1. Natural Born Killers (1994)

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