I don't even mean a bad thing, necessarily. I mean a thing that is made to normalize the status quo, pave over inherent contradictions in late stage neoliberal capitalism, make even the idea of changing society somewhat seem evil or impossible, and have lots of performative gestures that hide the stench of affluent arrogance. :zizek-preference:
I know it came out well before 2020, but I finally got around to seeing Iron Man 2 and I stopped at the instant Tony Stark said "I've successfully privatized world peace." It was bad. Very bad. The original movie was entertaining even if it had some painful deliberate adjustments to the comic book character to make him more like :my-hero: but the sequel played out like Ayn Rand fanfiction, especially the big smart awesome genius giving a speech about how the evil government and the ungrateful moochers were taking the sweat from his brow and so on and so on. :zizek:
The flood of MCU movies wore me out to the point that I stopped watching them and because of that I have only seen maybe half of them by now. Maybe it was a mistake returning to try watching Iron Man 2 because I now have even less interest in seeing anything MCU ever again. :zizek-fuck:
Here's a classic: Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). It's absolutely a beautiful movie with highly expressive scenes of workers being mistreated, but the message, written on screen after the final scene, is that workers and capitalists have to work together to better their conditions. It hardly makes sense in the context of the movie and Lang himself later recognized that it was essentially just a fairytale. Goebbels liked Metropolis, though, and Lang's co-writer later joined the Nazi party, so that's also an obvious hint to its ideology.
I really, really like that movie, both as a foundational work for cinematic science fiction and as an artistic masterpiece in its own right.
That said, yes, the message is horribly :LIB: especially considering what it showed the workers suffering before that ending.
Even if Lang was kind of a fucked up person, its really funny that in his police mystery movie "M" he based a character on Goebbels and made him the head of a criminal organization that tries to take the law into its own hands mostly due to financial reasons, as the police hunts for a serial killer is hurting criminal organizations, and who tries to make moral judgements despite having killed multiple people himself and ordering torture of innocents in the course of the movie.
Goebbels of course loved it despite obviously being cast as a horrific and evil person who is only seen as a lesser evil by virtue of the main focus of the movie being a serial killer of children, and ended up using scenes from the movie in antisemitic propaganda because the actor who played the serial killer was jewish.
M actually is a movie that I think holds up basically perfectly still today, compared to Metropolis which has cool imagery but kind of a butchered and incoherent story(partially the fault of scenes being literally lost).
I havent seen it since college, but I remember M being really good.
It has a really unique atmosphere due to it being in that early period of sound films, so it doesnt have a real soundtrack outside of music and sound inside of the scene.
Also while its not exactly anti-cop, most of the measures the cops put in to try and catch the serial killer is entirely arbitrary "grrr more cops everywhere! go bother everyone thats a criminal!" shit that doesnt accomplish anything besides make everyone miserable. And the actual investigation they do to find him feels pretty grounded and realistic compared to a lot of police procedurals that try to make it exciting and dynamic, and I at least appreciate that a lot as someone whos guilty pleasure is true crime and police procedural stuff.
M does also show the criminal orgs (aka Ringvereine) as good. They have moral codes etc. and are displayed as distinguishing between civilians and criminals on one hand and between good (securing children) and bad (non sanctioned violence).
It made crime look cool to a good part.