American Psycho is excellent though, if someone walks out of that film thinking Bateman is a cool guy then there's probably not much hope for them
American Psycho is excellent though, if someone walks out of that film thinking Bateman is a cool guy then there's probably not much hope for them
I've been thinking a lot of modern film is intentionally done this way so that it can be liked by both sides of the cultural divide (including a lot of stuff many of us enjoy).
It's all a big "which Hogwarts house do you belong in?" Marketing gimmick, and it's very effective.
I'm slightly surprised Disney didn't rehabilitate the Galactic Empire in Star Wars to the point of it being just another red team/blue team divide.
It was already done for them by the toy marketers in the decades prior.
E) Funny, now that I think about it I had a flatbrim hat that was 50% Empire 50% rebel iconography on it. Literally the star wars radical centrism hat lol.
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Actually Star Wars is one of the IPs I was thinking about. Nowhere in Star Wars film has there ever been a serious critique of the underlying economic system of the Empire. It's always been this nebulous corruption, bureaucracy, and authoritarianism which are bad things, but without the economic critique, chuds of all stripes could easily read the heroes as themselves. Something like the prison arc in Andor maybe gets close, but even that doesn't really critique economic relations, only political ones.
Both "Phantom Menace" and "The Last Jedi" imply the nature of the Republic/Empire as one of rapacious merchantilism. "New Hope" describes Tatooine as a frontier colony and trading outpost between Hutt Space and the Core Worlds. "Empire Strikes Back" also implies Bespin is a frontier colony profiting from resource extraction.
The focus of the films tends to be the ongoing civil war and associated military campaigns. But you can regularly see the edges of an economic picture - one of space faring civilizations spreading out into a galactic frontier in pursuit of new resources to mine for the benefit of the Core Worlds.
They could have and it likely would have been a better movie.
Andor does a great job of making the imperials sympathetic and human. It does a great job of making some rebels selfish and others overzealous.
The conflict is more sincere when the characters all seem grounded, rather than naively righteous or comically sadistic.
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I think there's layers.
The underlying story is a piece of literature. Then you've got the screenplay, the set design, and the special effects. Then you've got the actors with their own personalities attached to the project. Then there's the promo material that sells the film as a product.
As you move farther and farther from the original work, the more messaging drifts. At the end of the day, the goal is to draw people in to see the movie. But this isn't a singular vision. It's a composite of interpretations and expressions.
What makes it popular is the broad appeal. But plenty of movies are engineered to have broad appeal and end up appealing to nobody.