Why Are Movies Obsessed With Hidden Themes—And What’s Getting Lost in the Process?
I went to the theater to be amused and distracted by a film about a super-fast hedgehog, not to witness these gratuitous scenes that glamorize the importance of teamwork.
Give me laughs. Give me thrills. Even give me a scary villain now and again, why not? But spare me this obsession with making sure we all know your movie is about friendship, or perseverance, or whatever. You can stop crafting your movie around some aspect of human nature you find interesting, because I don’t care about that. At all.
I don’t want to see what made a character do something, or what led up to some event happening. I don’t like when your movie shows me various points of view that paint a fuller picture of the story. I just want to enjoy a movie for what it is, and that’s a random array of completely unrelated moving images that evoke absolutely nothing inside me.
Stop trying to make me fathom stuff.
Look. I get it. Hollywood is a big business, and directors have to follow the latest trends to be relevant. That doesn’t mean I want to fork over my hard-earned cash to sit through yet another well-paced plot that supports the main theme of love or bravery or how revenge is a fool’s errand that ultimately corrodes the human soul.
It’s getting so I can’t take my kid to the movies without having to cover her eyes so she isn’t exposed to the eternal struggle between good and evil or the universal need for human connection. I just wish they would leave those parts out. So many movies would be great if they didn’t include all that unnecessary garbage.
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