12 Brilliant Movies That Completely Lied What They Were About
They lied to your face, but you love them anyway...
Whether you realise it or not, some of your favourite movies have been lying to you all this time. From Best Picture winners to indie hits, these bonafide classics seemed to be about one thing but ultimately ended up revealing a completely different agenda.
Whether the fault of a nervous studio's manipulative marketing or the deliberate intent of the filmmaker, each of these films totally defied the expectations of their audience, and the end result was undoubtedly all the better for it...
12. Fight Club
The Lie: A surface reading of Fight Club appears to treat it as a celebration of directionless masculinity and the rejection of consumerism, as evidenced by the number of Fight Clubs that started up in the wake of the movie's release and the number of people who wanted to emulate Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) after watching the film.
The Reality: If you take away the movie's sheer "coolness" and David Fincher's snazzy directorial tricks, Fight Club is at its core a critique of Project Mayhem, and it's spelled out no better than its leader (Edward Norton) suffering from mental illness. More than that, though, it's a mockery of sheep mentality, taking to task both the protagonist's commodity-obsessed life at the beginning of the film, and Tyler's destitute existence, where he leads an army in his stead, throughout.
Downtrodden men and hormonal teenage boys tend to buy into the edgy nihilism when, in fact, the movie is delivering the exact opposite message beneath all that admittedly awesome fighting and destruction. Let's put it this way: if your life choices cause you to end up putting a bullet through your face, it might be worth reconsidering them. When we put it like that, it seems so obvious.