Most of the “childhood trauma” people are citing are things that weren’t aimed at children to begin with. Try some Watership Down (1978) at 2pm on BBC1 during the Christmas holidays.
The hardest part is realizing other kids weren’t wanting this tbh, great movie.
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.
That’s real childhood trauma.
The aliens that were allergic to water invaded a planet that’s 71% covered in water. Such a stupid movie, such a bad director.
That movie was fucking dumb. Nothing of value was gained by watching it.
They’re not aliens. They’re demons.
You never actually see a spaceship. They don’t ever show any technology or even clothing.
And they’re defeated with an act of faith.
That’s some stupid plaster made from pulp of that shit script and frothy fan spittle.
It’s easily his best film. Everyone shits on it because it was another “twist” while completely ignoring the excellent dialog, acting, character building, and theme. At its heart, it isn’t a story about an invasion. It’s the story of a grieving family leaning on each other for support after a tragic loss.
Gibson’s character had been outwardly the strong, moral man of faith at the center of his family and the community. His wife’s death pulled him into deep despair that had left him a broken man. He no longer had hope for the future and had stopped providing hope and comfort to his family and community.
Throughout the film, you see not only his grief over the loss of his wife, but everyone else’s grief over losing him as a fixture of compassion, comfort, and grace. The story is about his faith and hope being restored. The events that lead to that involve hostile invaders, but they’re just a mechanism to tell the story of grief and healing.
There’s a scene with Phoenix and Gibson whispering quietly for like 10 minutes about belief and fate with no action - just great acting and dialog. There’s a scene where he breaks down crying over his family and how cruel he’s become due to his fear and hopelessness while simultaneously eating a meal.
And in the end, many of the aspects of his normal life that contributed to his grief, annoyance, and fear were key to his family’s survival. He accepted what life had thrown at him, and was able to heal.
It’s easily his best film
That’s a rather low bar, NGL. 😅
Source? Or speculation? I’m genuinely curious.
It’s a very common theory but not explicit. It all makes perfect sense though
I’d take that over my generation’s childhood trauma any day:
official canon
And Henry Blake paddled a liferaft onto the Tracy Ullman show.
Here’s some more trauma:
The novel it’s based on makes it clear that The Neverending Story is a psychic parasite that traps young readers in an escapist fantasy, never growing up, never facing your real fears, just endless running down an egocentric treadmill of main character syndrome.
I read the book (as a kid) and didn’t get that from it at all, but that sort of subtlety would have gone over my head. I’ll have to read it again if I can bring myself to do it.
I do remember seeing the movie after reading the book and being pretty annoyed as the movie only covers about the first half.
Well, do you recall how fulfilling the wishes demands a sacrifice of Bastian’s memories and self?
One might alternatively phrase that as wish fulfillment, if one was tricky writer sort.
One might also note that the Story demands Bastian pass it on to another child if he wants his own memories back. Once he realizes he is not willing to give up his last memories of his father.
Passing to a new host once it has drained Bastian of what it wants and his defenses prevent it from gaining more, as it were.
A successful parasite is not one that kills its host, after all, it’s one that spreads and grows.
And then it evolves and spreads to a new, American movie going population where that message isn’t profitable so it just becomes a standard chosen one story.
Honestly no I don’t recall any of that, but to be fair I read the book around 30 years ago. Yes I’m old. Your points have intrigued me though and I’m going to have to find my old copy and read it again.
Yeah this was way more traumatizing than anything Signs had.
And Signs had Mel Gibson, so that’s really saying something.
Hey, I caught both of these! Yay?
100% what I expected on the sign
You’re gonna have to fill me in here. I don’t know this reference.
The horse the audience has grown attached to becomes depressed, and allows himself to sink slowly beneath the mud. The boy understands what is happening and that the depression is going to kill his friend. He pleads and panics as the horse very graphically sinks out of sight with an incredibly disturbing practical effect that must have been real life animal cruelty. Then the boy is left alone in the swap. It’s a fucking brutal scene that symbolizes suicide.
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No offence, but accusations like that add exactly nothing to the conversation if they’re correct, and are a fucking shitty thing to do to a person if they’re not. Unless you’ve got really solid receipts, and there’s some important outcome that it would actually affect if true, just don’t fucking do it.
To be fair, I assumed they cpy and pasted from an AI
But is that actually fair?
Oh, so this is your awkward way of asking? Then, no, it was not written by an LLM. This is what that would have looked like:
This thread got stupid fast.
I accept that your intent was not to offend (despite that, no offense, this reads like someone trying to get popped in the nose), but what your intent actually was escapes me.
yeah that’s cause we’re all autistic
THANK YOU
The Neverending Story. That’s the scene where Artax the horse gives up and let’s the bog of depression drown him
The Never Ending Story (1984)
Seems like the horses story ended
What a young movie!
Never ending story the horse is with the kid through thick and thin then gets stuck in a swamp and kid has to leave him behind.
Small clarification, he gets stuck in the swamp of despair basically. He only gets stuck and dies because he loses hope. Atreyu tries to cheer him up and give him hope, and it’s that scene that’s depressing AF. It’s like something out of old yeller.
A scene from The Never Ending Story. They travel through the Swamp of Sadness.
Atreyuu
I know this one but not the one from the post. Is it slender man is something?
I think the OP is from the movie Signs?
Good news bad news, I loved that movie as a kid and have zero recollection of that scene. I’m guessing I didn’t get the implication. “Oh he lost his horse”.
indistinct yelling of mothers name
How did a guy like that ever end up married to a lady named Moon Child?
This movie got a lot of grief, but I liked it. It was simultaneously a let down and scary to see the alien. As far as aliens go, it’s a pretty boring generic biped. But the suspense and buildup to seeing it, and the way they presented the scene as the viewer seeing it recorded alongside terrified people was great. Nailed it.
Maybe the worst aspect of the movie was the beyond-the-grave prompts regarding water and baseball bats. Meh. But the rest was pretty good.
Yes, the entire movie got retroactively bad because of that really atrocious ending.
If you watch half of it and then stop, it’s probably a good movie. But that first half is bad if you know the ending.
I tend to be the kind of person that needs a movie to stick the landing, but for some reason I still enjoy this movie even though the ending really is stupid (and makes the whole movie stupid).
I think the movie did a great job of making this alien invasion feel real. Not like shaky cam style real. But the way catastrophes happen in real life. Where it starts as nothing, then is something that can and often is ignored, until eventually you can’t ignore it.
If you see it as a movie about demons and not aliens it makes way more sense
The aliens are actually demons. Make more sense now?
Hydrophobic demons.
Invading very wet plane of existence.
If they were aliens however, they only had tech to suspend their spacecraft in the air, judging from how unsuspended my disbelief was.
Demons are often defeated with water. Some can’t cross running water. It’s an ancient trope.
“I’m not ready”
SFW version of trauma (“There’s Something About Mary”, zipper scene)
What scene is that?
It’s from Signs. It’s the first time you see the aliens, from a shakycam newscast. Scared the hell out of little me.
I heard Gen Z was soft but wow. We were watching dismemberment, head explosions, main characters die in torment; I saw Peter Weller turned into Swiss cheese and marinara, I saw Toxie fuck his girlfriend in an alley with his ear melting off, I saw mother Vorhees pulp campers, all before I was thirteen.
I saw alien when I was six weeks old coward
Gen Z wasnt alive when this movie came out
I too saw terrible things online, doesn’t change the fact this scared kids. Congrats on your trauma tho
Tbf films can be viewed anytime after their release
Many of us had actual trauma from being raised by boomers. We watched shit like this just to feel normal.
Well thats mine now
I’m Gen X but psychological horror always scared me more than gore. This scene got me good back in the day, and 99% of the whole movie was just building atmosphere. Anyone can show you a scene of someone’s skin getting peeled off to make you uncomfortable, but it takes an artist to genuinely scare you with a cheesy shaky-cam alien.
Could’ve easily been a screenshot of the last air bender
There is no movie in Ba Sing Se.
One of the goats in my opinion
It’s no Mr Pipes.
Thank god I got traumatized. If I would’ve seen the movie as an adult, I would have hated it.
It was so weird. People liked i that movie enough to go and start making crop circles in the cornfields outside town.
Yeah, it’s not a good movie. I did enjoy the mystery of it though, it does build up nicely until the big reveal of what they look like.
This describes most of his movies. Good build up to the mystery with a payoff so bad it retroactively makes everything before it worse.
Wait, I never thought about that and this is probably the best and most accurate description of how his movies are.
I recently saw Glass for the very first time. Rewatched Unbreakable and Split just to refresh the memory. And I was happy with Glass until I was halfway through. Afterwards, everything was just set on fire and I was left with nothing.
Yeah, the Shamalayan “twist” is that halfway through every flick, the creative flow becomes an untethered spray. Picture, if you will, a olde-timey grinder producing a length of sausage when suddenly, the casing comes loose… so the crank doubles its speed. How M. Night’s movies get made. 😶 (If you look closely, stamped into the steel there is the ShamaWurst logo.)
Was I the only one pissed off that the Brazilian kids suddenly speak English in that scene? “It’s behind!”
Move, children. Vamanos.
Might want to throw a trigger warning on this post mate. 😋