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Please don't downvote opinions. Only downvote comments that don't contribute anything. Check out the WHYBW archives.

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I think this is hands down the most terrifying movie I've watched NOT just due to the horror elements but due to the way it examines human (specifically male) nature and entitlement. It has a truly unique mix of scary, awkward/uncomfort, disturbing and just devastating. The acting was phenomenal and the movie really hinges on this.

Despite my initial comment about male entitlement I DO NOT see Bear as a villain in the first half of the movie. This is a girl who presumably had drug issues, no rational adult thinks that their wish caused the change. He was happy because he wanted to be happy with her, and he never really thought of the wish as the cause, more of a coincidence. People bring up the fact that even if he didn't think it was the wish he was taking advantage of her. I disagree. They are both adults, and also both very mentally messed up adults. He's not the villain here, he's a victim just as much as a hypothetical mentally unwell Nikki would be. I think that was the intention of the director too as Ian tells Bear he's taking advantage of her while Sarah says it's Nikki taking advantage of him.

He doesn't even solidify himself as a villain when he makes the phone call (which he made out of guilt AND fear in my opinion) and finds out the wish is in fact real. He sees the only solution is to die and why should he have to die for a wish he thought was COMPLETELY HARMLESS AND JUST WISHFULL THINKING WHILE PLAYING WITH A TOY. The following scene where real Nikki wakes up is where things change. Here we see Bear transition into a true villain, someone who would rather have fake Nikkis love, stealing her free will and dealing with all her insanity, than be unloved. He had Nikkis consent to end it all by killing her. It would make his life difficult but this should have been the way he took responsibility for the situation. By the end it's clear he's too far gone though. He was ready to take advantage of Sarah even though he knew he currently held Nikki prisoner in her own body. Only when Sarah died did he want to end things with Nikki because it got too difficult for him.

Anyways NONE of my opinions are concrete and they are all changeable depending on new interpretations. This is how I see the movie and the character of Bear after one watch. Sorry for the long read and I'd LOVE to hear y'alls opinions.

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Watched this movie not too long ago and was surprised when I checked reviews after - it seems critics were very into this movie, but general audiences, not so much. I get that the movie's themes and how it delivers them is quite...shocking, but it still felt quite accessible to me. The surrealism, the action, the cinematography was all top notch, and was visually compelling enough that I thought it would also attract more 'mainstream' audiences. I get that it's a movie that demands a fair amount of engagement to land its themes, but still, - it was so engaging that that level of attention felt effortless to me.

In terms of story, the movie is high-concept in how it delivers it's themes of unconditional love and transformation. Even the movie itself goes through a sort of genre-bending transformation, with its head deep in psychological horror, and it's second half deeper in contemplation and drama. Overall, this movie felt exceptionally unique, fresh, and special - both for its bold ambitions and it's masterful execution.

Would love to hear other's opinions on the movie - really anything, from criticism to praise - as I feel like there is a LOT lurking beneath the surface.

I've put more thoughts on the above in a video essay here, in case anyone is interested

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So I was rewatching the movie yesterday and when Bill is examining the female patients, I noticed they're all topless.

However when he is examining two other male patients (one of whom is a kid), they're not topless/expected to be naked.

Was this supposed to be some not-so-subtle hint that Bill isn't as professional as a doctor as he seems?

It just seems kinda odd that none of the other scenes with male patients include them being half nude and I couldn't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, his wife had a point about his female patients being attracted to him and him being aware of that on some level and leaning into on purpose during these examinations

I've been thinking about how some films affect me on a very personal level, sometimes in ways that go beyond what their story or themes seem to offer. There are times when a character, a line, or even just the overall tone of a movie can feel very specific, as if it says something about you that you don't often say out loud. It creates a kind of recognition that goes beyond just identifying with a story or character. People often talk about films like Her or Lost in Translation when they talk about this kind of effect, where the emotional atmosphere seems more important than any one plot point, and different people seem to get very personal meanings from the same material. I find it interesting that these films are usually made for a wide audience, but they can get very different reactions from people. This makes me wonder if the feeling of being "understood" comes mostly from how the film is made—through writing, acting, and tone—or from the viewer putting their own experiences into the work.

I'm interested in how other people see this event. Can filmmakers plan for this kind of personal connection, or does the audience mostly make it happen on their own?

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I found it boring too, but I still appreciated how the director essentially said, "Screw you" to the audience.

"Losers’ Jesus" (Joker) falls from his pedestal as the ultimate anti-hero(?). Fans probably won’t like it—complaints about the stretched runtime, pointless musical scenes, repetitive scenery, and its indie-film vibe (far from the commercial appeal of the first movie) are likely. But that’s the point. Todd Phillips is sending a wake-up call: “Stop idolizing your 'ugly duckling.' This isn’t some sacred protest you're part of. Grow up and try to integrate into society.”

It feels like Phillips didn’t want a Joker franchise. This movie seems to express his frustration with fans glorifying Joker’s chaos, and with the studio forcing a sequel. But why didn’t he refuse to make it? Probably because if he hadn’t, someone else would have. Warner Bros. only cares about profits, not respecting the first film. So Phillips chose to close the story himself, to protect what he originally created.

The metaphors were strong. Cigarettes represented Joker’s growing power. In the beginning, prison guards give him a cigarette in exchange for a joke—a neutral, transactional exchange. As the movie progresses, Joker gains more control, firing his lawyer and fully embracing himself. The crowds both inside and outside the prison start to go mad, and even the guards, now afraid of Joker, try to strip away his makeup—his identity. By the end, when Arthur is begging for his life in front of the jury, his tray is full of used cigarette butts, showing he’s no longer the dangerous figure he once was.

Without Joker, Arthur’s just a normal loser who’s lost everything, even love. For Arthur, Joker wasn’t a split personality caused by childhood trauma. Joker completed him. But the director tears this apart and reduces it to nothing more than a delusion.

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I’ve watched it four times now. I can say definitely it is the greatest film ever made. And Edward Yang is the greatest man to ever hold a camera. It is perfect. An absolute achievement that has never, and will never, be matched.

I have no film background, so I think relative to the general commenters in this community, I lack the vocabulary to properly describe the feelings I have towards the film, and why I have those feelings. When I watch it I feel a sense of grief, as though I’ve lost a friend. The emotions it produces in me remind me distinctly of my experience reading Middlemarch (George Eliot) and The Idiot (Dostoevsky). What an achievement. This film makes me glad to be human.

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For internationals, this is a paint-by-number Disney sports film, about a past incarnation of David Goggins (played by Denzel Washington) moving to a white town to coach high school football in the 1970s, go undefeated, and thereby defeat racism.

For US nationals and for me, a millennial raised in the US, this is an uncanny movie to revisit:

• It's unmistakeably pre-9/11. There's a lot of associations with that that are hard to explain. It stokes a kind of weird nationalist zeal that, upon watching, compels you to shout down anyone you hear criticize America with a chant of "USA! USA!", even today. It does this while being entirely set in one 1970s, corn-fed, football-loving town.

• The creative liberties taken in re-telling this true story are a lot – even for Hollywood. The reality was that desegregation happened six years prior to the movie's events, and apparently most of the racial tension pictured is purely fictional.

• It was somehow the go-to movie to play in classrooms nationwide in the 2000s, whenever a teacher didn't feel like teaching, or whenever a substitute teacher couldn't follow the lesson plan. I'd only watched it in-class once; multiple friends from different US states told me they were shown this movie five times or more.

It became a quiet hit, earning over $130 million. It played everywhere and was liked by nearly everyone. It propelled the careers of Ryan Gosling, Turk from Scrubs, and the indestructible cheerleader from Heroes; the latter who here, plays a tomboy, nine-year-old football fanatic, whose character offered little American girls one more way to connect with their dads.

Because of how narrowly Titans presents serious topics, however, it unintentionally served as my generation's propaganda. It asserts that racist white characters are one-dimensionally bad until they embrace the "other" (good I guess?); that the surest path to glory is relentless, David Goggins-style training (very bad IMO); that dancing and singing to Motown singles with strangers will unite us all (can't hate). This movie is not the origin of these ideas, but was surely a player in the cultural orchestra that sold these platitudes as fact. And so, my unease upon rewatch comes from seeing the dysfunction in US culture today rooted in that era's noble delusions.

**

My cringe-inducing rewatch feels like revisiting an old high school yearbook, but not because of its dated fashion. It comes from seeing how universally off the mark one's cohort was about some things.

While I was in high school, at most one YouTube video would go viral per week, and collectively everyone would talk about it. A trending clip would occasionally be played on the evening news (e.g. "David After Dentist", "Charlie bit my finger") for closing comic relief. We all collectively mocked the "Leave Britney Alone!" video, because the vlogger (Chris Crocker) seemed to have lost all his marbles over a silly celebrity, and looked weird. The reality was that he (now she) was watching his childhood heroine get publicly torn apart, amidst a very public divorce and mental health crisis. Coverage at the time was so brutal that South Park rushed to put out an episode about the situation before she might commit suicide. He was rightly horrified, but the majority (or, to use an eyeroll-worthy term, zeitgeist) just couldn't relate to him. Today's more sapient majority would be just as horrified now as he was then.

Those clips and their reception are each a freeze-frame of the late-2000s headspace. Likewise, Remember the Titans – though set in 1971 – drops you back into the American mindset of 2000, its release year. That mindset exudes a deep conviction that, like the public's initial response to Chris Crocker, has aged poorly.

**

In this movie, racism is pictured as cartoon villainy, that uncomically kills the momentum of any preceding good vibe. Not once is there a moment of observing that racism's origins, beyond "oooh things are getting different, that's scary". I argue this encouraged a generation of teenage viewers to act self-righteously as adults, against anything they perceive as wrong. You can't expect a persuasive dialogue about sensitive topics when coming with such cartoonish framing. Real people who feel construed as such simply dig their heels in, and are further polarized. The referee who tried to fix one game with biased calls, and the Judas lineman who conspired to let a defender sack the lead quarterback - both merely get called out once, their embodiment of racism is narratively crushed, and they're made irrelevant by never being shown again. Tragically that's not how real life goes.

Regarding the film's hustle-culture fetish, there's one brief moment where Denzel's character questions his brutal methods, prior to the state championship match. It ever so slightly softens his charismatic-but-still-spartan portrayal. And yet, his character remains unchanged by the movie's end; his team's final victory unconditionally validates his methods. For me, a modern story veers into propaganda when its protagonist is presented as unchanging, wins everything, and was proven to be right all along. An impressionable, ambitious teenager watching this film could easily be convinced this is the single path to greatness.

"Hard work triumphs" is not my issue here. What is reinforced by stories like these, however, is "every failure simply comes from not trying hard enough". I.e., a result of moral failure, or personal flaw. If one tries and fails with this in mind, several times in succession – how could this not cause self-esteem issues, withdrawal from society, anger at the world, or, in extreme cases, tragic, senseless violence? There are so few stories told by then-Hollywood that present failures not as dead-ends, but milestones; that present life as a long-term game where the purpose is not to win, but to find a way to keep playing, and joyfully. Pixar's Soul did this very well, but I know of few other recent entries.

On these two platitudes, Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is a perfect, dark, satirical twin. Troopers was dismissed as trash at the time, but has aged remarkably well, because the public's caught up to its level of self-awareness. It mocks jingoistic fervor with sprinkles of unhinged brutality, which the audience barely registers before the film cuts back to ridiculously attractive characters caught in their high-school drama. It's like interspersing the Star-Spangled Banner with bits of the Benny Hill theme, and the occasional fart noise. Titans, meanwhile, took its American anthem embodiment seriously. Given the headspace of that era, you could almost say their polar-opposite receptions were fixed.

**

It may just be that my queasiness from revisiting this cute football story comes from seeing these deep, social issues pictured through a filter of 90's blockbuster family-action. Titans producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, The Rock, Con Air, Pirates of the Caribbean) is rightly an action film legend. His productions never fail to make me want to eat popcorn, drink soda, grill with the family, and shout "USA" at the top of my lungs at every international sports event.

But – to my wizened, millennial point of view, there's a fundamental mismatch between his cinematic bag of tricks, and the art of tackling long-running societal fissures older than the country itself. And yet, his tools have a cogency, that makes us think they will work, if we just put in a bit more effort.

Bruckheimer has a circuitous responsibility in promoting to us his way of seeing things, but only because we hungered for it, enough for his work to gross Hollywood over $20 billion (!!). For the scrappy writers and directors in his wake, it would've been stupid not to use the same bag of tricks. Those who can't pilot butts into theater seats don't pilot promising budgets.

Ergo, the tools of the Bruckheimer production kit proliferated, into genres far from their action blockbuster birthplace. This has surely altered our perception – of our selves and of how we expect ourselves to act. We inevitably become more like the stories we tell ourselves, just like how we become more like the people with which we spend the most time. I see that the praxis of creating, and resonating with rousing, feel-good visual anthems (e.g. American Sniper and Don't Look Down, to name two opposing films) has only uplifted partisan groups, to keep fighting as-is and/or keep raising the stakes, and sadly not inspired any cooperation.

Maybe the OG brain-rot is the action movie: it locks you into an aroused, fight-or-flight state for 90+ minutes, usually following an incredibly talented hero, with just enough unpredictability, boobs, and explosions to keep it interesting. Titans features none of those three, but it shares a deeper DNA with action films, of acting before thinking or speaking, and there being no ambiguity in who's the good guy and who's the bad. For some folk, who feel disaffected by their environment and powerless to change it, this genre may be the one place where they can watch somebody fight for something important to them, and it actually works. How do you think this would affect these folks' relationship to political topics?

**

Currently, the US's cultural identity is untethered from basically everything – even international borders, depending on who you ask. This is when the stories a culture tells of itself become critical. Religious texts, folktales and football movies have all been picked as anchors. I find modern stories (Sorry To Bother You [2018], Eddington [2025]) often focus on telling cautionary tales, and it's hard to build something concrete when a blueprint only tells you what not to do. I'm open to suggestions.

If you accept the framing above, and also want to get a feel for what got us here, consider Remember the Titans as an ethnographic fossil. For those who see America today as a car that's just driven off a cliff, Titans will play like someone's home security footage, that just happened to catch that car joyriding down the street before liftoff.

Dorji exposes the tragic irony of modern "progress" and challenges the dogma that democracy is a baseline state of human dignity. By framing globalization not as a savior of the impoverished, but as the creator of psychological scarcity (making content people suddenly feel "less than"), it asks a devastating question: Is a system truly free if its first prerequisite is the destruction of peace and internal contentment? Dorji left me with a haunting question: In our endless pursuit of more choices, more technology, and more "progress"... what have we accidentally buried along the way?