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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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People being very gung-ho about a particular philosophy, then having their mind changed by experience.
It’s really hard to write a story about a person transitioning worldview because unless the audience is undergoing that same transition when they watch the movie, they won’t be able to identify with both the before and the after.
I mean, there are movies about people undergoing radical changes in outlook, but the audience doesn’t feel what the character feels, because the old philosophy is presented as obviously bad to the audience, and the character is presented as being asleep or brainwashed or something.
What I’m referring to is a character that is actually, fully portrayed as the good guy, in a way the audience believes, who later realizes he was doing bad things, and the audience realized it along with them.
An example of the pattern I’m not talking about is Equilibrium. Christian Bale’s character undergoes a radical transformation of his outlook on what is good, but his previous state (enforcer of the anti-emotion policy) is depicted as obviously bad to the audience.
I feel like movies, comic book movies in particular, are structured to condition people to resist changing their worldview, especially views that society wants the audience to have.
Like Batman movies are notorious for this because they're always about pressuring Batman to kill and his refusal to for stupid reasons, even when it is obviously the morally correct thing to do. And producers do it because they don't want the audience to think killing evil people is good -- can't enable the peasants to guillotine their masters, after all.
I genuinely wish we'd get a movie that kind of does what you're asking; that has a character who holds socially correct worldviews and who rejects those views in a way that philosophically makes sense. A movie that sincerely questions those views.
I think the closest we ever got to something like that in modern film is Fight Club.
However the interaction with Raz Al-Gul in Batman Begins did have a little transformation. I haven’t seen it in a really long time but I remember it being a darkening/opening of Wayne’s outlook on life.
And then Batman was completely derailed at the end of TDK leading to the mess that was TDKR.
I don't think the Nolan trilogy was well thought out and he was just winging it toward the end. Begins and TDK were good, granted, but you can still tell.