25 films that are secretly deeper than you thought

Science-fiction fans had been clamoring for a direct adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” since “Aliens” nicked its militaristic tone, and most of them were plenty steamed with the contemptuous satire cooked up by the “RoboCop” duo of director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Edward Neumeier. Audiences and critics completely missed the point in 1997, with the latter camp drubbing the film as one-dimensional and heartless. Over time, people recognized the film’s none-too-subtle satire of the book’s creepy promotion of full-blooded fascism.

All of George A. Romero’s zombie movies are trenchant metaphors for whatever happens to be going wrong in society at that particular moment. They’ve skewered consumerism, militarism, corporate greed, emerging media and tribalism. But none of them can match the gasp-inducing power of “Night of the Living Dead,” which ends with its African-American hero getting gunned down by the authorities like a random zombie. Viewed in a vacuum, it’s a cruelly ironic twist. Set against the assassination of civil rights leaders in the 1960s, it’s a kick in the gut.

Unlike many of the films on this list, audiences and critics figured out this one pretty quickly. What looked at first like an utterly innocent animated musical diversion from Disney turned out to be, in part, a liberating LGBTQ metaphor for coming out. Though this theme is never explicitly stated, it’s implied in the buildup to Elsa’s cathartic performance of “Let It Go,” which flips double rockets to the “conceal, don’t feel” crowd. 

Arguably the most misunderstood film of all time, Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” was in for a rough ride from the start thanks to the film having been birthed by Stanley Kubrick and in development for over three decades. After Kubrick’s death in 1999, Spielberg fast-tracked the project as his next movie and delivered a sci-fi epic that turned the filmmaker’s escapist flights of fancy into melancholy longing. The boy-android protagonist just wants the mommy he never had (but was programmed to believe he did). What’s often viewed as Spielbergian sentimentality in “A.I.” is actually soul-crushing despair. It’s Kubrick’s final masterpiece: He got Peter Pan to confront his own mortality.

Most people don’t go to slasher films for thematic depth (though it’s been there since the beginning in “Halloween” and “Slumber Party Massacre") so it's understandable that the majority of the moviegoing world missed out on “Freddy’s Revenge's” homoeroticism in 1985. If this film were released today, people might complain that the protagonist’s implied struggle with his repressed homosexuality is more text than subtext. If this doesn’t sound like the movie you remember, watch it again. It’s shockingly subversive for a formula genre flick.

Filmmaker Douglas Sirk was the master of the 1950s melodramas, which were dismissed as skin-deep “women’s pictures” back in the Eisenhower age. Thankfully, the enfants terrible of the French New Wave were paying closer attention to Sirk’s films; they could see past the filmmaker’s lavish studio style to the subtle-yet-savage critiques of American masculinity and domesticity. “Written on the Wind,” a sudsy drama about a wealthy Texas oil family, may be Sirk’s subversive masterpiece. Underneath the lush surface that’s as much “Giant” as “Dallas” lurks a brutal send-up of wilted manhood. Keep an eye on those erect oil derricks.    

This is an interesting case of a filmmaker either not being aware of his central metaphor or abandoning it altogether because he can’t square the theme with the surprise ending to which his narrative has been building. M. Night Shyamalan’s film opens with Bruce Willis slipping off his wedding band to hit on a female passenger. He blows it, then slips the ring back on. Moments later, he’s the sole survivor of a train wreck. For most of the film, the main conflict centers on Willis’s failing marriage to Robin Wright Penn. It is vitally important that they stay together for their son, but as the film seems to be clearly implying, the marriage (symbolized by the ring) also gives Willis his superhuman invincibility. Alas, Shyamalan never ties off these dangling threads. Perhaps this will be explored in the late-arriving sequel “Glass” in 2018!

The original “Ghostbusters” is a lightning-in-a-bottle classic: a miraculously perfect blend of laughs and scares that finds four misfit scientists saving the world from destruction at the hands of an angry Sumerian god. It’s also, rather by intent or accident, an anti-environmentalist screed that pits three decent, hard-working small business owners (and one incompetent cad who uses their operation to harass a female client into dating him) against the regulatory evil of the EPA. When the agency shuts off the Ghostbusters' HQ’s power (due to their glib refusal to conform to environmental standards), the planet is nearly obliterated. The lesson millions of kids learned from watching “Ghostbusters” on a pay-cable loop in the 1980s: Environmentalists are sanctimonious frauds who live to inflict bureaucratic pain on the working man.

Keep telling yourself that “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is nothing more than a rousing fantasy aimed at every teenager who wished he or she could cut class with impunity. Pay no attention to the fact that Ferris is an upper-middle-class brat (he’d safely rate as “upper class” today) whose primary grievance is that his parents bought his sister a Pontiac Fiero, while he has to make do with a home computer. Don’t give too much thought to principal Ed Rooney’s down-market Plymouth Reliant or his sensible (i.e., inexpensive) wardrobe, or that his goal of punishing Bueller for devaluing education is actually a noble one. Ignore all of it. Because thinking about it just a little bit might make you realize Rooney is the underdog hero and that the film is actually a tragedy.

Like many of Nicholas Ray's most celebrated films (“Rebel Without a Cause” “Bigger Than Life” and “In a Lonely Place”), the high, borderline campy style of “Johnny Guitar” masks its substance almost too well. This Western starring Joan Crawford as a saloon proprietor who runs afoul of her community for supporting the encroachment of the railroad has a lot on its mind — partially because it had a lot going on behind the scenes. Screenwriter Philip Yordan fronted the script for the then blacklisted Ben Maddow and the story of a populace resorting to false charges to drive out undesirable elements is a fiery commentary on the Joe McCarthy-led anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. There wasn’t an analogue for it in 1954, which is probably why it failed. Years later, it’s hailed as a masterpiece of genre subversion.

Before he took dead aim at the fascism of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers,” filmmaker Paul Verhoeven used the comic book trappings of “RoboCop” to tackle the issues of creeping authoritarianism in America and the exploitable evils of capitalism. But Verhoeven really blew minds when he revealed that the film is, first and foremost, a riff on the story of Christ. Murphy’s arms go crucifix-wide when he’s shot to death by Boddicker’s gang. He’s then resurrected and, at the end, is made to look like he’s walking on water (before plunging a steel spike into Boddicker’s jugular).

Four years after the success of James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” Universal Pictures brought the director back for monster-creating mischief. While Whale generally played it straight with the first movie (a loose adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel), he let it rip with the sequel, crafting a creature feature that blithely skips from comedy to horror to, eventually, tragedy. It’s also, on a subtextual level, working through ideas of reproduction and the degree to which society is willing to accept non-traditional creation. Given Whale’s open homosexuality, some have read the film as a gay parable. Thematically, it is not an easy film to nail down, but it is a fascinating film to struggle with.

Conventional wisdom states that the first “Rocky” is a great film that, to its everlasting discredit, spawned a series of increasingly silly sequels (until Ryan Coogler redeemed the franchise with “Creed” in 2015). Few would dispute that the five films in between “Rocky” and “Creed” are not up to the Best Picture-winning original, but those looking for intellectual value to excuse repeat viewings of these gloriously goofy follow-ups should consider this: Each Rocky film accurately reflects the state of Sylvester Stallone’s career at the time it was made. Rocky is the underdog-out-of-nowhere tale, “Rocky II” is about proving the success isn’t a fluke, “Rocky III” deals with the ambition-sapping challenge of superstardom, “Rocky IV” focuses on international stardom, “Rocky V” is about maintaining one’s credibility after immense failure, and “Rocky Balboa” finds Stallone and Balboa attempting to prove they’ve still got it despite being past their prime. Sly definitely thinks about this stuff. Maybe you should, too!

Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre might’ve bombed at the box office, but years later, it’s become one of the horror genre’s most celebrated feats of subversion. The plot concerns a promotion-hungry bank loan officer (Alison Lohman) who repossesses an old gypsy woman’s house and winds up cursed as a result. It’s a simple concept that allows Raimi to relentlessly terrify audiences in a way he hadn’t since the first “Evil Dead.” But if you pay close attention, the horrific events befalling Lohman may be a psychological side effect of an eating disorder. The film is loaded with shots of food and people eating, but we never see Lohman take a meal (we later learn she used to be extremely overweight). This visual metaphor builds all the way up to the final shot, which drives the theme home in a viscerally terrifying manner.

Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” works just fine to this day as a relentlessly terrifying horror movie about a group of hippie kids straying into the spider’s nest of a cannibalistic family. But there’s more to it than that. Much more. Like most Americans, Hooper, a disillusioned hippie himself, was outraged by the ongoing dual atrocities that were the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. The “Age of Aquarius” was over. If you watch the film through that early-1970s lens, you’ll see it’s not just a group of kids getting slaughtered, but the entire peace-and-love generation. 

It was the ultimate no-win proposition: After a 16-year hiatus, George Lucas returned to his “galaxy far, far away” to fill in the tragic backstory that leads to the rebellion’s stirring triumph over the Empire. It was always going to be a bummer narrative, but Lucas got off on the wrong foot with fans by eschewing the narrative simplicity of the original trilogy and replacing it with a surprisingly complicated tale of political machinations and legislative intrigue. Though the individual films are stiffly directed and clumsily scripted, the trilogy’s depiction of creeping authoritarianism now plays as depressingly prescient. George knew. Hopefully, the generation of kids raised on the prequels got the message.

Jordan Peele’s surprise horror hit directly addresses its themes of cultural appropriation and modern-day enslavement, but repeat viewings reveal a meticulous structure full of clever details, like the African-American protagonist literally picking cotton out of an armchair to plug his hears and hasten his escape. Like George A. Romero’s zombie movies, Peele clearly believes his overall message is too important to be hidden under the surface; however, in respecting his audience’s intelligence, he’s left them a great deal to discover if they feel like digging beneath the soil.

The demon spawn of “Eastbound & Down” co-creator Jody Hill, this pitch-black comedy plays like a satirical “Taxi Driver.” Seth Rogen stars as Ronnie Barnhardt, a fascist mall cop who dreams of one day abusing his power as part of the local police force. The film was dismissed as a mean-spirited lark in 2009, but it saw the storm clouds of white-male grievance gathering. Over the course of the movie, Ronnie stalks a female mall employee, accuses an Indian store owner of plotting to blow up the Chik-fil-A and uses lethal force to apprehend a parking lot pervert. Ronnie makes Dirty Harry look like Andy Griffith, and one look around today’s world suggests the Ronnies are on the rise.

This classic comedy collaboration between Harold Ramis and Bill Murray has a killer hook: What if you were doomed to repeat the same day for the rest of your life? It’s an uproariously funny film with a surfeit of heart that, when the credits roll, leaves you pondering nothing less than the meaning of life. Ramis has articulated a combination Buddhist/Existentialist take on the film (in the absence of meaning or purpose, Murray’s initially selfish character embraces a selfless worldview), but it’s wide open to interpretation. Many Christian scholars see it as a flawed (but not evil) man being consigned to purgatory, where he indulges his worst impulses before, in utter despair, learning it is better to do good for others than satiate one’s basest needs. Heavy stuff for a studio rom-com, no?

Some subversive films have meanings that are more elusive than hidden. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s concept of a murderous spirit that relentlessly stalks teenagers after have sex appears at first to be a cautionary tale about promiscuity or STDs, but the filmmaker purposely doesn’t play by the rules established by his characters. The protagonist is told she can rid herself of the spirit if she has sex with another person, but that doesn’t work. The young characters scramble to find a silver bullet that will fell their tormentor, but in the end, they can’t be sure they’ve conquered the entity. No less an authority than Quentin Tarantino criticized Mitchell for not following his own rules, but the lack of certainty is the point of the movie. Sex is a gateway to adulthood, and it’s as adults that we become aware of our mortality. Alas, there is no silver bullet for death.

Searching for definitive meaning in a Coen Brothers movie is a fool’s errand. The boys have been taunting discerning viewers with intentionally misleading symbolism and metaphor since “Blood Simple”; they abhor the idea of the message film and seem to delight in frustrating any attempts to locate a solitary theme in their movies. But that doesn’t mean their movies aren’t occasionally more profound than they’d intended. That’s the case with their Washington, D.C.-set goof “Burn After Reading.” On one hand, it’s yet another low-stakes game of greed played to the bloody hilt by a handful of hilariously unskilled scoundrels. But the characters’ belief that they’re dealing with high-level political operators is a spot-on indictment of Beltway behavior. The creation of unnecessary intrigue climaxes only succeeds in getting an innocent man killed and the government funding of an elective cosmetic procedure. 

The best Pixar movies are remarkably subversive, dealing with themes of terrorism, sexual identity, single parenthood and death. This might sound like heavy subject matter for what are ostensibly kiddie movies, but John Lasseter’s team of genius storytellers is simply following the lead of Walt Disney’s sneakily provocative, nightmare-inducing animated classics. “Monsters, Inc.” isn’t one of the more lighthearted Pixar films, but its pro-alternative energy message (you can run Monstropolis on more than just children’s screams) is the most cleverly integrated metaphor in the company’s history to date.

OK, chances are very good you haven’t even seen Brian De Palma’s erotic thriller, much less been made aware that the majority of the film’s narrative take place in a dream (something far too many critics failed to pick up on). Knowing this ahead of time may take away some of the fun, but there’s so much more to work out in this puzzle about a genre archetype attempting to dodge her dictated-by-storytelling-convention fate. Pay attention, and you’ll have a blast right up to the hugely satisfying conclusion (this applies to almost every pre-2002 De Palma thriller).

If you saw “Spectre” in the theater, you might still be suffering from hearing damage caused by the deafening groans of audience members reacting to Bond’s laughably implausible escape from Blofeld’s torture chair. To be fair, taken at face value, it’s a pretty rotten cheat. But go back and watch it again, this time secure in the knowledge that everything post-brain drill is Bond’s death dream. This is the only logical explanation: Bond dies in “Spectre.”

“My name is Joel Goodson. I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night. Time of your life, huh kid?” The film that made Tom Cruise a star is also the early-'80s most pointed critique of yuppie greed. At the time, critics lamented the “happy ending” of Joel getting accepted to Princeton after he blows his entrance interview due to running a one-night brothel out of his parents’ suburban Chicago house. People felt a downbeat ending where Joel pays for his materialism-driven misbehavior would’ve been bolder. At the time? Perhaps. But letting Joel get away with all of it has proved to be the far more subversive (and prescient) alternative. Princeton, and the insanely corrupt business world, could always use a guy like Joel.