Movies that screw up the morals they're trying to tell

Are there any movies that try to use a message/have some kind of moral but they screw it up really, really badly?

Suburbicon and The Greatest Showman are both almost completely different films but if they do have one thing in common it's that they both try to have an anti-bigotry message and screw it up really, really badly. In both movie's cases, the messages feel forced in, like they are only there because racism is a hot topic in the news right now, not because George Clooney or Hugh Jackman really wanted to tell a story with an anti-bigotry message.

I mean, the subplot with the black family facing racism doesn't really have much to do with the main plot in Suburbicon (other than the family moving in next to the main family) so it just ends up feeling like a pointless subplot. Like, if Clooney wanted to make a movie about a black family moving into a white neighborhood in the 50's, that's great, and if he wanted to make a movie about a family in the 50's getting embroiled in a crime, that's also great, but don't force the two together, they just feel like different movies and it makes it feel like the black family's sub-plot is just there for the movie to feel topical which makes it feel forced in.

As for The Greatest Showman, even if you get past the fact that the protagonist is based off of a guy that exploited people for their deformities yet the movie is trying to have an "it's okay to look different" message, the problem is most of the "freaks" don't have much personality to speak of. The only thing we know about most of them is that people make fun of/literally torment and beat the crap out of them for how they look and that's about it. Even Zendaya, whose only a "freak" because she's black, doesn't have much of a personality and her character is one of the main characters. As a result, the message just isn't that powerful because it's being centered around a bunch of extras and it's hard to really care about extras, no matter how much they repeat the movies "moral". And, no, them being an albino or a siamese twin doesn't automatically make them interesting people.

Really, though, it would be like if Selma was about Lyndon B. Johnson and we ended up knowing nothing about Martin Luther King and the other protestors other than they faced racism. If that was the case, the movie wouldn't be that powerful.

Submitted August 26, 2018 at 02:25AM by mranimal2 https://ift.tt/2P2jBxw