Movies With Hidden Meanings

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Movies With Hidden Meanings
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Over the years, artists of all kinds have used allegories in their work to make wider points about things. Perhaps the most famous example of this is George Orwell's ‘Animal Farm’, which far from being about how awful pigs are when put in positions of power (although they undoubtedly are), is actually a criticism of communism and Stalinist Russia.

Since the dawn of cinema, film makers have used symbolism in their work to varying degrees of subtlety. The most recent example of this is the excellent 'X-Men: First Class' (out now), which follows the previous films and its comic-book roots and deals with issues of race and discrimination. Kind of obvious when you think about it, eh?

 

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District 9 (2009)

Being a South African film, it's no surprise that Neill Blomkamp's alien invasion film is about apartheid. District 9 was really District 6, an area of Cape Town that became 'Whites Only' during the sixties after tens of thousands of black South Africans were forcibly removed. It's upsetting enough to see how the aliens (or 'prawns') are treated in the film, but knowing it's based on real events and people makes repeat viewings of it a lot harder work.


Avatar (2009)

You don’t have to be a film school graduate to see the theme in James Cameron’s global blockbuster. The comparisons to the American invasion of Iraq seemed obvious. Cameron seemed to be saying that the mineral on Pandora is the equivalent of oil here on Earth, and the marines were marching all over the Na'vi, just as so many said we had swarmed into Iraq. It was a pretty overt theme - the imperialist invaders vs. the native environment.


Godzilla (1954)

Post-war Japan was in turmoil - the H-bombs that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki had understandably depressed the whole nation. And even more understandably put them off nuclear weapons. The gigantic monster of the title is the hideous and devastating product of radioactivity and a symbol of how much havoc it can wreak.


High Noon (1952)

This western (voted No.27 in the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films of All-Time), has Gary Cooper’s character needing to round up a posse to take on a dangerous criminal out for revenge. Everyone he asks wimps out of the task and makes their excuses. At the time, Hollywood figures were being targeted by US senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee of Un-American Activities, as they aggressively searched for ‘commies’. This movie was a direct response to Hollywood’s cowardly response to the attack and the 'black-listing'. The notoriously right-wing John Wayne famously hated the film because of it...


A Serbian Film (2010)

Without a subtext, Aleksander Radivojevic's hugely controversial and extremely graphic film could quite possibly be the most disturbing, repellant and nihilistic film of all time. The torture, rape, murder and child abuse relentlessly debasing the film's characters over and over again, making it a hugely challenging watch. According to the director though, it's is a stark representation of the pillaging of Serbia during the Balkan conflict by the armies of former president Slobodan Milosevic and military leader Ratko Mladic.

Metropolis (1926)

Fritz Lang’s classic, the influence of so many sci-fi movies that followed it, warns of the dangers of urban living: technological reliance, class divide, pollution, pints of beer that cost £4.10.


Starship Troopers (1997)

It’s bad-guy humans brutally slaughtering hapless aliens again... This time the efficient army unit serve as a symbol for fascism and more specifically, Nazism. Perhaps the best thing about the film (apart from the shower scenes of course *ahem*) are the wartime propaganda videos - a popular tool in Hitler’s Germany. Director Paul Verhoeven even draws some comparison with the US miitary and their somewhat over-exuberance. It turned out to be quite prophetic, considering it was made pre-9/11 and the War on Terror.


Alien (1979)

A film about the male fear of pregnancy? Hmmm... We’re not convinced by that one!