Opposite of Movies (spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I’ve been thinking about how much perspective helps determine who is considered the villian and who is the hero in movies. I think one way find out is to take the opposite of a movie, in terms of the perspective and who is supposed to be the villians and heros.

I’ll give an example, but I think some movies can’t be changed this way, if the villian is too difficult to make appealing.

[spoiler]I’ll take the Matrix. Agent Smith and the other Agents would be portrayed in a way similar to law enforcement shows. They are trying desperately to catch these criminals Morpheus and Trinity.

Neo basically is refocussed as a rude anti-authority type and that is portrayed as bad, so your hero Agent Smith finally decides he’s not going to stop until all of them are in jail. Cue upset good cop pose.

Then the whole escape the Matrix sequence has a scary light to it, more evil mastermind style music, and Morpheus is seen as a nutty evil professor sort of dude with his henchmen.

Neo is rescued after Agent Smith brings him in and the villains talk about building Neo back up to gain his loyalty because Neo is destined to be the one. The one is subtly shown to be a sort of dark deity intent on vengeance.

Cipher is portrayed as the one good guy that Agent Smith has managed to sneak into this evil project. Cipher comments that the steak juicy bit is part of why he is working to keep people in the Matrix. And he dies after a valiant attempt to destroy the criminal group.

The whole building assualt uses the same footage with a bit different theme, showing that all this rampant destruction.

The Oracle is seen as a kind of dark prophet, finally our hero Agent Smith and his allies face off against Neo, Agent Smith smartly changes form to the train guy, and then he chases after the bad boy Neo, trying to knock some sense into him by calling him Mr Anderson, to remind him of “reality”, the Matrix. Finally, they get Neo. They think they’ve got him. But this is a sad ending, Neo becomes the dark god of the Matrix, then in a tragic end eviscerates Agent Smith, and the other Agents run off scared.[/spoiler]

Actually, Opposite Matrix is a bit like the Lethal Weapon series.

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Join your emperor! Help to end this destructive conflict and bring order to the Galaxy. (Plus, you get to wear this cool looking white body armor.)

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It can be argued that the entire movie version of Starship Troopers is a deliberate ideological inversion of the original intent of Heinlein. So the opposite of that movie would be one that was true to the novel

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The opposite of Star Wars, Episode 2 would go something like this: We would follow the plight of the seperatists, as they fight to free themselves from the corrupt and hopelessly dysfunctional Galactic Republic. However, the power-hungry Chancellor Palpatine, along with his unwitting dupes the Jedi Knights, grow an army of clones and defeat them.

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PRESDIENT SAURON VOWS TO CONTINUE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM
A small group of royalists have continued to terrorize the inhabitants of Mordor. Rumors persist that they have allied themselves with several foreign governments bent on the the overthrow of President Sauron.
“I feel sorry for them really,” President Sauron said in a statement today. “But the days of the monarcy are long past and it’s time they learned that. I would also like to offer a full pardon to any member of the terrorists who returns the ring that was stolen from me. That ring was given to me by my mother.”

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Lumpy said what I was gonna say about Starship Troopers.

Starship Troopers is designed precisely this way. It doesn’t work at all if you try to watch it with Johnny Rico and the other grunts as the heroes, and the bugs as the villains; it seems clunky and awkward and a violation of Heinlein’s intent. But that’s Verhoeven’s point. Watch it again, and this time, pretend you’re watching a propaganda movie imported from a hypothetically futuristic Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, in which the soldiers are making the universe safe for (not from) fascism or Stalinism or whatever. From this perspective, the ineptness is deliberate: the bad acting by fresh-faced mannequins, the goofy dialogue, the empty theatrics, the ridiculous sermonizing; it’s all of a piece.

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I think furryman is on to something here!

HOBBITON HOUSING TERRORISTS; PRESIDENT SENDS BLACK RIDERS TO ROOT OUT OSAMA BIN FRODO