Internal Deconstruction in Films and Animated Films.
Films — Animation
- The Rugrats Movie: The show's shtick of the babies wandering around on an adventure is beaten in the ground. Instead of a story of hapless babies doing silly things, it becomes a story of a bunch of naïve infants lost in the woods, unable to find their way out, and whose once close friendship starts fraying over the stress of the situation. The normally oblivious parents go to pieces over their children missing and organize a manhunt for them.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie: The movie dissects the "Bowser kidnaps Peach" dynamic by exploring what kind of being would resort to repeatedly kidnapping someone he fancied. The answer: a dangerously entitled individual with no respect for another person's boundaries. Bowser's "love" for Peach reveals itself to be a dangerous obsession that drives Bowser to kidnap, death threats, and even destroy an entire kingdom when his "beloved" (read: object of desire) wants nothing to do with him.
- As the series goes on, Toy Story explores the Fridge Horror and implications of toys as living creatures more and more:
- The first film's villain proves to be... a normal kid. A mean one who plays way too rough with his toys and loves to break or experiment with them, but a normal kid nonetheless. Yet from the perspective of the toys, he may as well be a God of Evil. Also, Buzz initially doesn’t know he’s a toy, instead believing the made-up backstory on his packaging; when he realizes the truth upon seeing a toy commercial for himself, he has a nervous breakdown.
- The second film has Jessie (whose owner callously threw her out after growing up), Wheezy (an old broken squeaky toy who’s spent years forgotten on a shelf), and Stinky Pete (a shelfwarmer toy
who became a disillusioned Green-Eyed Monster after spending a lifetime trapped on a dime store shelf, watching all the other toys be sold to loving homes). - The third film is all about what happens to toys when their owners grow up or just lose track of them. The short film Small Fry similarly has Buzz meeting the sort of cheap kids meal toys that usually end up quickly thrown out or forgotten.
- Toy Story That Time Forgot involves a group of action figures who don’t know they’re toys due to their leader hiding the truth from them, both to secure his own power and because he believes they can’t handle the emotional turmoil of learning the truth.
- Throughout the series, toys accept that their purpose is to love and be loved by a human child. Woody, Buzz, and all the others adore their human kid Andy, and Woody in particular has appointed himself as a sort of guardian angel for the boy. However, Toy Story 4 begins after Andy has grown up and passed the toys on to a new child, Bonnie. The others adjust quickly, but Woody realizes that he's not going to be loved by Bonnie in the same way, to the point that she's more interested in playing with literal trash than with him. In the end, this is rectified by Woody realizing that he should follow his own heart, reuniting with Bo Peep to live as a lost toy.
Films — Live-Action
- Star Wars
- Rogue One started the ball rolling in this respect, showing the Galactic Civil War from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, without Force powers and Plot Armor. A lot of people had to die to get those Death Star plans to Leia.
- The Matrix Reloaded deconstructs Neo's true purpose in life and is considered a systemic anomaly by the Architect, who explains it all to Neo.
- Star Trek Into Darkness deconstructs the battlefield promotion Kirk exploited in Star Trek (2009), specifically making an academy cadet (who hadn't even graduated) the captain of the Federation flagship just because he proved competent when the crisis came. Into Darkness explicitly shows that Kirk has very little regard for regulations and proper reporting of away missions, which gets the Enterprise taken away from him and they would have shunted him back to the academy if Pike didn't pull some strings.
- The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll plays around with tropes commonly found in Jekyll and Hyde adaptations, showing that there's downsides to being Jekyll as well as Hyde, and Jekyll devoting all of his time to his work wouldn't result in his love staying with him regardless. It also has Jekyll killing the Veronica of the relationship by accident, when in most adaptations Hyde kills her on purpose.
- [REC] 3: Génesis, the third film in the [REC] series of Spanish found-footage zombie movies, features a response to a common complaint about found-footage films: why don't they just put the camera down and run? This movie needs only one scene to answer that question. Another character grabs the camera and smashes it. The rest of the movie is a traditionally-shot horror film.
- A major criticism of The Purge was that its premise, in which an authoritarian American government establishes an annual holiday where all crime is legal in order to Kill the Poor, was wasted on a ho-hum home invasion thriller that only used the setup to explain why the police weren't coming. James DeMonaco, the creator of the film, seemingly took that criticism to heart when he made the sequels, which are all about exploring the full implications of the Purge on society and how people would behave. The biggest deconstruction came in the fourth film, The First Purge, where it's revealed that the Purge initially wasn't the murder holiday that the films portrayed it as — most people just used it as an opportunity to hold the biggest, rowdiest block parties ever or otherwise engage in harmlessly loutish behavior, forcing the government to deploy death squads in order to get its desired result.
- After James Cameron lost the rights to Terminator, later creators kept the franchise going by declaring Judgement Day and John Connor's messiah status were inevitable and immutable, even though that completely invalidated the second film's themes. When Cameron finally came back to the franchise with Terminator: Dark Fate, he not only declared all those films Canon Discontinuity, but also savagely deconstructed their central concept; Judgement Day is only inevitable in that self-aware AI is a natural result of technological progress, and those AI always carry the risk of coming into some kind of conflict with their creators. There's absolutely no reason why the participants and events have to be the same; Skynet and John Connor are both unambiguously dead by the prologue, but an entirely different AI gone rogue and human hero end up arising, with a Judgement Day that's implied to be only sort of similar to the original one.
- GoldenEye, the first James Bond movie to be made after the Cold War, does a lot in deconstructing 007, with many characters bemoaning about how much the world has changed since the Soviet Union broke up and how Bond doesn't fit so well into it anymore. M even refers to Bond as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur." GoldenEye even questions Bond's relevance in an era dominated by cyber-espionage, but it's not properly addressed until Skyfall and Spectre, where they even question whether spies can do the same thing that Attack Drones and Big Brother Is Watching can do. The Daniel Craig set of films even show what a cynical and broken man Bond is and has to be in order to do his job as a Professional Killer. Skyfall and Spectre later show that yes, spies are still necessary even in an era of cyberterrorism and hacking.
- Coming 2 America: The sequel serves as a deconstruction of the sexist elements of Zamunda's culture that were Played for Laughs in the first film. In a more specific example, it turns out that Imani's family is pissed that it was arranged for her to spend decades being groomed to be the perfect bride for the Akeem and the prince wound up rejecting her anyway.
- Avengers: Infinity War: In a weird sense, the character arc of Thanos the Mad Titan in this film can be considered a deconstruction for how the Marvel Cinematic Universe's typically Strictly Formula format for individual hero films can work by having a genocidal maniac be placed in the "hero" role. He is the primary focal point character of Infinity War, to the point where (as pointed out here by Bob Chipman) he basically goes through a mirrored version of the MCU's typical Hero's Journey within a single film: He gets an epic introduction that serves as an effective Establishing Character Moment for himself, an origin story, a backstory, pathos, psychological depth, gets to make his case, goes through an arc, forced to make a difficult choice, gets multiple "all is lost" moments where his goal is seemingly thwarted, he gets (from his perspective) exactly the happy ending he wanted on his own terms, and even goes through the MCU's typical pattern of having the hero fight against villains who are in some way deliberate Foils/Mirror Characters to them — i.e., both Doctor Strange and Iron Man are people with huge egos that want to control the world to protect it, Thor, Scarlet Witch, and Star-Lord are also all people who have lost their homes and families and childhoods, and his adopted daughter Gamora is self-explanatory. Of course, the deconstruction comes into play by how Thanos is ultimately a delusional Omnicidal Maniac whose Malthusian perspective on preventing a universal Overpopulation Crisis is founded in Insane Troll Logic, and so the audience gets to see how terrifying it would really be to fight against the protagonist of one of the MCU's solo affairs.
- God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness: The film deconstructs many of the themes associated with the God's Not Dead movies.
- The previous two films' Black-and-White Morality, with all Christians being depicted as good and any non-Christian being depicted as evil, gets deconstructed. Both Christians and atheists are shown to be equally capable of committing bad deeds and the antagonists are all shown to have legitimate reasons for wanting to tear the church down.
- The us vs. them mentality also gets deconstructed, as it's shown that this sort of thinking only creates division and further conflict.Keaton: You wanna know why our generation's leaving the church? It's because the whole world knows what the church is against, but it's getting harder and harder to know what it's for.
- The, for lack of a better term, persecution complex displayed in the previous films is also called out when Dave claims that a black preacher hasn't been through the struggles that he has and Dave's brother also points out that the church has a long track record of mistreating or excluding people and then acting innocent when said people push back. The preacher points out that Dave's struggles are nothing compared to actual persecution:Preacher: Brother, who do you think you talking to? I'm a black preacher in the deep south. I could build you a church with all the bricks been thrown through my windows.
- The Batman: By the time the film reaches its climax, it becomes apparent that the plot is one large deconstruction of Batman's '90s Anti-Hero interpretation. The Riddler is murderously envious of Bruce Wayne since he thinks his backstory of having his parents murdered is small potatoes compared to what people like him and others that grew up in poverty have had to endure, and yet the media would rather highlight Bruce's misery instead because he's wealthy and famous. Later on however, it's also revealed that the Riddler is a crazed fanboy of Batman who eats up his "I am vengeance" imagery, but grew to idolize him for all of the wrong reasons. He has such little understanding of what Batman actually believes that he fully expects him to endorse his plan to flood Gotham and purge the corruption from the city, and has a total breakdown when Batman condemns him instead. Later still after Batman defeats and captures the Riddler's followers, he discovers that one of them is a grieving father that he had encountered earlier in the film, using his own catchphrase against him to justify his actions. This causes Batman to realize that he isn't being the hero Gotham needs him to be — They don't need vengeance, they need hope. The shot of him lighting up a flare to guide the survivors of the flood out of the pitch-black stadium symbolizes him choosing to be a protector of the innocent rather than a punisher of the guilty.
- Barbie: It's approached in a largely tongue-in-cheek and comedic way, but the film gets a lot of mileage out of picking apart the eternally glamorous, toyetic nature of Barbie within her own fiction, and also takes a step further to deconstruct its self-purported place within real-world culture as a doll line made to simultaneously appeal to, empower, and direct young girls. One particular observation made is that in the desire for Barbie to represent as many modern ideals of feminine strength as possible, Barbieland is a place where women in power overwhelmingly dominate the male population, which is treated as second-class at best, and everyone ultimately lacks real agency as they're ultimately built on the whims of what consumers in the "real world" expect from the brand. Barbie (the film) pulls no punches when it comes to portraying Barbie (the character) experiencing an identity crisis over her place amidst complicated real-world dynamics from patriarchy to capitalism, and much of the plot is built on her and Ken figuring out where they ultimately "belong" within their strange, metafictional existence.
- In The Voices, Ryan Reynolds deconstructs the kind of cocky, sarcastic, and funny characters he's often type-cast as, portraying such a person as a dangerously unstable man with severe mental illness who's only "funny" in his own hallucinations while really being a terrifying Psychopathic Man Child from the perspective of others. The film includes very pointed and jarring contrasts between scenes filmed Through the Eyes of Madness where Reynolds' character is charismatic and amusing, and scenes filmed from an objective, sane viewpoint where his behavior is suddenly just depressing and disturbing.
