Unbuilt Trope / Live-Action Film

Creators / Multiple Films

• The Rocky series is frequently bashed for creating a genre of sports movies in which an underdog protagonist wins against a far superior opponent based on sheer willpower alone, with little consideration given to real skill and strategies. This ignores the fact that in the original film, Rocky lost the match against Apollo, despite his hard work, and prior to being chosen for the promotional bout, he was a loser who had to break the law to put food on the table. Furthermore, Apollo chose Rocky not because of prowess but because he loved his nickname "The Italian Stallion" and thought it would be an easy match and great publicity to give a complete bum a shot at the title, furthering the American Dream (it was on 1976, America's bicentennial, after all). Rocky initially refused to go back to the ring in the second film because he was exhausted and preferred to settle down with Adrian despite calls for a rematch with Apollo. He only chose to return because of the family's need for money when his new son was born. He actually loses in the third film, which shows the consequences that success has on a Determinator, and the rematch is not decided by willpower alone, but by a strategic approach based on avoiding the opponent and wearing him out gradually. While the fourth film would repeat the underdog and willpower tropes, it deconstructs them in the first half when Apollo (a fighter whose physique was designed for agility and maneuvering, not for ground-and-pound like Rocky's own) fights the antagonist of the film and refuses to throw in the towel, later dying from his injuries. The fifth film deconstructs the trope further, as a doctor's appointment shows that Rocky has serious injuries as a result of the damage cause by boxing and will not be able to box anymore. His obsession with trying to revive his boxing career via proxy through Tommy Gun, who he adopted as a foster son, strains his relationships and backfires. In the sixth Rocky film, he loses a fight once again despite showing even more resilience than in the first film because age is catching up with him. Creed almost averts the film's Determinator reputation when Rocky refuses to go into treatment for cancer since he has nothing left to live for. It is only the begging of his new apprentice, Adonis Creed, that ultimately makes him seek treatment.
• Along with Cecil B. DeMille, D. W. Griffith was one of the first of the big-shot Hollywood film directors. He shaped nearly every aesthetic aspect of the American motion picture as we understand it today. And yet as early as the mid-1910s, Griffith was already experimenting with editing styles which would not catch on with filmmakers in his own country for nearly half a century, and to a great extent are still not common today. His “art-house” masterpiece, Intolerance, showcased a rapid-fire montage style that defied conventional Hollywood editing techniques — techniques that, by and large, Griffith himself had invented.
• Although the giant monster movie genre has come to be synonymous with gleefully watching the invincible monsters tear apart the puny human cities, some of the earlier ones had a far more "realistic" and nuanced view of this. In The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, half of the movie consists of the hero, labeled as a delusional foreigner, trying to convince the American authorities that the rhedosaurus really exists at all. And when it shows up, it's not Immune to Bullets, but – being a recently-resurrected dinosaur – carries all manner of hideous diseases we've never seen.
  • Even before that, King Kong subverted many aspects of the giant monster genre long before they were ever played straight. While often thought of, and depicted, as a Kaiju in modern pop-culture, the original version of Kong was "only" about 30 feet tall, and moreover was easily killed by conventional weapons. It's telling that in more recent versions, Kong has usually been given a size increase to put him more in line with what contemporary audiences expect a kaiju to be.
• The Cowboy Cop trope has been deconstructed multiple times before it was ever played straight later on without a hint of irony primarily in the action movies of the 1980s and 1990s.
  • Where the Sidewalk Ends, from 1950, is a deconstruction that predates many more famous examples. The protagonist is a true Cowboy Cop, rampaging all over the city in his pursuit of justice — or he would be, if he didn't have to spend so much time dealing with the consequences of his actions.
  • Bullitt was actually the first Cowboy Cop movie, but seen today, it looks like a deconstruction of the genre: the cop (Steve McQueen) ignores his superiors and dismisses the quite reasonable demands of a slimy politician (Robert Vaughan) out of distrust, but accidentally kills all the witnesses and ruins any chances of finding the real mob bosses. The film ends with him staring into a mirror, realizing just how badly he's screwed up.
  • Dirty Harry also qualifies as an unbuilt trope. Harry's methods aren't actually shown all that positively; he's treated (both in-universe and by the film itself) as someone who is useful only under the most extreme circumstances and otherwise borderline unfit to be a policeman. His Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique on the Scorpio Killer is downright horrific and ends up doing no good. And in the end he throws away his badge after disregarding orders and endangering innocents, although it's not necessarily clear that he is punishing himself, rather than rejecting the system that would not have stopped Scorpio. The first sequel, Magnum Force takes it up to eleven by having Harry face off against a squad of motorcycle cops who carry out summary executions of criminals, which Harry himself realizes is merely an extreme extension of his own methods. The later sequels, however, play the Cowboy Cop tropes straight, losing the moral ambiguity of the first two films and painting Harry as a more conventional action hero.
  • The French Connection did something similar. Popeye Doyle is The Shield's Vic Mackey before Vic Mackey – goes against the books, quick to jump the leash, and at least a little bigoted. And what happens when he goes in guns blazing in the final Darkened Building Shootout? He kills a police contact, providing enough chaos for the kingpin to get away, and a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue explains that he ended up getting transferred out of Narcotics for the clusterfuck.
• Back to the Future set the stage for many modern conceptions of Time Travel. But the films also show how messy and dangerous Time Travel is.
  • When Marty inadvertently ends up in 1955, he accidentally prevents his parents' first meeting, and must Set Right What Once Went Wrong to keep himself from being erased. However, it doesn't go as planned: Marty not only brings his parents back together, but boosts his father's confidence enough that he fights back against Biff. When Marty ends up back home, his parents are much happier and successful, while Biff is working a dead-end job.
  • The film averts the Nostalgia Filter and Politically Correct History for past time periods: 1950s Hill Valley is replete with the sexism, racism, and bullying that existed at the time. Tannen's goons use racist terms like "spook" and the owner of the local diner mocks the idea of a "colored" mayor.
  • The films shows how difficult it is to live in a different time. Marty has quite a bit of trouble fitting in 1950s Hill Valley, with his slang, taste in music, and 1980s manners not meshing well with the 1950s and him having trouble with stuff as simple as simply ordering something in a diner and people thinking his jacket is a life preserver. Marty trying to do A Little Something We Call "Rock and Roll" is met with more confusion by 1950s teenagers then with any applause. The third film shows Doc and Marty in The Wild West. However, Marty's attempts to live up to the stereotypical version of The Wild West make him look like an idiot to the downtimers, and Doc is murdered by an outlaw shortly after arriving. Marty defeats "Mad Dog" by unorthodox means instead of shooting him in a duel, and he's arrested by the local sheriff.
  • The second film shows Doc again trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong by preventing Marty's future son from joining a street gang. However, this leads to a series of mishaps: Jennifer, Marty's girlfriend, is inadvertently exposed to her future self, causing both of them to faint. And more seriously, the film shows what happens when Time Travel ends up in the wrong hands: Biff learns about the time machine, and steals Marty's idea to use a sports almanac to enrich himself with uptime knowledge of sports, causing him to be an incredibly corrupt tycoon who turns Hill Valley into a cesspit, while murdering George and bullying Lorraine into marrying him. These incidents convince Doc to destroy the time machine, realizing its benefits don't outweigh its costs.
  • The DeLorean is seen as the Trope Codifier of the "cool car time machine". But in much of the series, it was anything but. It had its mishaps and breakdowns much like the real-life version of the vehicle. From the first film, the car shut down multiple times, including during a critical point when Marty had to race to the clock tower for the lightning bolt to power the flux capacitor. In the second film, Doc Brown pointed out how fragile the car was when Marty asked why he couldn't crush Biff's 50's-era car. And in the third film, the car was so broken-down (from a busted fuel line and Doc's meddling to fix it) that a train was needed to give it a push to get Marty back to the present. And the DeLorean ends up destroyed anyways in a trainwreck by the end. It was likely that Doc Brown used the DeLorean "for style"^note and its stainless steel construction because of his Mad Scientist persona. Also Doc used dubious means to build his time machine, including conning a group of Libyan terrorists out of their plutonium.
• Found Footage Films became big during The New '10s. Some of the genre's progenitors may seem like answers to the likes of Cloverfield, [REC], Diary of the Dead, and The Devil Inside.
  • Cannibal Holocaust in 1980 was arguably the first found-footage horror film ever made. It's also the first found-footage film to be as much about how the footage was found as the actual content of it (predating Sinister by over thirty years), with the main story concerning an anthropologist and a TV network recovering the missing film crew's surviving reels, examining them, and debating whether to show them on television. We see that the film crew had staged horrific abuses against the native peoples for the purpose of capturing violence on film and exploiting stereotypes of Amazon tribes, the fact that they had cameras at all being a major contributing factor in their uncivilized actions. After watching it, the network executives are so disgusted that they refuse to air the footage, instead choosing to destroy it. Director Ruggero Deodato intended it as a satire of the mondo film, a genre of documentary films devoted to showing various instances of (often staged and/or sensationalized) "real-life" sexuality and brutality for the primary purpose of alternatively shocking and titillating the audience. It also doubles as a deconstruction of the Cannibal Film, despite being considered one of the defining examples of the genre, portraying the Western film crew as violent interlopers and Villain Protagonists who the natives are reacting to about as logically as one might expect, rallying to fight back against them and score some free meals in the process.
  • The Blair Witch Project was the Trope Codifier for the found-footage genre, but when compared to the many slick, big-budget imitators that followed, it feels like a deconstruction. For one thing, Heather's insistence upon filming everything even when logic suggests she put the camera down for once, a staple (and common criticism) of found-footage horror movies, is suggested by Josh to be her way of coping with the fact that she's lost in the woods — the screen on the camcorder all makes it feel less real. This also causes a rift between her and the rest of the group, with Mike and Josh telling her several times to turn the camera off and attacking her over it. Furthermore, the film's tiny budget, rambling improv style, and Enforced Method Acting mean that the camera catches as many mundane events as it does exciting action beats — exactly what you'd expect to find on a camcorder that's been lost in the woods. Finally, it actually looks and sounds like amateur footage in the production values, not like a traditional film with professional lighting and sound design. There was no script beyond a 35-page outline of the lore, the actors were all selected for their improv experience because they had to come up with all the characters' dialogue and actions themselves, and they were subjected to a very heavy dose of Enforced Method Acting. This episode of RedLetterMedia's re:View details how little The Blair Witch Project has in common with modern found-footage horror films, which are mostly just traditional films done in a first-person POV style.
  • Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, predating Blair Witch by one year, is a Made-for-TV Movie that is presented as a TV broadcast about the protagonists' disappearance — and it has several segments with talking heads who discuss whether the footage we're watching is real. Like Blair Witch, it misses many action beats, with the only major one being Renee's death, which it's implied that the camera catches. Everything is done with practical effects in order to try and preserve the realism. It also includes a missing persons notice at the end, complete with a (fake!) number to call in the event of any of them being sighted. What's more, it's a remake of a previous found-footage film, a No Budget 1989 film called UFO Abduction that never got properly released thanks to an accident with its distributor, but which did find its way into the ufologist community in The '90s as "The McPherson Tape" (shorn of its opening and closing credits revealing it as fiction), where it was mistaken for a real record of an Alien Abduction.
  • The Last Broadcast also predated Blair Witch by one year, and like Alien Abduction, a lot of the film concerns how the footage was found, with multiple talking heads discussing the disappearance of the people who filmed it while the protagonist David, the last surviving member of the film crew, analyzes the footage for clues. It also shows how Manipulative Editing can be applied to found footage, as a major plot point concerns the fact that the camera didn't catch everything that happened and that important parts of the tape were damaged. Specifically, the parts proving that David was the killer all along, and that he's been selectively editing the footage.
  • Even Paranormal Activity, the film that really kicked off the found footage boom in horror, did things quite differently, and often at odds with what the formula would become. As Bob Chipman noted in his review of the film, instead of using Jitter Cam and Dizzy Cam to obscure the effects and create a Nothing Is Scarier atmosphere, it used the handheld camera to establish that there was a ghost and make sure that the viewer saw everything that happened, in keeping with the intent of the protagonists Katie and Micah to prove that their house is haunted. Most of the action takes place from a single fixed, stationary camera at night observing a room where seemingly nothing interesting is happening until the ghost shows up, more like a security camera than anything, to the point where the film fast-forwards through all of the mundane events in between the hauntings.
• Many early Euroshlock films tried to paint themselves as "True Art", rather than just shocking for the sake of shocking. Indeed many sub-genres of Euroschlock and American Exploitation Films have their origins in Italian "art films", only to be copied by other lesser filmmakers who just didn't care. Ever hear of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom? While being one of the most disgusting, shocking, and offensive movies ever made, it's not pointlessly so, but rather a satire on Italian Fascism. Anyone going into Cannibal Holocaust will expect disturbing and gorny, but most will overlook its thought-provoking commentary on imperialism and are more interested in the gruesome bloodshed instead. ^note Though director Ruggero Deodato insists it was just simply meant to be a mindless exploitation film.
• Gangster films are often accused of glorifying crime, violence and overall amoral behavior. However, many of the most famous films are either deconstructions or subversions that show just how depressing, stressing, and painful the criminal lifestyle can be once things start to go wrong. Most end with the Villain Protagonist falling hard from grace, often leading to their death, and everything they built getting destroyed as a result. Rarely do any of them accomplish what they truly set out to do before things start to fall apart. And despite being surrounded by every vice and pleasure a person can want, they're often never truly happy with it. Some quick examples:
  • Tony Montana in Scarface (1983) is an iconic movie bad guy many people admire and want to be like. He is often mentioned in many rap songs and other music genres, as well as famous lines like, "Say hello to my little friend!", are often mentioned and played for laughs in other movies, shows, and video games. However, many either overlook how Tony Montana ultimately failed in his dream to be the biggest drug dealer in the world (the world is yours), was rejected by his mother, gets his sister killed, kills his best friend for really nothing, and is all alone to face a cartel army by the end, and predictably loses, despite taking a badass last stand.
  • In The Godfather films, Michael Corleone is praised for being a Magnificent Bastard and a brilliant strategist. What's not focused on, is how he didn't want to live that lifestyle at all. He believed he was forced to do so because of his father being in danger. Everything he does is a desperate attempt to fulfill his father's wish to make the crime family legit. He makes decisions that haunt him despite appearing to be cold and ruthless. And by the final film in the trilogy, he is an emotional, guilt-ridden, man. The stress over the years has caused him to become diabetic, and he suffers from attacks. He still finds that he can't get out of the criminal lifestyle, despite appearing to finally succeed, and the film ends with his daughter taking a bullet that was meant for him, finally breaking him.
  • Gangster films were heavily unbuilt as enforced by The Hays Code — all of them produced at that time have to show how bad gangsters will have it, how everything they planned falls apart, and how their many acts of crime will get them in the end (for example, Scarface (1932) has Tony Camonte's world of organized crime destroyed, his sister dead, and depending on the ending, either shot dead by the police, or after his trial, sentenced to death by hanging).
• Girls Behind Bars would become a famous subgenre of exploitation movie — showing women's prisons as dens of kinky torture and lesbianism. But the two earliest appearances of the trope in mainstream media are quite different.
  • Caged is a dark drama that follows a young housewife sent to prison for being an accomplice to her dead husband's crimes. Her corruption to hardened jail bird is played straight — she goes off the Despair Event Horizon after her mother refuses to take care of her newborn baby, she's denied parole twice, she's abused by the cruel matron and she ultimately loses a Cute Kitten as her only Morality Pet. It's more like a Film Noir than exploitation.
  • So Young, So Bad, a movie about a girls' reform school, reads almost like a deconstruction of the stock characters that would pop up in later movies — the blonde sexpot is a wannabe Fille Fatale who's implied to be a former prostitute and has to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. The 'innocent' is implied to be mentally ill. The Ambiguously Gay couple aren't exploited for fanservice and their relationship is relegated to subtext — but still based on caring and an emotional connection.
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged is also unbuilt, as many early examples use it to mock and/or criticize society, unlike later examples that would be the basis of award-winning tales of inspiration.
  • The Miracle Worker: Helen Keller is a logical consequence of putting a disabled person on a pedestal. Her parents' refusal to discipline their disabled daughter out of pity for her condition turned her into a violent brat. Annie's therapy to bring Helen out of her darkness, far from being clean and organized, is horrifically excruciating for both Helen and her.
  • Being There is remembered as the 1979 smash hit about a mentally-challenged gardener who ends up earning the favor of the US President with his profound wisdom. The truth is Chance lacks any profound wisdom, introspection, or intelligence because of mental illness, and his few social cues come from watching television. Chance only gets as far as he does because his soft-spoken ways make him seem like a man of great insight. The film is more a satire of how society's perceptions of an individual end up mattering more than the individual themself. Chance's caretaker Louise, instead of feeling proud of Chance, is resentful of the fact that he can get whatever he wants despite his lack of real accomplishments.
  • The Elephant Man comes across as a sad deconstruction of the concept. Yes, Merrick is a very cultured individual underneath his deformities. Yes, he is getting better treatment than he got at the sideshow. However, it is pointed out that holding him up as a symbol is not that different from putting him in a sideshow because as Mothershead said "He's just getting stared at again". Finally, his disability — rather than being some kind of pretty Soap Opera Disease — is actual serious deformities that end up killing him in the end.
  • Rain Man was possibly the first major Hollywood movie to explore autism. But it's clear that Raymond is too low-functioning to use his skills practically. Furthermore, while the film is often criticized nowadays for portraying autistic people as helpless, it clearly shows us that Raymond only got as bad as he did because he was unable to learn social norms due to his father shipping him off to a mental institution when he was just a child. Charlie does become less of a Jerkass through his bond with Raymond, but part of his growth is realizing that Raymond isn't cut out for a normal life, and that Charlie has to change to help him. In the end, putting Raymond back in the mental hospital is considered the correct decision.
• Several works explored the ramifications and possibilities of the Reality Show years before Big Brother and Survivor, the Trope Codifiers for reality television, were a speck in anyone's eyes:
  • The Truman Show. While shows that we would now call "reality TV" (COPS, The Real World) did exist at the time, they were done in a far more documentary-style manner than the types of shows retroactively skewered by Truman. Truman is "real", in that he's the only person who doesn't know what's going on, with the show itself ultimately being very unreal since the producers predetermine everything. At the same time, the movie unbuilds the trope it named and codified by exploring the insane amount of work and money it takes to actually pull the show off, as well as what happens when the whole thing inevitably collapses in on itself.
  • EDtv did the same thing around the same time, only it did it in a more realistic fashion. Truman was unaware he's on TV. Ed was one of many applicants for the job, and ends up finding out that being a reality TV star isn't all it's cracked up to be.
  • Another early example (1981) is the definitive cult icon's less successful younger sibling Shock Treatment, which was eerily prescient of reality television's cults of personality, lewd consumerism, and destructive effects on the talent long before Reality TV actually existed.
  • Network has a subplot where one of the executives joined forces with a Symbionese Liberation Army-esque group to produce a reality show, The Mao Tse-tung Hour, covering their antics. The leaders of this group initially see this as a means to show off their ideals, but they wind up selling out to the very corporate machine they sought to destroy, their ideology becoming hollow as the leaders argue with the executives over distribution costs, overhead, and subsidiary rights. The only one who still gives a damn about their original ideas is, ironically, the Patty Hearst-esque heiress they kidnapped who later joined them.
  • The Running Man is about a reality show in which criminals are sent against killers to try to escape with their lives. And in the darkest form of Executive Meddling, the evil game show host, played by Family Feud alumni Richard Dawson, bends the rules for his own gain: he lies to Ben Richards about sparing his friends, calls Amber a slut, covers up the fact that three contestants were burned alive, offers Richards a chance to be a stalker, and then uses Manipulative Editing to make it look like Captain Freedom killed Richards.
  • Its predecessor, the German film Das Millionenspiel (1971), turns the manhunt into a regular and voluntary event, with the production team trying to keep things interesting by helping the side at disadvantage off-camera to get a climatic showdown. During the show, the candidate for the next run is already revealed and interviewed. Unlike following films, the hunt itself is neither questioned nor fought against by the participants (although it's shown to be controversial).
• The Screwball Comedy is this for the Romantic Comedy. Furthermore, characters like Katharine Hepburn's in Bringing Up Baby are this for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl; she's less the reward to the stuffy, nerdy male lead and more his crucible. The humor comes from just how much havoc she can wreak on his life. Likewise, rather than livening up David's life, Susan instead yanks him into hers.
• Even after the release of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), it still took a few years before the most iconic tropes of the Slasher Movie genre really became settled. As a result, many early slashers, especially from before those films came out, often broke the "rules" of the genre because there often were no rules to follow yet. The Final Girl, for example, wasn't part of the genre at first; in Black Christmas (1974), for example, the character who most obviously fits this archetype winds up being the first one killed, and it wasn't until the early '80s that the idea of a heroine who was a paragon of feminine virtue really took over. Furthermore, the police, far from being bumbling idiots who existed only to give some armed opposition to the killer, actually served a major role in the story more often than not. Many early slashers were whodunits as the killer's identity served as a mystery, as opposed to the "icon" slashers (Jason, Freddy, Michael) with their own trademark outfits, masks, and weapons who came to predominate around mid-decade, and they often took their cues in that regard from the Police Procedurals and Mystery Fiction of the time (especially the Italian gialli, important progenitors to the slasher), with police investigating the murders and racing to stop the killer before the next person dies.
• Mel Brooks popularized the spoof genre. However, his spoofs weren't the shallow parodies seen in the late 90s and 2000s, but often nuanced and faithful deconstructions of the genres they parodied.
  • Young Frankenstein is a hilarious send up of the Frankenstein franchise in general and the original Universal movies in particular. But the movie actually explores the humanity of the monster, who, at the end of the movie, is given intelligence and a chance at love as well.
  • Blazing Saddles didn't just mock the genre of Westerns, but was also a subtle critique of issues that plagued the real-life Old West, such as government corruption and racial tensions. Unlike other films, it justifies its excessive pop culture references that are not from the late 19th century because it explicitly shows the film is a modern-day Western filmed in the present day.
  • High Anxiety is a silly mockery of Hitchcock movies. However, the film actually has a pretty dark storyline: a corrupt mental asylum whose staff conspires to gaslight their wealthy clients into remaining institutionalized. While the villains are Laughably Evil, they are still willing to commit heinous crimes-including murdering their own staff, hiring a psychotic killer and framing the protagonist for attempted murder- to maintain their enterprise.
  • Spaceballs is a hilarious send up of Star Wars and other sci-fi properties, but the Darth Vader-like villain is still an incredibly evil, if nerdy, individual, willing to kidnap a princess, hurt his minions, and destroy the atmosphere of an inhabited planet to get his way. It was also one of the first to have a deconstructive parody of Merchandise-Driven works by having in-universe jokes and gags of said products and parodying Misaimed Marketing (e.g. Spaceballs-brand flamethrowers and shaving cream) — before misaimed products were more done in earnest in the first place!
• Terminator:
  • The Terminator is the Trope Maker and Trope Namer of the Terminator Twosome. However, Kyle Reese is not the typical time-traveling hero who goes out to Set Right What Once Went Wrong; his stated mission is the one of a Time Police. The T-800 is out to Make Wrong What Once Went Right. It also turns out that Reese fails to destroy the T-800, forcing Sarah Connor to defeat it single-handedly; Reese's destiny is instead to father John Connor. Reese's "sent back in time to stop a Killer Robot from the future murdering one specific person" mission also means he has a very hard time convincing the local police he isn't insane. While the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day plays the trope a lot straighter, the T-800 makes a Heel–Face Turn between the films.
  • Those used to Sarah Connor's reputation as a Action Girl via later installments or Pop-Cultural Osmosis might be surprised to find that in the first film, she starts out just as terrified and out-of-her-depth as you'd expect from an average civilian thrown into that situation, and gradually becomes an Action Girl because being constantly chased by a near-unkillable robot assassin will do that to you.
  • The first film set the gold standard for depictions of a chillingly bleak Robot War post-nuclear Bad Future, with its mountains of human skulls, flattened cities patrolled by mechanical horrors, and human survivors living in painfully squalid holes in the ground. In spite of this, it also tempers this seemingly impossible vision of Hopeless War with an unusually optimistic message. The whole point of the movie is that, despite how far they've fallen and how little they have to fight back with, humanity still wins and has Skynet on the ropes so bad that the seemingly invincible machine intelligence gets desperate and has to resort to time travel to save itself.
  • The first film also retroactively feels like a deconstruction of the Screw Destiny plots the franchise would become famous for, as the ultimate result of its Terminator Twosome isn't a better timeline, but a Stable Time Loop: John Connor only exists because Kyle Reese went back in time and ended up becoming his father, and the remains of the Terminator are implied to become the inspiration for the robots that later end up warring with humanity.
  • The T-800 is known for his Cool Shades, but there was a justification for it in the first movie: the T-800's human disguise was falling apart, so the cyborg had to wear dark sunglasses to cover up the exposed bionic eyes. The sequels had the later T-800 models wear shades simply because it looked cool.
• George A. Romero, the "Father of the Zombie Film", is considered to be an influential figure for zombie fiction, but his zombie filmography has multiple twists on the usual formula that he inspired.
  • Romero's Living Dead Series, which codified plenty of Zombie Apocalypse tropes, can nowadays feel like a direct response to the films that followed in their wake.
    • Despite Night of the Living Dead (1968)'s reputation as the Trope Codifier for modern-day Zombie Apocalypse media, the film's take on the genre is significantly different compared to the way zombies are portrayed today. For starters, the zombies are instead referred to as "ghouls", as the word "zombie" had a different meaning at the time. Zombification is not spread through The Virus, but is caused by a radioactive space probe reentering Earth's atmosphere, which means that everybody who dies with their brain intact comes back as a zombie; people turning into zombies after getting bitten is simply because a zombie bite is always fatal due to how many germs are in their rotting mouths. (The Walking Dead uses this rule, but most others take the viral infection route.) On top of that, the zombies were fairly agile and showed some signs of intelligence, while the main characters were wiped out by their own incompetence as the rest of the world outside quickly figured out what was going on and was systematically wiping out the last of the zombies by morning. Both sequel series retcon this in different ways, but as a standalone film it's completely clear that the disaster is over. Later films either always treat zombie uprisings as an apocalyptic event, or joke about how stupid that is (like Shaun of the Dead).
    • Dawn of the Dead (1978) implied that the only reasons why someone would actually want a Zombie Apocalypse or some other doomsday disaster to happen are because they hold a grudge against some part of society, fantasize about being a badass, want to run wild, or some mixture of such — all the way back in 1978, three decades before Cracked said the same thing. To demonstrate this, the film has a racist cop who uses the zombie outbreak as an excuse to shoot minorities and immigrants without consequence, rednecks who treat zombie killing as an excuse to get drunk and party, and lastly, the biker gang that loots the mall and destroys the protagonists' safe haven in the process. The zombie apocalypse doesn't happen overnight, either. The film starts three weeks into it, and while the fabric of society is clearly fraying, public services are still functional enough to keep the power running, the television stations on the air (even if they're switching to emergency broadcasting by this point), and law enforcement in one piece. Also (especially in the extended versions of the film), the zombie apocalypse comes with a lot of ennui — the protagonists slowly develop Cabin Fever as they're boarded up inside the mall trying to survive, with increasingly little to do to let off steam once the novelty of having a mall all to themselves wears off.
    • The opening of Dawn also shows what a zombie outbreak would look like through the eyes of people in the ghetto, beyond just news reports showing violence and zombie mayhem in the overrun downtowns and inner cities, a perspective that's only rarely seen in zombie films even today — and what the film shows goes a long way towards explaining how a zombie outbreak could become the zombie apocalypse. The classic zombie movie trope of people being unable to shoot their infected loved ones clashes hard with the orders of the police and National Guard to execute all infected people, which itself clashes with decades' worth of boiling fury over Police Brutality, leading Philadelphia's black and Puerto Rican communities to defy the emergency measures and flat-out revolt due to the fact that they do not trust the authorities to have their best interests at heart. As far as they're concerned, the official line that infection can only be "cured" by Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain is just an excuse for the police to put their jackboots on their necks, and given that even the authorities are shown to be in bitter disagreement on what's even causing the zombie plague and struggling to convey the most basic facts to the public, and that there really are some bad apples on the police force that see them as their lessers, they aren't lacking in reasons to be paranoid. (Just weeks before the film premiered, a Philadelphia-based black liberation/anarcho-primitivist group called MOVE had gotten into a high-profile confrontation with the police, which would serve as a prelude for a far greater disaster seven years later.) Romero was half-Spanish and grew up in the Bronx, so he was writing from experience in his depiction of how an inner city might react to the apocalypse.
    • A general rule in Romero's apocalypse is that the people who will thrive After the End are those who were living outside of, or were otherwise constrained by, civilized society beforehand and have the most to gain from its collapse. Many works that take after Romero use this idea to depict Crazy-Prepared rugged individualists and cool misfits emerging from the apocalypse and becoming the heroes they could never have been in the old world, either Walking the Earth or building a new world free of the sins that brought down the old one, but that's not who Romero had in mind. The winners in his apocalypse are hardcore criminals who already have their own "parallel society" in the form of gangs, cartels, mafias, and underworld syndicates, with a ruthless biker gang emerging as the most powerful force in the post-apocalyptic wasteland in Dawn. Land of the Dead puts a different spin on this, with the "winners" being the elites whose greed and depravity were once constrained by the rules and oversight of liberal American society, but are now free to rule as kings and queens while everybody else begs for scraps in the neo-feudal world they establish. Survival of the Dead comes closest to the archetype in the form of the Feuding Families inhabiting a remote island that's shut off from the outside world... who are portrayed as the bad guys, causing most of the film's problems in the process as Romero uses them to comment on how tribalism destroys people.
    • Because the Living Dead movies created the modern Flesh-Eating Zombie, they established rules for later zombies, most notably the idea that classic zombies moved slowly and weren't particularly smart. Some zombie works such as The Zombie Survival Guide play this completely straight while others, such as Zombieland: Double Tap and Army of the Dead, subvert it with Elite Zombies that have mental and/or physical advantages over the classic zombie. Interestingly, while Romero stated that his zombies were supposed to be slow-moving, he always portrayed them as capable thinkers. Indeed, Romero zombies from their very first appearance were smart enough to use tools, with the very first zombie in the film using a rock to break open a locked car's windows, another grabbing a spade to kill a human, and multiple other zombies picking up rocks and Ben's torch to damage the protagonists' cars and to break through the survivors' barricades. In fact, by the third Living Dead movie Day of the Dead (1985), Romero zombies were capable of wielding guns, feeling emotions, and remembering their old lives, all of which make them more similar to intelligent Elite Zombies than to the mindless zombies that they inspired. Case in point, Frank Darabont, the original showrunner of The Walking Dead, used the Night of the Living Dead as a template for the show's zombies, which meant that The Walking Dead zombies in Season 1 were able to climb fences, vaguely remember their old lives as humans, and use rudimentary tools. However, after Darabont was fired, Seasons 2 and beyond dumbed the zombies down to make them less threatening and to emphasize the human villains of each arc. The final season reintroduced the smart zombies but revised them to be a special zombie variant to explain why the smart zombies in Season 1 seemingly disappeared. Basically, the average Romero zombie from Night of the Living Dead is considered an Elite Zombie in The Walking Dead universe, and this isn't getting into the Romero zombies' increased abilities in the sequels.
    • Additionally, the concept of a Zombie Infectee hiding their zombie-inflicted injuries from the other characters is rarely played straight in the Living Dead movies, mostly because the series is ambiguous on whether or not a disease is responsible for the zombie phenomenon. The infectee in Night is incapacitated in her onscreen time as a human, and at this point, nobody actually knows that zombie bites are lethal, so her family doesn't bother hiding her zombie-inflicted wounds. By the time of Dawn and Day, the lethality of zombie bites becomes public knowledge, but even then, the trope isn't played straight. In Dawn, the infectee doesn't hide his bites and tries to enjoy his final days alive while his friends prepare to kill him if he comes back undead. In Day, one character bitten by the zombies begs for a Mercy Kill from his friend, and in another case, the protagonist attempts to stop her friend's zombification by chopping off her friend's limb.
  • Similarly, Romero's other zombie movie The Crazies retroactively reconstructs the Technically Living Zombies/Plague Zombies codified and deconstructed by 28 Days Later.
    • The Trixie virus itself plays with the concept of the Hate Plague. Most people infected by Trixie turn into homicidal killers, but some of the Crazies merely turn catatonic and don't violently lash out, subverting the idea that Insane Equals Violent.
    • A common criticism of infected zombies, especially the ones inflicted with the Hate Plague, is how they solely attack healthy humans but conveniently never turn on one another. A general Hand Wave is that the pathogen gives the zombies the instinct to not attack one other, thereby allowing the infected to act more like a traditional zombie horde. In any case, none of this applies to the Crazies, who don't follow the usual zombie mob mentality and will occasionally kill fellow Crazies that they view as dangerous. Furthermore, the Crazies still possess their former personalities and motives, so they will ally with close friends, even those that are healthy individuals. Ironically, this makes the Crazies a lot more dangerous as mingling with the uninfected allows them to spread the virus more easily especially since said virus is airborne/waterborne and not contact-based like most other zombie pathogens.
    • The Crazies may lose their mental stability, but like George Romero's other better-known zombies, they can utilize firearms and other tools and can strategize against their enemies. In contrast, modern infected zombies tend to be mindless berserkers that are fast and savage but aren't capable of thinking. That said, the Crazies are shown running since they are regular humans otherwise, but the movie mainly emphasizes their intelligence rather than their athleticism. Notably, the Crazies are capable of driving cars and using air transportation, allowing them to carry the Trixie Virus out of town, which is why the military blocks off the local roads and airports as part of the quarantine.
    • Plague Zombies normally suffer from very visible symptoms such as abnormal hemorrhages and skin lesions, allowing one to differentiate the infected from the uninfected without needing some kind of diagnostic test. In contrast, the Crazies look no different from the uninfected, which proves to be a problem for the government. The general rule of thumb is that anyone behaving irrationally is a Crazy, but as pointed out by Dr. Watts, healthy people can behave irrationally as well, resulting in multiple false positives since the townsfolk, infected or not, aren't happy with the military presence and retaliate with violence against said military presence.
    • Most zombie pathogens are contact-based diseases to justify why the zombies have to bite or scratch their victims to spread the infection. As deconstructed in 28 Days Later, it is fairly simple to quarantine contact-based zombie diseases especially when the zombies in question are trapped on an island and lack the intelligence to use water/air transportation. On the other hand, the Trixie Virus in The Crazies relies on waterborne and airborne transmission to spread; therefore, none of the Crazies act like the stereotypical biting zombie because they don't need physical contact to infect the healthy. As a result, the Trixie Virus is difficult to contain because it has multiple methods for transmission and doesn't solely rely on its zombies to spread the disease; in fact, the pandemic starts after the plane carrying the virus samples crashed into a small town's water supply.
    • Because the Trixie Virus targets the mind and none of the Crazies spread the infection through obvious bite wounds, it takes a while for the zombie infectees to recognize that they themselves have the virus, assuming that said infectee has enough rationality to realize it. Throughout the story, every Crazy that realizes that he is infected commits suicide instead of hiding his zombie status like a standard zombie infectee would.
    • The movie also has a Deconstructed Character Archetype of The Immune. David may be immune to the Trixie Virus, but none of his friends are, which leaves him the last man standing after the soldiers kill off his infected companions. This leads to him keeping his immunity a secret out of contempt.
    • It is worth noting that The Crazies came out in 1973, predating most of Romero's Living Dead filmography other than Night of the Living Dead. Essentially, the Crazies are a more grounded take on the undead, voodoo-esque zombies from Night of the Living Dead as Romero justifies the Crazies' existence as the consequence of America's very real biological weapons program, which only began shutting down in the 1970s.
• Adam Sandler movies are infamous for featuring an out-of-control Manchild as their protagonist. However, his first two films are a deconstruction of this mindset, and the plot of both movies is the two titular characters learning to overcome their immaturity to find happiness.
  • Billy Madison features a grown-up layabout who mooches off of his wealthy father. However, Billy only got as bad as he did because his father spoiled him and paid his teachers off. However, after his father makes it clear he is sick of his son's behavior, Billy goes back to school and learns to become more mature to regain his father's respect. Billy is also a bit more nuanced than other later characters, honestly wanting to succeed or fail on his own and being genuinely upset to learn his father paid his teachers. He also knows full well he isn't suited to run his father's company and is fine with not being given the position, only wanting to stop the amoral Eric from getting it.
  • Happy Gilmore has a protagonist who is a wannabe hockey player with very severe anger issues. After he transitions to golf, he is frequently told off, reprimanded, and punished for his behavior with only his immense popularity stopping him from being removed entirely after getting into a fight on air and it's shown other, more traditional golfers dislike him immensely, mainly his rival Shooter McGavin.
• Steven Seagal movies are infamous for featuring an Invincible Hero who stops at nothing to defeat the bad guy. His early films, however, play around with this formula.
  • Out for Justice: Even with the rather dubious-quality final fight scene, Gino is portrayed as justified for wanting revenge against a psychotic mobster... but in his vendetta, he does very morally dubious things like working with the mob and acting like an aggressive bully to anyone who won't help him, even people with justified reasons. And he is actually called out for putting his wrath on his own family. He also gives Richie a chance to turn himself in but Richie is far too unstable to take it, fully expecting and even wanting to die at Gino's hands. Furthermore, the partner he is avenging isn't quite as innocent as Gino initially believes, being revealed as a crooked cop who was having an affair with Richie's girlfriend which is why Richie murdered him to begin with.
  • Under Siege: Casey Ryback is the typical action hero who rebels against authority. However, this rebellion not only had consequences — Casey being demoted to navy cook for striking an officer and he's only been kept around because the captain of the vessel likes him — but it also serves as a plot point: Casey stays under the radar because the bad guys don't suspect the cook could cause trouble. And Casey may be tough, he doesn't actually save the day on his own: the love interest and the other crew help him along the way. And the villains are most definitely not stupid, showing excellent tactical sensibilities and coming very close to succeeding in their plan, even with Casey's interference.
• Steven Spielberg's Signature Shot, the "Spielberg face", is often used to communicate a sense of wonder and awe on the part of the person or people in the shot, staring off at something amazing happening off-screen in front of them. However, when he first used it in Jaws, it was an Oh, Crap! face used to communicate a sense of horror as Brody sees a young boy get attacked by the shark, paired with a Vertigo Effect.
• The movies in Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse can be a bit strange to watch in the wake of the Marvel Cinematic Universe making it big. Almost everything that the MCU did in the 2010s was also in the View Askewniverse two decades earlier. It featured multiple films set in a shared universe with a well-established Canon, several recurring characters and continuity nods between films, frequent esoteric references to comic books and science-fiction, encounters with divine beings, a cameo from Stan Lee (yes, really), and a movie about a group of Unlikely Heroes uniting to stop a villain called "Loki" from destroying the world. Yet, in spite of all that...they were comedies about the humdrum lives of ordinary people, and their ambitious world-building just underscored how comically mundane the characters' lives really were. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back even openly satirized superhero stories with the characters "Bluntman and Chronic", complete with a Hollywood studio attempting to cash in on them.
  • Clerks features one of the first prominent discussions of What Measure Is a Mook? when Dante and Randall try to deconstruct Star Wars by questioning how many relatively innocent contractors and such were killed when the Rebels blew up the Death Stars. Except the film also almost immediately flips that entire deconstruction on its head when a customer joins the conversation by relating an incident where he was offered a job putting up drywall in the home of a known gangster; he turned it down, but a friend of his foolishly took up the offer and promptly died when a rival gang shot up the house as he was working. The point being, it doesn't matter how innocent those mooks on the Death Star may have been or whether they had families or whatever. They knew full well what kind of dangerous situation they were putting themselves in when they agreed to work for the Empire, and have only themselves to blame for their deaths.
• Zatoichi: Ichi the blind Japanese swordsman is cinema's Trope Codifier for the Blind Weaponmaster, inspiring similarly blind badasses in modern Japanese works like Samurai Champloo or foreign stories like John Wick: Chapter 4. That said, the very first movie deconstructs Ichi's character in multiple ways.
  • For one, Ichi regrets his swordsmanship training as it has led him down a path of violence and bloodshed, specifically the life of a yakuza. He also admits that he became a swordsman to earn respect from others as a blind man like him otherwise will face discrimination in Edo society. The sequels continue to develop this aspect of Ichi, with one installment's plot about him going on a spiritual journey to atone for his sins.
  • Furthermore, while Ichi is a talented swordsman with great speed and heightened senses, the first movie still portrays Ichi's skills (and disability) in a realistic manner. For example, when Ichi goes up against two gangsters during the late night, he wisely puts out his lantern to negate his opponent's vision advantage before engaging; furthermore, this is the highest number of enemies he fights at the same time in this movie. Likewise, in the final duel against an equally-skilled samurai, Ichi wins partially because his opponent is dying from an illness. Ichi's pop-culture reputation as a blind superhuman actually begins in the sequel The Tale Of Zatoichi Continues as said sequel turns Ichi into a One-Man Army capable of beating down squads of trained samurai with utmost ease.

Individual Films

• 12 Angry Men is the Trope Codifier for the Rogue Juror trope. However, Juror #8 isn't necessarily convinced of the defendant's innocence; he just insists that the jury does its job properly and in accordance with the law, and he finds some of the evidence a bit sketchy and worthy of further examination. Even though he convinces the other jurors to acquit the defendant, neither they nor the audience ever find out whether the defendant was actually innocent. This is realistic, in that many juries will never know for sure if the accused is guilty—but if guilt can't be definitely proven, they have to be acquitted.
• 28 Days Later codified the trope of the Technically-Living Zombie, but also deconstructed the very idea. The people infected by the rage virus still have physical needs, but are too insane to address them. It doesn't take long for all of the infected to die of mass starvation and sleep deprivation a few weeks after the initial outbreak. This is what also helps the protagonists realize that, despite claims, it's not The End of the World as We Know It. Since those with the rage virus are too insane to operate vehicles, this also means that they can't go any distance a human couldn't travel on foot, so Great Britain has been put under quarantine to prevent the outbreak from spreading. In the sequel, the zombies do reach the European continent at the end, but only because of a Typhoid Mary.
• 42nd Street: Julian Marsh is the ur-Secretly Dying show director who stays with the job even though it is killing him. Except that the producers know about it, but go on with the show because they need him, at least one major reason he's doing the show is he needs the money and he doesn't die at the end, though it's hard not to get the feeling that there's a part of him that wishes he did.
• 48 Hrs. is commonly viewed as the Ur-Example of a buddy cop movie, but it's quite different from the typical example in a few ways.
  • An increasingly common twist on the "buddy cop" formula is to have one of the "cops" not actually be a cop. This actually got its start here: Eddie Murphy's character, Reggie Hammond, is a convicted criminal on prison furlough. Not only that, but he used to be a partner to the main antagonist, Albert Ganz.
  • The movie is a good deal more violent and grim than most examples of the genre, with Reggie being the only real source of comedy. And even he has a number of moments where he's completely serious. The tone, in addition to being darker than most buddy cop films that came afterwards, is also more grounded. This can be seen in how the antagonists are portrayed, as well as the tone of the conflict against them. The bad guys are cruel and ruthless people whose crimes are portrayed with serious gravity, and their final showdown with the heroes is not some glorious action set piece, but relatively subdued, with greater emphasis placed on tension and suspense.
• The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971): the film's climax has the eponymous Dr. Phibes (Vincent Price) kidnap the son of the last of the doctors who wronged him and chain him to a device that will pour Hollywood Acid in his face. His father must find the key to free him in his bowels via surgery with limited time. That's the kind of things that wouldn't feel out of place in Saw.
• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension practically defied classification when it was first released in 1984, but in hindsight, it can actually be seen as a Deconstructive Parody of the kinds of superhero franchises that would come to dominate Hollywood in the decades after its release. Part of the movie's gimmick is that it's a standalone film that's deliberately made to look like one installment in an expansive saga, complete with a complex backstory that's never fully explained, references to important characters who never appear, and a Sequel Hook for a sequel that was never made; many of the jokes are essentially Mythology Gags for a mythology that doesn't exist. The movie was made decades before those very sorts of films—sprawling multi-part epics with a massive cast, constant Mythology Gags, and never-ending Sequel Hooks—actually became commonplace, but it manages to demonstrate how bizarre the average franchise film would look if it didn't have a franchise to go with it.
• The original Air Bud is generally credited with inventing the Animal Athlete Loophole trope. But unlike most of its imitators (including its own sequels), it actually provided a plausible justification for it: Buddy is just a late-game replacement for an injured player in the final championship game, and the idea of him joining the team on the court is only suggested because the kids' only other option is forfeiting the game and losing the championship on a technicality. When the kids initially discover Buddy's remarkable talent for shooting baskets, their first reaction isn't to suggest that he join the team—it's to make him the team mascot; they only bring him to games so that he can entertain the crowd. Relatedly, Buddy's ability to shoot baskets isn't just a random and inexplicable talent: his former owner was a professional clown who trained him to do tricks as part of his act, and it's strongly implied that his basketball skills are a result of his training.
• Airport codified many conventions of the Disaster Movie, especially those set in planes. Yet many of these same tropes were used some fifteen years earlier in the 1954 film The High and the Mighty about the struggle of an airliner's crew to get its plane and passengers to a safe landing after an engine fails midway through a flight from Honolulu to San Francisco. Some may see it as being a deconstruction of the genre, considering that nobody dies or is even injured, and that the plane, in the end, lands safely at the San Francisco airport.
• Part of Alien's enduring success was how many tropes it either inverted or highlighted in a unique way before they became popular in media.
  • While it didn't codify the Final Girl trope (Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) had done so in the five years prior to its release), most final protagonists were set up with some degree of focus and major development. In stark contrast, Ripley was played by Sigourney Weaver, who (at that time) was the least-known member of the cast, had a handful of film cameos to her credit, and is Out of Focus for a third of the film. No one expected that the cast would be killed off in descending order based on their star power (John Hurt and Harry Dean Stanton were the biggest stars in the cast at the time), and which still hasn't been replicated in films that feature a Dead Star Walking.
  • Related to the above, it also codified the Tank-Top Tomboy trope, especially in horror movies. But when Ripley fights the xenomorph at the end while wearing only a tank top, it's to show her as vulnerable, not badass. That was her night shirt, she was preparing to go into cryosleep before realizing that the xenomorph had snuck aboard the Escape Pod, and she was also in her underwear on top of it. It created the impression that she was naked and defenseless, and that (given the above) her luck might have finally run out. In later films, however (including Alien³ with Ripley herself), putting the female protagonist in a tank top became quick shorthand for establishing her as an Action Girl.
  • Whereas most modern films have a self-destruct that is triggered by entering commands into a computer or flipping a switch, Alien's self-destruct sequence is played as realistically and procedurally as it can in a science-fiction film. The procedure requires Ripley to read the directions before she initiates the process, which entails slowly pulling out rods and inserting them in four reactors. The process takes a solid minute to initiate and has a Failsafe Failure that causes Ripley to just miss the window of opportunity when she tries to reverse it after encountering the xenomorph. Likewise, the Exact Time to Failure tells Ripley how much time she has before the failsafes are rendered inoperable, in stark contrast to any film that has a countdown. The self-destruction also results in the ship going up in several pieces, rather than the "single explosion" that has been seen in most modern films. Notably, when this same sequence was repeated verbatim in Alien: Isolation, some players found it to be too drawn-out and slow given the action taking place on-screen at the time.
• Aliens:
  • The film is credited with kick-starting the gritty, grizzled Space Marine trope that's permeated science fiction and popular culture for decades afterwards. A group of hardened veteran soldiers (or just one) mow down hordes of mooks/aliens/monsters with their advanced weaponry, saving civilisation while spouting boasts, one liners, and snark left and right. It's easy to forget then that the Colonial Marines in Aliens are portrayed as arrogant, trigger-happy jarheads who, despite their overwhelming confidence, had never faced anything even remotely like the Xenomorphs, and suffered for it. They collapsed into panic and disarray the moment they made actual contact, they got slaughtered because they had no idea what they were up against, and their incompetence resulted in the entire facility being blown to pieces by accident. It's not a display of badassery so much as it is a sci-fi version of 'Nam. Furthermore, the only marine who survived the ordeal was the one who followed the orders of Ellen Ripley, who is not only a civilian but also a woman and the main character, something rare even today in similar genres. The final confrontation is between two Mama Bears, Ripley, and the Xenomorph queen, completely counter to the hyper-masculine narratives permeating the versions that followed.
  • The film also subverted the Punch-Clock Hero trope long before it became commonplace in television and film. When Ripley is court-martialed and drummed out for destroying the Nostromo in the previous film, she simply picks up work at Gateway Station's docks and doesn't make any waves for a fair stretch of time. Even when Burke and Gorman come to recruit her for the mission, she refuses on the grounds that it's not in her job description and the mission sounds uneventful. It takes another dream to convince her to go, and even then, she acts largely as a civilian advisor (who doesn't like the soldiers she's traveling with) until two-thirds of the way through the film.
  • While a handful of films released around this time were beginning to embrace the Kid Sidekick/Tagalong Kid tropes (most notably Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom two years earlier), Aliens was actively subverting it via the Newt character. While most kid characters simply existed to be rescued or provide witty comebacks, Newt is the only one of the group who fully understands the danger on LV-426. She listens to commands and follows them, has a wry sense of humor at times, and at one point, Ripley and the others defer to her judgement (in the maintenance ducts after fleeing from the attack on Medical). A Freeze-Frame Bonus even shows her using the hatch to close the dropship ramp while the group is escaping at the climax of the film! All this from a kid who's no more than ten years old.
  • The famous walking-and-grabbing Power Loader was exactly what it was — a power loader used to haul heavy equipment and supplies, hence why no armor or long-range artillery. It was never designed for combat despite Ripley using it as an Improvised Weapon against the Alien Queen. Later works (like some of the arcade games) and its copycats would use it as more of a Humongous Mecha-styled weapon.
  • Vasquez Always Dies is credited as starting with this film, but unlike most examples of the trope, Vasquez not only proves to be very competent and important to the protagonists, but she's the last female character to die, and does so near the very end of the film after taking out hordes of aliens. There were several other female marines, and they died because they lacked Vasquez's toughness and trigger-happy personality. In addition, every female character in the film is a straight-out Action Girl, or at least received combat training or experience. The sole survivor Ellen Ripley was only less masculine in the sense that she's a civilian, but she's still presented as a blue-collar roughneck who happens to be a woman, more akin to Rosie the Riveter than your traditional feminine Action Survivor. Ripley not only survives the horrific events of the first film, but in this film she actually proves to be manly in many ways outside of combat, such as taking charge of the marines as their de facto leader when their officers are taken out and the survivors start panicking. Other than being a civilian without military training, Ripley herself is just as tomboyish as the traditional Vasquez archetype after she Took a Level in Badass.
• While it has a lot of funny moments, American Graffiti could act as a thorough deconstruction of nostalgic teen flicks, especially Grease. The cool drag racers are a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and a straight-up Jerkass, and both of them are losers whose lives are going nowhere (Milner, at least, is self-aware enough to know this). The mysterious DJ on the radio turns out to be... an ordinary middle-aged guy (albeit one who has some wisdom through his experiences). One of the heroes and his girlfriend are going through a rough patch, and it's portrayed in a mature and realistic way. The climactic drag race lasts all of fifteen seconds, and ends in a near-fatal crash. The main hero doesn't get the girl; in fact he never even learns her name.^note In the original script, she didn't exist; she was a hallucination that represented Curt's ideal woman, and therefore a construct that no real person could live up to. It's made very clear that Our Heroes will not always be together. In fact, this is probably the last time they'll all be in one place at the same time. This was made five years before Grease was released. Although the original musical hit theaters in 1972, American Graffiti was already in late pre-production by then.
• American Pie inspired decades worth of Quest for Sex movies, but ripped the notion to shreds at the prom near the end of the movie. Finch and Jim have made themselves into laughing stocks, given all their attempts to woo women have blown up in their faces. Oz has genuinely fallen in love, and is disgusted that his pre-Character Development ideas are being hung over his head. Likewise, Kevin does love his girlfriend Vicky, but he's too insecure to go through with losing his virginity and admit he loves her, believing it all has to be perfect. So at the prom, he's unbelievably smug that he's not alone, but when he finds out they can't and won't go through with it, he tries to force them to do so, leading to Jim blowing up at Kevin and Finch. In short, the Quest for Sex is ultimately presented as a bad thing, as the movie argues that getting laid just for the sake of getting laid is a shallow and empty pursuit, and it's really not worth it even if you do manage to have sex. Yet other movies inspired by American Pie would treat the objective unironically, or as a reward at the end of the film.
  Jim: Kevin, you don't need us to get laid. Are you afraid or something?
  Kevin: No. Come on, I mean we made a pact. You can't break that. You guys are just gonna have to-
  Jim: Have to what, Kev? Huh? I don't have to do shit! You know, forget it. I-I am so sick and tired of all this bullshit pressure. I mean, I've never even had sex and already I can't stand it. I HATE SEX!! And I'm not gonna stand around busting my balls over something that, quite frankly, isn't that damn important. Now I'm gonna go hang out with that geek over there, cuz at least she has something to talk about besides sex.
• Animal House:
  • It actually does a lot in deconstructing Wacky Fratboy Hijinks, as it's pointed out how the wild and destructive Deltas do things that would get real college students arrested, which no sane college administration would allow. Though the Deltas do ultimately get their revenge on the Dean and the snobbish Omegas by the end, it's a Pyrrhic Victory — in spite of it all, they're expelled from the college, and it's heavily implied that at least some of them end up drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. As Dean Wormer perfectly puts it, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son."
  • It also shows that the Deltas are not quite "cool loser" types; they just think they are. For example, the band they hire to play doesn't actually like them, and it's strongly implied that Otis Day sees the Deltas as little more than a steady booking that he tolerates. Likewise, Otter, the basis of the teen comedy version of The Casanova, is not a slick ladies' man and is perceived by most of the women in the film as a desperate lech. Even the Official Couple, Boon and Katy, are ultimately shown to be a poor match due to their immaturity, and the end credits imply that they have a tumultuous, unhealthy, and ultimately short-lived relationship. Much of this is because the film is actually an irreverent satire of the nostalgia-driven teen dramas of the 1970s, most notably American Graffiti, something later teen Sex Comedies missed because they were merely aping the surface features of Animal House.
• Imagine that you're watching a film about a bunch of grown-up Baby Boomers looking back on their youth and activism in The '60s and how much better things were back then, all set to a soundtrack of awesome period music... and the entire dramatic thrust of the film is about how they completely sold out their ideals, which were hollow to begin with and ultimately ruined their lives, and that they're all clinging to the past. It sounds like something a disgruntled younger filmmaker might make to dismantle everything that their parents' generation stood for... except that the film in question is 1983's The Big Chill, the film that codified "Baby Boomer nostalgia" as a creative industry! Director and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan (then 34 years old, making him, if anything, one of the older Baby Boomers) was making a movie about his own generation, not that of his parents.
• A film by the director of Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray, Bigger Than Life is cited as one of many films made in The '50s that cast a darker light on some of the obsessions of that decade: namely, the suburban "keeping up with the Jones" mentality (here shown as an attempt by a family straining themselves and living out of their means) and the Nuclear Family (which amounts to a father becoming a tyrant of the home). Moreover, it deals with prescription drug abuse long before it became a major public issue in American society.
• Blackboard Jungle is the Trope Codifier for Save Our Students movies. However, it feels almost deconstructive today. Progress is slow and difficult, and the ending isn't a final triumph, but only the beginning of victory.
• Black Christmas (1974) was an early major slasher film and the inspiration for Halloween (1978), but it has little in common with most of its successors.
  • Unlike iconic slasher villains such as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, Billy doesn't wear a mask and is definitely not a silent killing machine, spending much of the film making taunting phone calls and has been doing so for weeks before the start. The audience learns absolutely nothing about Billy and his motive nor is his face fully revealed, with a heavy implication that "Billy" isn't even his real name.
  • The movie contains surprisingly little gore with much of the horror coming from the building tension and Billy's calls. It's also a whodunnit since the movie points to multiple characters as potential suspects for Billy. As such, it's a lot closer to a giallo rather than a normal slasher.
  • Jess is not the usual innocent Final Girl and engages in sex and drinking as much as anyone else, and a major plot point is that she wants to abort her pregnancy, making her boyfriend a suspect for Billy as he disapproves of Jess's decision. Jess's quiet friend Clare is a better fit for the final girl stereotype as Clare isn't much of a drinker due to her upbringing under a strict father, but she ironically ends up as Billy's first victim. Finally, the film ends on an uncertain note, with Billy still alive and Jess's fate left ambiguous.
• Blade Runner:
  • The movie is often regarded as the Trope Maker for the Cyberpunk genre as the cyberpunk genre has adopted a lot of the elements of the film such as futuristic Film Noir. However, unlike cyberpunk proper, which would be further codified in William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, computers and cyberspace play little to no role in Blade Runner (although the concept was already around, if not the term). Moreover, the punk aspects are mostly in the background; the main characters, while streetwise, are either working for "The Man" or are akin to escaped slaves. Roy Batty, one of the replicants on the run, has the punk look but not the right personality or skills. Genetic designer J.F. Sebastian is the closest character in the film to fit the classic cyberpunk image of a computer hacker, but he is ultimately a side character in the larger story.
  • It also takes the Artificial Human concept further than most later works; when the film starts, replicants have already been invented, extensively introduced, and gone rogue. The plot is about destroying rogue replicants, a literal deconstruction. Fantastic Racism is also lampshaded in the introduction, before any replicant even enters the set. Unlike a lot of "emotionless Killer Robot" sci-fi movies, the Replicants are depicted tragically as, essentially, just young children lashing out against their inevitable deaths. Deckard, meanwhile, is shown as a bit of a scumbag and potentially a rapist.
• Blow-Up contains the Unbuilt Trope version of the Enhance Button. It's based on the realistic version of the trope: a photographer in a dark room. Unlike most other versions of the Enhance Button, enhancing the image is a time-consuming process, and the final result is so grainy that the photo might not show what it seems to show. Ultimately, it's like two mimes playing tennis.
• The Blue Lamp: The film is often misremembered as an early example of Retirony but actually subverts it — PC Dixon has just decided not to retire, but to agree to work for another five years, when he is gunned down by an armed robber.
• The Bourne Identity is celebrated for revolutionizing the spy thriller flicks. However, the first film itself is not about spying; Bourne is an assassin and a rogue one at that. Instead of taking down terrorists or criminals, Bourne is only interested in his survival, the primary Big Bad in the movie works for the U.S. government, and he himself is not killed by Bourne, but by a backstabbing partner of his. Likewise, the film goes to great lengths to not only subvert most conventions of the genre, but show (contrary to every spy flick made before or afterwards) just how terrifying someone with such a set of skills can be, even to the main character himself. The people who seem to be the most terrified are the average government workers themselves, who can only sit and watch in horror as one man effortlessly dismantles most of their operations and assets on his own. The main character is incredibly disturbed that he can analyze places and people so efficiently, and can't comprehend basic concepts like just asking someone for a pair of keys. One of the assassins is a university professor who moonlights as a silent, stalking assassin, who expresses remorse upon his plight when fatally wounded. It's the complete antithesis of the following films, which fall into much straighter spy thriller tropes.
• Brazil was one of the big Codifiers of sci-fi Dystopia stories, but feels like a savage deconstruction of them, especially of later Young Adult Literature dystopias: The government/MegaCorp isn’t some big evil force of oppression, just an incompetent Vast Bureaucracy that’s grown too byzantine to function properly. The rebellious hero is a pathetic, middle-aged loser who revolts more as an excuse to indulge his hedonism. The revolutionaries are psychotic terrorists that cause mass destruction and may not actually exist, instead merely being an invented scapegoat for Central Service’s criminal incompetence. The “advanced” technology is not only poorly designed, but also falling apart because nobody’s maintaining it and the infrastructure is just far too ambitious for it to support.
• 1985's The Breakfast Club codified the relationship between teen stock characters that have been prevalent since The '80s— the Stereotypical Nerd, the Jerk Jock, the Freaky Loner, the Alpha Bitch, and the Delinquent. The film also deconstructs the stereotypes, showing that they are not so different after all, and that they are held apart by peer pressure. In fact, living up to those stereotypes and the societal expectations is the source of their misery. The movie both opens and closes with a letter written by the titular Breakfast Club of students, with the letter to their principal saying that the students realize that they're "brainwashed" into being kept apart from people that they could be real friends with. And yet, many 1980s flicks played the stereotypes that this movie examined completely straight.
• Carrie, both the original 1974 novel and its 1976 film version, showed how brutal teenage bullying could get, and how hard it can be for bullying victims to deal with it, as many teachers don't think anything about it, and her fundamentalist mother also abuses her. It was telling that the 2013 film version had to put greater emphasis on the wrongness of bullying than before.
• Citizen Kane.
  • It Was His Sled is a Trope Namer, but the sled is actually the unbuilt trope of the MacGuffin, long before Alfred Hitchcock coined the term. The framing device of the movie is everyone trying to figure out what "Rosebud" is, as it's the last thing that Charles Foster Kane said before he died. However, not only do none of the people who knew Kane best know what "Rosebud" is, but the reporter himself never finds out. The audience is only shown what Rosebud is as the very last shot of the movie, where it's revealed that Rosebud is the sled that Kane had as a young boy. This completely changes the narrative, Kane's characterization, and why his actions were all done throughout the entire movie. And yet, most other films with a MacGuffin lay out very clearly what it is and what it does, despite the progenitor of such a thing hiding it until the last minute.
  • Citizen Kane is the first feature film where Rags to Riches is the central theme. It is thorougly deconstructed with the reveal that wealth only made Kane unhappy. He's Lonely at the Top, the few people who surround him end up leaving him behind when he's such a Jerkass that he drives everyone away, and he finds himself asking what the point of it all was at the very end of his life. Despite being a self-made man and close to becoming President of the United States, it not only didn't make him happy, but it made him miserable. This is why the shot of his sled was so impactful as a twist — it showed that, in the end, all Kane really wanted was happiness, and the more wealthy he became, the further away happiness got from him.
• Clerks was one of the first films with a main character in a Soul-Sucking Retail Job, making Dante suffer multiple indignities as a convenience store clerk. But the film also shows that the person most responsible for Dante's misery is Dante himself, terrible job or otherwise. Dante is a snide, lazy, self-pitying Know-Nothing Know-It-All who chooses to stay in a job that makes him unhappy. While Dante complains a lot, he never tries to improve his life in any meaningful way. It's even pointed out to Dante that although he was asked to cover a shift, he could just as easily have refused. Randall chews out Dante with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech for Dante blaming everyone but himself for his misery, making it seem like his job is way more important than it really is, and blowing all of his problems out of proportion. Randall even highlights Dante's refusal to get over Caitlin, a girl that Dante dated in high school, as Dante has no reason to care about Caitlin any more and really should have gotten over her by now. Randall's speech ends with an Armor-Piercing Question to Dante about what he's doing working at a convenience store if he's really as smart as he thinks he is. Dante doesn't answer, yet the film makes it clear through Dante's Stunned Silence that he doesn't want to admit that Randall has a point. Most films after Clerks depict retail workers and/or those at the bottom of the corporate ladder as some kind of unsung heroes who are being kept down by the system, being a lot smarter than their bosses, and having a sour exterior due to always getting dealt a bad hand. And yet, the movie that did it first argues that while retail does indeed suck, a lot of Dante's problems would disappear if he tried to improve his life instead of constantly complaining about it.invoked
• Conan the Barbarian (1982):
  • The embodiment of 1980s action flicks, Conan the Barbarian (1982) is an introspective, dialogue-light opera exploring Nietzschean ideas about Man versus God/Society. The movie begins with a Nietzsche quote "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" and narrates a Cimmerian legend of how man stole steel from the gods. Throughout the film, Conan questions the worth of his patron god Crom and eventually goes on a quest to overthrow the religious cult of Set, which has spread across the lands.
  • Thanks to Adaptation Displacement, Arnold Schwarzenegger's take on Conan is the best-known depiction of the Barbarian Hero, an archetype codified by the original Conan literature. That said, Arnold's Conan, like his literary counterpart, doesn't follow most conventions of a barbarian. For one, Conan is educated in philosophy and poetry and learned from the war masters how to fight, making him a Genius Bruiser rather than mere Dumb Muscle especially since part of Conan's religion is solving the "riddle of steel" to enter the afterlife. Thus, while Conan relies on his physical prowess to dominate fights, he still utilizes tactics, stealth, and homemade traps to mitigate his enemies' numerical advantage. In addition, Conan usually wears clothing and armor for better protection against the elements and his opponent's steel; the times Conan wears just his iconic loincloth occurs during his most vulnerable moments, such as when he is forced to be a gladiator or after Thulsa Doom's men capture him and strip him of his belongings.
• For all of its flaws, Daredevil (2003) was ahead of its time in many ways, and its deconstruction of Matt Murdock's life and the realities of his chosen path was one of the biggest ones. Instead of glossing over or paying lip service to the life of a (mostly) unpowered vigilante, it dives headlong into it. Matt and his criminal defense practice are financially distressed due to his refusal to represent clients who he knows are guilty; his powers make sensory overload a constant issue (forcing him to sleep in a sensory deprivation tank, and making loud noises and areas with lots of noise sources a Kryptonite Factor); his relationships with others are badly strained and usually transient, and Matt himself is badly scarred, pops painkillers like Skittles and is barely able to drag himself back into his apartment by the end of the night due to pain and exhaustion - an Establishing Character Moment involves Matt spitting out the fragments of several broken teeth before downing painkillers. Furthermore, Elektra's saga is in the same vein: hungry for blood, she trains extensively in order to get her revenge on her father's killer, only to get the wrong guy before starting a fight with the right guy, who takes advantage of her impulsivity and blind rage and effortlessly and sadistically defeats and mortally injures her before leaving her to die (and she does). While the film has quite a few rough spots that are emblematic of the early 2000s that even the Director's Cut doesn't entirely nix (the overuse of nu metal and post-grunge, the costuming, some of the campier dialogue choices and action scenes), general consensus is that it did a lot of things right and has aged surprisingly well in many ways.
• The first Death Wish film pioneered the urban Vigilante Man concept but is far more realistic about the consequences than many of its successors. The protagonist is not a hardened One-Man Army, but an architect who feels sick the first time he actually kills a man. He's clearly in danger every time he goes out, and relies on sneak tactics, rather than direct fighting. While he does become a folk hero, he also gets the attention of the police, who progressively close in on him. The thugs who kill his wife and rape his daughter are not mustache-twirling archvillains, but random lowlifes who are never seen again. Paul never even attempts to get revenge on them directly, because he has no idea who they are or what they looked like. The original book was even blunter about these themes, and its author Brian Garfield was so disappointed with its Misaimed Fandom that he wrote a sequel, Death Sentence (which was later also adapted to film), that straight-up portrayed the vigilante as the villain.
• The Deer Hunter is the film that many critics and movie buffs point to as the first true "Oscar Bait" film. It first released to film critics and Academy members, and only got a wide release after it won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1978. However, one key difference The Deer Hunter had against later Oscar-Baiting films is that the campaign of getting nominated & subsequently winning the Best Picture Award was largely for financial reasons more than anything else. The film had already been completed and was ready for release, but it had a then-high budget of $15 Million^note  For Comparison, Star Wars from the previous year had a fairly-high total production cost of $11 Million... and it had went over-budget and was widely-expected to be a flop and producer Allan Carr felt that it would not make its money back at the box office because of its serious & depressing subject matter. So he opted to gamble on releasing the film to critics first and then to a wider audience hoping its Oscar Buzz would return production costs. And it worked, with The Deer Hunter being one of the Top 10 Highest Grossing Films of 1978 and even becoming popular to general audiences. This is pretty different from many current Oscar Bait movies, which are largely indie-films that have small budgets and are often made solely to get nominated, but hardly get a wide release and have low box-office earnings, rarely being among the Top 30 Highest Grossing Films of their respective years and not being appealing to general audiences, who frequently find them underwhelming.
• Desert Hearts is one of the first mainstream Hollywood movies about an LGBT love affair... where neither dies, there's No Antagonist, and no Downer Ending, elements which have appeared in many, many gay romance films since to the point of cliché.
• Die Hard:
  • The original film actually does a lot to deconstruct the Right Man in the Wrong Place and Action Survivor tropes, which it helped to popularize. It was originally something of a deconstruction of the Hollywood Action Hero popular in The '80s, showing what it would actually be like for a normal police officer to take on a whole gang of terrorists while trapped in a building with no backup (though many of its imitators ignored this, as did some of its later sequels). When John McClane realizes that Nakatomi Plaza has been taken over by terrorists, he immediately realizes that he's in over his head and tries to call for help—but the police don't believe him. And although he wins in the end, a night of battling terrorists with bare feet and no armor leaves him badly roughed up. By the end, he's seriously injured and grateful that it's finally over.
  • The movie was the Trope Codifier for An Asskicking Christmas, and it remains the most famous example in film history. Unlike a lot of its imitators, though, the story actually has an explicit reason for taking place during the Christmas holiday. The Big Bad Hans Gruber chooses Christmas Eve as his date for robbing Nakatomi Plaza's vault because he knows that the CEO will be hosting a Christmas party on the 30th floor—conveniently allowing him to round up all of the employees in one place and take them hostage (which is vital to his plan).
  • The Air-Vent Passageway, which has been played up and given a Shout-Out in many, many works that followed it, comes across as more of a deconstruction than anything. It's made clear that it's not something John wants to do, but he has no other options because he's being cornered near the roof and the only way out is down an elevator shaft with accessible vents. He barely manages to make it into one of the vents, which he uses to hide in, not travel somewhere or get the drop on a terrorist. It's incredibly cramped (leading to him famously complaining that, "Now I know what a TV dinner feels like."), he barely shimmies into the vent before the terrorists spot his light source from an upper floor, and he very nearly gets caught (with him even ready to try and shoot his way out) before their attention is diverted elsewhere. Far from the numerous imitators, it's made clear that this is something he doesn't want to try again. And finally, just crawling through a few feet of the vent leads his shirt to noticeably change color once he climbs back out.
  • Casting Bruce Willis in the main role was considered revolutionary, because he was seen as a comedic TV actor beforehand - reports even say that the first trailers had people laughing when his face first appeared as the action movie lead. But his Deadpan Snarker wiseass is a major part of what made the character more relatable, as it contributed to his shaky relationship with his wife. But, especially through his relationship with Sgt. Powell, that sense of humor is shown to be what he needed to keep himself sane in a stressful situation, as he was much more serious when things got serious and by the end he is on the verge of a complete mental breakdown. Imitators tend to show their hero as badass precisely because they keep on wisecracking during all these action moments, evoking that they've Seen It All and are unfazed by the carnage, making them funny but not as relatable.
    • Al's backstory also reflects the effect being a cop has on your mental health. He was a gung-ho beat cop, but after using his gun for the first time against some random teen punk, he was so shaken that he became a fat, junk food guzzling, desk jockey.
• The Dirty Dozen simultaneously popularised and deconstructed the Trading Bars for Stripes and Boxed Crook tropes, showing that, sure you can send a band of violent criminals on a highly dangerous mission, and they may even succeed, but it won't go smoothly or end well.
  • The eponymous Dozen are the worst convicts in the military prison system and almost half were on death row. They’re not selected because their criminal histories give them an edge or specialist skills over everyday troops, they have been chosen because the operation is a Suicide Mission and they’re the only ones desperate enough (and expendable enough) to take it.
  • When they are sent to a military base to begin their training, they immediately antagonize everyone, and get into open fights with the regular troops, culminating in an outright brawl with actual shots fired, which almost gets the mission cancelled and all of them sent back to prison.
  • Although the Dozen manage to gel fairly well while stateside, and perform well in their training exercises, once they get deployed it all quickly goes to Hell. Because they have barely any actual paratrooper experience, one of them botches his landing and dies before the mission even starts; the Psycho Party Member goes rogue, murders a civilian and starts indiscriminately shooting everybody, and has to be killed just to make him stop; his rampage alerts the Germans to their presence and the mission turns into a bloody shooting battle rather than the stealthy commando mission they planned; and, while the mission is ultimately a success, only one of the Dozen manages to escape with his life.
• Dracula (1931) is the Trope Codifier for the Classical Movie Vampire. But it's heavily implied that this version of Dracula adopted the outfit and demeanor he's seen with in the movie to better fit in with English high society — after all, many scenes of him socializing after arriving in London have everybody wearing evening dress. In other words, Dracula's not dressing and acting the way he does because it's his personal style or because he wants to identify himself as a vampire — he's doing it because he wants to blend in.
• Dr. Strangelove:
  • The movie created General Ripper. But the Trope Namer isn't a bombastic military man, but acts calm, collected, and suave. The keyword being "acts". Ripper's ability to hide his nervous breakdown from the psychological evaluations, Mandrake, and everybody else allowed him to be in the position of power he needed to be in to set his demented plot into motion. The news of his insanity was a shock to everyone involved. Buck Turgidson could be seen as the more standard version of this trope, with his loud threats against Communism, but was (wisely) ignored by the diplomatic President Muffley. And ultimately, Turgidson came to realize the disaster that would unfold.
  • The movie was also one of the first to use the Pointless Doomsday Device. However, the film explains why the Russians would build an apocalyptic weapon they wouldn't use: they couldn't afford the arms race anymore, and so they built the ultimate deterrent to prevent a world war. However, they chose not to tell anyone about it because they wanted it to be a surprise. Ironically, it is the titular Mad Scientist who chews them out for this (for additional irony, the URSS did have a similar device built and kept secret, however in real life their reason was to deter soldiers from reckless nuclear aggression, both by having an ensure retaliation to deny the "if we don't strike first we will not be able to retaliate" mentality, and due to fear of the USA having similar safety measures in place. That's right, in real life the apocalyptic weapon was used as an ultimate deterrent for their own troops, not for foreign nations).
• Drunken Master, the first film of the "Jackie Chan learns Kung Fu" series. In it, Jackie's character was very good at fighting to begin with (he bests his teachers), and was actually sent to the Training from Hell as punishment, though ultimately he ended up becoming much better at Kung Fu than before. But in many subsequent films, Jackie plays an absolute novice with no previous fighting skills who suddenly becomes the best fighter in a very short time, much less time than in that first movie.
• While the 1969 film Easy Rider was not the Ur-Example of the Badass Biker, it became the Trope Codifier, and an inspiration for biker culture since that year. While the main characters get rich from drug trafficking, and occasionally provoke and scare people along the road, they are mostly good-natured, in contrast to the intolerant, violent locals. While the bikers have their moments of joy on the journey, it does not turn out nearly as glamorous as they had hoped for, with a seemingly pointless Downer Ending.
• Equilibrium:
  • As the Trope Codifier for Gun Kata, unlike the many works that since imitated it, it actually provided an in-universe explanation for the fighting style. Since the Grammaton Clerics are agents with perfect emotional control, they are able to use that ability to perfectly read what the attacker's next move is going to be, and thus position their bodies out of the predicted trajectory of return fire, resulting in the many poses and stances the art creates. Notably, the art performed by the main protagonist, John Preston, gradually becomes less robotic and more fluid as he starts to become attuned with his emotions, culminating in the hallway fight, where he exceeds the other Clerics due to channeling all his emotions into Tranquil Fury. Very few works give such an explanation for this fighting style beyond Rule of Cool (though considering how implausible it is, the explanation given in the film may also come across as simple cool factor as well).
  • Looking at the movie now, in the wake of the wave of teenage dystopia novels and films that have saturated the market following the runaway success of The Hunger Games, it can also come across as a subversion of several of the cliches present in those works. The main hero, John Preston, is not a young teenager, but rather a full grown single father, and one of the head agents of the totalitarian regime at that. Rather than being some sort of Messiah or rebellious spirit, blessed with either a unique special ability or personality trait, Preston is more or less the same as the other Grammaton Clerics, and his Gun Kata skills, while no doubt impressive, are hardly noteworthy in the context of the film's world, where such an art is mandatory for the defensive arts of the Clerics, and he is also completely loyal to the cause of the government at first. While other such stories have the main character motivated to go against the system by the words of a rebel or love interest telling them of their uniqueness, Preston's comes about as a result of a complete accident; missing a dose of Prozium. The character that does fit into more of the molds of the typical YA dystopian hero, Errol Partridge, is killed by Preston not even a third of the way through the movie. Instead of herding dissenters and children into some sort of separate society or murder arena like in so many other YA Dystopia stories, the rebels are instead dealt with by either straight up execution or, in the case of the children, educated from birth to follow the system blindly. Furthermore, other films portray the main hero or heroine as being in a forbidden romance that manages to pay off in the end, with said love interest also being extremely admirable and able to relate to the protagonist. Here however, the one presented as the possible love interest, Mary O'Brien, is portrayed as being rather unstable and violent because of her rebellious nature. Ultimately, she is killed via live cremation before a romance could've bloomed between her and Preston, with the latter failing to save her. Finally, the rebellion, which is usually spearheaded by the main character, has already started before the events of the movie, and their victory only comes about due to one of the members of the totalitarian regime joining them. In fact, this is even the plan of the villain, so as to have Preston unknowingly act as a sleeper agent. The only thing that saves him and the resistance is by modifying his emotions to allow him to perform the same acts of Gun Kata he used when purged of feelings. It can be a bit surprising then to find out that the film was released in 2002, about a decade before the YA Dystopia trend took off.
• Escape from New York:
  • It features one of the (if not the) earliest uses of an Explosive Leash in fiction, but actively subverts the concept of it. Unlike most modern works, which depict it as the main tool to keep slaves and prisoners in line, it's used as a last resort option by Bob Hauk and Dr. Cronenberg when it's made clear that Snake isn't going to be compliant. Even then, Cronenberg is extremely dubious about the leash's potential, and has to be coerced into it by Hauk. The device itself isn't so much an "explosive" as a tool that bursts the implanted individual's main arteries, which won't instantly kill him but will cause him to bleed out in under a minute. Cronenberg also makes it clear that the device can't be disarmed until it hits a 15-minute window just before detonation, which is the only point at which the leash can be demagnetized. Finally, unlike most "leashes", the devices can't be permanently removed from the subject once they're implanted.
  • More generally, it can also be seen as the prototype for an archetypal '80s action movie plot, in which a lone American operative is sent into dangerous enemy territory to either rescue someone (in this case the President) or recover something valuable (in this case a breakthrough in unlimited clean energy). Yet Snake Plissken is anything but the sort of gung-ho hero commonly seen in such movies. He has to be coerced into it via the aforementioned Explosive Leash, as he was originally being sent to Manhattan as his prison sentence. Furthermore, he's played by Kurt Russell, who in 1981 was still seen as a clean-cut Disney star^note Younger readers, imagine Finn Wolfhard or Olivia Rodrigo playing Snake in a remake of Escape from New York, and even now that he's better known for his roles in action movies, he's hardly what most people picture when they think of a muscle-bound Hollywood Action Hero from The '80s. Moreover, having been written in the aftermath of Watergate, it has no time for the Patriotic Fervor that was characteristic of the genre. The US government in Escape is shown to be corrupt and authoritarian, its decision to wall off Manhattan and turn it into a prison island portrayed as proof of such, and when Snake finally rescues the President, his moral code causes him to screw him over out of spite at the end rather than remain complicit in a system he sees as evil. And that's before getting into the sequel, Escape from L.A., in which the government was explicitly villainous.
• The Exorcist is one of the all-time classic Religious Horror films, and codified the Demonic Possession/exorcism subgenre in particular. However, as opposed to most films in the genre, the priests who exorcised the antagonist demon were killed in the process rather than living out to the end to proclaim God's victory. In addition to the Bittersweet Ending, the film's conclusion gives out an eerie tone rather than one of triumph; the good guys win, but they've lost a lot in the process, and the sequels would show that the battle against Pazazu had not ended. It plays out like a Catholic version of a Cosmic Horror Story, one in which humanity is weak and small in the face of terrifying demonic forces and can only claim minor victories at best. Rather than merely showing a stage of supernatural phenomenons directly leading to the exorcism, the film deconstructs the process required for an exorcism to be ordained. The victim Regan has to go through extensive psychiatric evaluation and physical examinations — including two brutal scenes where she's given a spinal tap, a painful procedure that has her cringing in pain — before the priests risk subjecting her to a dangerous ritual.
  • More specifically, Lankester Merrin has become the basis of virtually every priest involved in a Hollywood Exorcism. Not only did Merrin die, but he completely failed to actually perform a successful exorcism; only Damien Karras's Heroic Sacrifice manages to defeat Pazuzu.
• "Eye of the Devil" predates "The Wicker Man (1973)" by seven years and later works with similar premises such as "Film/Midsommar" by over fifty years but has little in common with many films that followed. For a start, Phillipe, rather than an unwitting outsider who is preyed upon by sinister cult members to be their human sacrifice and doesn't know until it's too late, is himself a devout member of the faith who is fully aware of what is required from the beginning and goes to his fate without hesitation, even turning down the chance to escape, and is a middle-aged man with a wife and children rather than a religious celibate like Neil Howie or a dumb frat boy like Christian. The focus is more on his wife Catherine who is met with behavior that ranges from unnerving to outright hostile but which is designed to frighten her off and ensure she doesn't stop the ceremony. It's also established clearly that they had no intention of hurting her, with Pere Dominic even reaming out Odile for nearly getting her killed just to be cruel and the film ends with her and her children leaving unharmed, albeit with the implication that their son is now being groomed to take over Philippe's role. And unlike most modern horror stories, there is only one death and even Phillipe's sacrifice is not a gruesome immolation or extended torture but a simple arrow to the heart which kills him instantly and which he faces calmly.
• Falling Down: The character of D-Fens is seen as a precursor to "angry white males", a victim of economic injustice who lashes out at what he deems to be an unfair world. But he is largely a deconstruction of such a mentality: Foster wasn't a victim, just an ill-tempered bigot who scared his ex-wife and his mother, and started taking out his frustrations on total strangers. At the end of the movie, Prendergast seems disappointed at how petty most of Foster's complaints are, and tells him that his frustrations didn't justify his behavior. Foster, for his part, seems genuinely surprised to realize that he's the bad guy in this story.
• Watching the original Friday the 13th (1980) today, it can be strange to note just how unlike many other '80s slasher movies it actually is.
  • The Friday the 13th series is widely seen as a Trope Codifier for the Sex Signals Death trope in the slasher genre, but the original film actually had a surprisingly nuanced (and justified) take on it. The killer, Pamela Voorhees, specifically targeted lustful teenagers because her son Jason drowned in Crystal Lake after his camp counselors snuck off to have sex when they were supposed to be watching him. Even in later movies, where Jason became the Breakout Villain, it was heavily implied that Jason targeted lustful teenagers partly to uphold his mother's legacy, and partly because he was essentially a traumatized child who never got to grow up, and sex was so far beyond his comprehension that it terrified him. When later slashers from outside the Friday series took the more surface-level elements of this trope, they were often accused of misogyny and reactionary fantasy. It's ironic that most of them were inspired by a film about a mother on a bloody Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Speaking of Pamela Voorhees, she was almost an inversion of many of the tropes of the slasher villains who followed in her wake. For one thing, she was a middle-aged woman, which is still a rarity in the genre. Furthermore, many '80s slashers wore masks but otherwise had their identities known for much of the film. Not only did Pamela not wear a mask or otherwise try to conceal her identity, but while we get several Murderer P.O.V. shots, the killer's identity is a mystery for most of the film, a setup that wouldn't really become popular in slasher films until the '90s when Scream popularized it. While Michael Myers had a profound influence on many later slasher villains, including Pamela's son Jason, Pamela herself did not, to the point where "who was the killer in the original Friday the 13th?" became a common trick question (as seen in the aforementioned Scream).
  • There's also the fact that the original film actually gave Pamela Voorhees a surprisingly coherent and logical (well, logical to her...) motivation for her bloody rampage, as well as a well-defined reason for targeting the specific people that she did. Since then, it's become something of a widely accepted convention that "true" slashers don't need a reason for killing people, and that they're just evil for the sake of being evil. The first movie's attempt to explain Pamela's murderousness might seem like a subversion of this idea—but since Friday the 13th (along with Halloween) created the archetypal slasher film, the filmmakers were free to tweak their conventions as much as they wanted.
  • Alice is the Final Girl of the first film, but lacks a few of the obvious traits associated with that character type. For one, she has no problem smoking and drinking with the rest of her friends, and doesn't seem to be any more or less responsible than them; in fact, it's hinted that she could be having an affair with Steve. She's also blonde, while the rest of the female victims are brunette. While she doesn't show her breasts on camera, she does appear in a bikini and is about to strip^note The characters play strip Monopoly in the same vein as strip poker when the storm interrupts her. Laurie Strode from Halloween is a far more archetypal Final Girl than Alice.
  • A pretty widely recognized cliché of slasher films is that slashers are both unstoppable and impossible to kill, partly to make them seem scarier to the audience and partly because they wouldn't be able to make any more sequels if the heroes ever killed them. Despite being one of the franchises that codified this convention, the Friday the 13th series didn't start portraying Jason as a superhuman killing machine until six movies in — and unlike most of its imitators, it actually provided a justification for why Jason was like that. Jason gets Killed Off for Real in the fourth movie, the fifth movie has a copycat killer as the villain, and the whole premise of the sixth movie is that he gets resurrected as an unkillable zombie after his corpse is struck by a bolt of lightning.
  • Another slasher film Cliché is the killer moving slowly. But Jason runs full-tilt on multiple occasions throughout the franchise, especially in the early movies.
  • Ralph serves as the Harbinger of Impending Doom in the first film, warning the counselors that they're going to die — and as a result, becomes one of the main suspects the minute people start dying.
  • Imagine a Friday the 13th movie in which the main characters are aware of the existence of slasher movie cliches, remark that the situation they're in is something straight out of a horror movie, and make jokes about how being scared is a strange idea of fun and how the only reason they're digging up Jason again is because of money — at times while staring directly into the camera. That movie actually exists, and believe it or not, it wasn't made in response to how Scream popularized that kind of self-referential "meta" horror movie. It's Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, made just after the franchise's commercial peak a full decade before Scream. In fact, Kevin Williamson, the writer of Scream, directly cited Jason Lives as a major influence on his own groundbreaking screenplay.
• Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket is the Trope Codifier for Drill Sergeant Nasty in American media. But rather than being portrayed as a necessary evil whose methods come through in toughening up the recruits, his methods lead to one of the recruits going insane, then snapping and killing Hartman, then himself, while the rest are decidedly unhinged afterwards. As such, Hartman is a demonstrable failure of a drill sergeant, yet most works that use such a character after this film was released usually don't show the negative consequences of this type of behavior. Hartman's actor was R. Lee Ermey, a retired Marine staff sergeant and drill instructor, who has gone on record stating that Hartman's methods are not normal. Ermey even added that such actions by a drill sergeant would actually result in immediate dismissal or even a court martial if used in real life.
• Funny Games is a 1997 Psychological Thriller with a postmodern premise: a family is held hostage by two psychopaths, one of whom can Break the Fourth Wall to interact with the audience. While the movie promises violence, all of the kills are covered up by Gory Discretion Shots or undone by Paul's remote control, subverting Gorn and mocking the audience for wanting it. In addition, the villains, Paul and Peter, admit that they are only torturing the family For the Evulz with Paul reminding the viewers that he's also trying to entertain them and asking them if the movie had enough violence. While deconstructing the thriller genre, the film critiqued violent movies in general, but viewers of the film's 2007 Shot-for-Shot Remake interpreted it more specifically as a deconstruction of Torture Porn movies that were popular in the mid-2000s.
• Garden State helped codify the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope with Natalie Portman's character Sam, a free-spirited woman who helps a depressed loner rediscover the joy in his life. While she plays the trope completely straight, her romantic foil's emotional issues are played much more seriously than you might expect. Andrew "Large" Largeman isn't just an awkward nerd looking for love—he suffers from a legitimate brain disorder that makes it nearly impossible for him to feel emotion, thanks to his psychiatrist father prescribing him lithium as a child. Despite the film's generally humorous tone, it examines the implications of this in full: Large's father is taken to task for what amounts to abuse, and it's heavily implied that Large cuts himself off from his emotions to avoid facing his guilt over accidentally paralyzing his mother as a child. Plenty of Manic Pixie Dream Girls might fall for guys with depression, but it's rare to see them fall for a victim of severe emotional trauma.
• Gaslight:
  • The film is the Trope Namer and Trope Maker for Gaslighting and yet what gives it the name—Gregory causing the house's gas lights to flicker—is done unintentionally as it's just an accidental side effect of Gregory trying to find the jewels by turning on the attic lights. In addition, while Gregory did anticipate that Paula would hear his footsteps in the attic, he did not foresee that Paula would see the gas lights dim as he doesn't understand how the gas lights actually work. As a result, Gregory's servants, Nancy and Elizabeth, don't deny that the gas lights are dimming when Paula notices, and instead they offer Paula plausible if incorrect explanations on why the gas lights would fade at certain times; in fact, Elizabeth's explanation almost reassures Paula of her mental stability. The original play makes Gregory's ignorance more blatant as the Detective has to explain to Gregory's play counterpart how turning on a set of gas lights will make another set of gas lights dim due to gas redirection.
  • Gregory also employs handpicked servants to facilitate his psychological abuse, but the servants in question are Unwitting Pawns and unintentionally gaslight Paula because Gregory manipulated them into believing that Paula was insane. For example, Elizabeth only believes that Paula is hearing imaginary sounds because Elizabeth herself can't hear the same noises due to her partial deafness, which was taken into account by Gregory. Ironically, when Elizabeth does intentionally gaslight Paula, she does so to protect Paula from Gregory.
• Gentleman's Agreement was one of the first Hollywood movies to tackle discrimination. But while most anti-racism films explore the more explicit acts of racism, Gentleman's Agreement focuses on the more implicit and "respectful" kinds of bigotry. While pretending to be Jewish to learn more about antisemitism, Phil doesn't encounter serious discrimination, but he is treated very differently by those around him: he tries make a reservation at a fancy hotel, only for the clerk to try and redirect him to a cheaper motel without telling him why. His upper class girlfriend Kathy, while not out and proud bigot, is happy to enable antisemitism to maintain her social standing, and his own supposedly progressive newspaper forced his Jewish secretary into getting a more anglicized name in order to be hired. The film comes to a conclusion that those who enable bigotry are as bad as those who are bigots.
• Get Carter feels at times like a deconstruction of the typical British gangster flick that emerged in the late 90's due to directors like Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughan. The villains are shown as ruthless and incredibly sleazy - the killings are done in a very matter-of-fact manner with little blood and no dramatic tricks, it's set in bleak Newcastle rather than London, there is a complete absence of any pop soundtrack or any form of music and the lead character is cold-hearted and utterly ruthless, not shown as any better than the men he kills. Were it made today, it would almost certainly be a Genre Deconstruction. Yet it was made in 1971, long before British gangster films became big, and was instead a reaction to the increasingly lighthearted caper films of the previous decades. Michael Caine is said to have insisted on making a film to depict gangsters the way he knew them as a condition for appearing in the Lighter and Softer The Italian Job.
• Glengarry Glen Ross does this for the motivational coaching genre, years before it was commonplace and glamorized by films like Boiler Room and The Wolf of Wall Street. Hotshot salesman Blake (Alec Baldwin) delivers a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech to a group of sad-sack real estate brokers, imploring them to "Always Be Closing" and motivating them to do better with the promise of access to better leads. While the scene is typically held up as the most memorable thing in the film (to the point that it was added into the original stage play because of its popularity), it reads like a subversion of the industry it was designed to puff up. For one, it was a complete failure: Blake's speech doesn't help the protagonists to make good sales — only to make more bad sales. Blake threatened that everyone but the top two sellers would be fired as incentive, which only made things worse by adding unnecessary amounts of stress. When this happens, Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) is so far ahead of everyone else in terms of sales that the others realize that they're not fighting for two spots at the company, but one. Eventually, two of the brokers get so desperate that they perform a theft that results in their arrest. Blake's speech focused only on motivation and failed to acknowledge the protagonists' real problems. Giving them motivation and only motivation would not help if they still don't know how to sell and their leads are worthless anyway. Despite David Mamet intending Blake's speech and his character to be everything wrong with corporate America, this one scene still gets taken way out of context by managers looking to motivate their employees, and later films portrayed the kind of speech Blake gives to be inspiring and uplifting instead of depressing and needlessly antagonistic.
• Gojira:
  • The originator of the Godzilla franchise is nothing like the kaiju genre it spawned. Godzilla is a clear metaphor for the horrors of nuclear weaponry, with the nuclear bombing of Japan less than 10 years past at the time. Godzilla is an evil abomination of nature, and his rampage is not treated as a gleeful spectacle of destruction, the film including extended scenes of little kids painfully dying of radiation burns and other horrors.
  • Both the Trope Maker and the Trope Namer for the Godzilla Threshold, it went much farther in examining the moral and psychological implications of such an idea than many works that came after it. In addition to examining the political ramifications of the Oxygen Destroyer used to kill Godzilla, its inventor, Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, is depicted as a tragic, self-loathing figure who genuinely hates the fact that his only great creation is a horrific weapon of war, as he's also a battle-scarred veteran who witnessed the worst of World War II as a young man. Serizawa's hatred of his Oxygen Destroyer is so great that it destroys his relationship with his intended bride, Emiko, and he's so devoted to protecting the world from his creation that he only agrees to use it against Godzilla after destroying his notes, ultimately committing a Heroic Suicide in the final scene so that the secret of the Oxygen Destroyer dies with him.
  • King Kong vs. Godzilla, while not the first of its kind, popularized movies with giant monsters fighting each other, and is one of the earliest examples of two popular icons duking it out, but the movie feels like a parody of these two tropes. The entire joke of the movie's crossover is a greedy businessman by the name of Mr. Tako brings King Kong to Japan to fight Godzilla for ratings, but when Kong and Godzilla first meet Godzilla just shoots Atomic breath at King Kong, and the ape leaves seeing no point in fighting another strong monster for no reason, like most animals would. The only reason they do fight is that humanity slides King Kong down a hill into Godzilla. And unlike most crossover fights, there's an actual winner - King Kong. Furthermore, despite being one of the first most important big-screen crossovers, it actually has a franchise buildup other modern crossover movies are criticised for, such as the DC Extended Universe - that it happened incredibly early instalment wise. How early? This is Godzilla's third onscreen appearance, and Kong's second (for the latter, there was the Son Of Kong, but that didn't feature Kong directly, just his hypothetical offspring). This even makes it line up perfectly with the MonsterVerse's order of featuring the two Kaiju, before and on their crossover battle.
• The Graduate:
  • It popularised the Runaway Bride trope — and the sequence of Benjamin convincing his love interest to run out on her wedding is iconic. But its numerous imitators forget to include the part that happens next; once they're on the bus and the thrill wears off, the two share a look that says "did we really do the right thing?" — and the film ends ambiguously.
  • The film was the Trope Namer for Mrs. Robinson. But it isn't portrayed just for fanservice, although Mrs. Robinson is certainly attractive, but also for drama. Mrs. Robinson was forced into a Shotgun Wedding after having a child out of wedlock, and she wants to have an affair with Ben out of dissatisfaction with her marriage. It also portrays the consequences of a young man having an affair with a married woman: when Ben falls for Elaine, Mrs. Robinson lies and tells Elaine and Mr. Robinson that he took advantage of her. The latter threatens to sue him if he ever comes near his family again, and Elaine initially wants nothing to do with him.
• The Green Mile is the most famous cinematic example of the Magical Negro trope, but it tempers the trope much more negatively than future imitators. Rather than a saintly, elderly old man who dispenses wisdom to the white characters, John Coffey is a simple-minded manchild rapist and murderer or so everyone assumes at first. In addition, his magical abilities that help the white people are shown to be agonizingly painful for him, to the extent that he tells them his execution would come as a mercy for all the pain he's been forced to absorb. Most other examples of the trope also forget the fact that John Coffey is capable of harming as well as helping the white people around him, like when he uses his powers to force Percy to gun down the real killer, Wild Bill Wharton, destroying Percy's mind in the process. The white main character gets immortality from Coffey's powers, but he views it as a curse rather than a blessing, telling his friend that he feels God is punishing him for allowing John Coffey's execution.
• Groundhog Day: The film is the Trope Namer for the plot in which a person repeats the same day over and over. Being a selfish and cynical man, Phil milks it for all it's worth: robbing from an armored truck, sleeping with random women, and stuffing his face with junk food. His attempt to get close to Rita by exploiting the loop to learn about her fails because she thinks he's stalking her. He's quickly driven over the edge and desperately tries to kill himself, to no avail. The original idea was that Phil was cursed by a jilted ex-lover. He eventually uses the time to learn about the people in Punxsutawney, as well playing the piano and learning poetry. Stephen Tobolowsky, the guy who played Ned Ryerson, guesses that Phil spent 10,000 years in the loop, since it takes a lot of time to learn those skills. Harold Ramis puts Phil's time at about ten years.
• Halloween (1978):
  • The film played a major role in defining the Slasher Movie… except the killer's not all that invincible, the main adult character is actively hunting the killer down and saves the day at the end instead of being useless, the Final Girl is as much a bookish, socially awkward nerd as she is a "good girl", the violence is almost bloodless by modern standards, there are only four onscreen deaths, the killer has nothing even resembling a Freudian Excuse^note At least, not in this film. The sequels would reveal that Michael was Laurie Strode's long-lost brother and, later, that he was a pawn of a cult — reveals that would prove highly divisive, and which even John Carpenter himself expressed Creator Backlash towards. Two separate Soft Reboots, Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later and the 2018 film, hit the reset button for this reason; while H20 kept the second film and its reveal that Laurie and Michael were siblings, it ignored the entire "Curse of Thorn" storyline, while the 2018 film went further and also ignored the second film., and he turns out to be very normal-looking under his mask.
  • The vast majority of slasher series are Villain-Based Franchises with few (if any) major recurring characters apart from the killer, to the point that it's considered subversive if a series of slasher films has a consistent hero or protagonist (as the Scream movies do). ^note The Friday the 13th, Child's Play, and Hellraiser franchises also feature Tommy Jarvis, Andy Barclay, and Kirsty Cotton, respectively—but Tommy wasn't introduced until the fourth movie (and he vanished after the sixth movie), Andy briefly vanished after the third movie (only returning for a cameo in the sixth and a supporting role in the seventh), and Kirsty mostly vanished after the second movie (only returning for a supporting role in the sixth). But the Halloween series was actually one of the first slashers to do this, featuring two consistent heroes: Laurie Strode and Dr. Sam Loomis. Laurie and Loomis also differ pretty significantly from most subsequent slasher heroes in that they're not just two randomly targeted victims who manage to survive by grit and luck, but both of them have deeply personal connections to Michael Myers: Loomis is his psychologist, and Laurie is his long-lost sister (although this was a retcon introduced in the second movie, and the 2018 reboot dropped it). Even when Laurie was absent from the fourth, fifth, and sixth films, her daughter took over her role as the protagonist, effectively framing the series as a family saga, which is still rare in slashers today. It can seem like an intentional subversion of the standard slasher formula—but Halloween was one of the films that created that formula, and was free to tweak it as much as it wanted.
• On paper, Maude from Harold and Maude sounds like a textbook example of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a quirky, spontaneous love interest who gives the bleak male protagonist a new hunger for life... except the film was released in 1971, she's at least forty years' Harold's senior, and that oh-so-charming spontaneity leads to her suddenly committing suicide.
  • Harold is notable for being an Emo Teen back before emo was even a thing. He's rich, very depressed, and obsessed with death, to the point of repeatedly staging his suicide.
• Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer: Being one of the first of its kind, the "serial killer lead" subgenre of the Villain Protagonist genre, Henry gives us one of the darkest and most realistic examples in the entire history of the genre.
  • Whereas most of the serial killer and slasher films of the 90s and onward have us almost root for the villain and may sometimes even give them a sympathetic motive, here we're given a psychopathic serial killer character in its rawest form and the result is more sickening than entertaining. Unlike such protagonists as Patrick Bateman, Henry is socially awkward, plain-looking, not particularly intelligent, and incredibly vicious.
  • The film also retroactively deconstructs the theme often found in those type of slasher flicks: the good girl breaking down the defenses of the serial killer. Instead, Henry sees Becky as more of a nuisance than a friend or love interest and kills her in the end. Seriously, Becky's fate would almost seem like a fuck you to Book!Clarice Starling and Debra Morgan if it wasn't for the fact that Hannibal and Darkly Dreaming Dexter wouldn't come about for over 10 years after this film was finished.
  • The ending also serves as a prototype for the Bad Serial Killer vs. Worse Serial Killer that has become a staple of the genre. Henry and Otis' fight is brutal, ugly, and random and neither side has any moral high ground. And since Henry winds up just killing Becky later the same night, it's completely pointless. Watching this and then watching Dexter square off against the Doomsday Killer makes the latter seem almost childish by comparison.
• Home Alone was the movie that kickstarted the "kid empowerment" genre of the 1990s, but at the same time, it felt like a deconstruction. While Kevin is quite intelligent for a kid his age, it's also shown the circumstances that led to him being home alone in the first place, and how hopelessly out of his league Kevin was when a genuine threat showed up. Later "kid empowerment" movies, including those that starred Macaulay Culkin, either missed the point of such movies or made the kids into Invincible Heroes, despite Home Alone showing its Kid Hero protagonist as extremely vulnerable.
  • Most films of the genre feature clueless adults who are completely unable to come to the kid's aid. Kevin being home alone and not being able to get any kind of aid is not the result of plot stupidity but because of a series of freak occurrences: Kevin had a poor relationship with the rest of his family and was punished by being forced to sleep in the attic after making a spectacle of himself at dinner. During the night Kevin and his family slept, a storm knocked out the power. This deactivated the alarm clocks, causing everyone to oversleep and scramble to get to the airport. In the scramble, they end up leaving Kevin behind after miscounting the number of kids present. And they are unable to get in touch with him because the phone lines are still down. Kate, Kevin's mom, immediately puts herself on the next flight back home, and most of the family become worried sick about him as well.
  • Kevin doesn't seek out any other adults because most of his neighborhood is absent for the holidays, he is scared that the police would arrest him after Kevin (accidentally) stole a toothbrush, the Wet Bandits were constantly stalking him and Harry at one point impersonated a cop to gain access to his house, and he was downright terrified of Old Man Marley after hearing some nasty rumors about him. As a result, Kevin doesn't call the cops despite the Wet Bandits clearly stalking his house out of fear of the police.
  • Instead of having wild and improbable fantasies like most other kid-empowered films, Kevin does mostly rather mundane things around the house, such as... jumping on the bed, sledding down the stairs, or eating tubs of ice cream while watching (somewhat) violent films. Because he is, well, home alone, he needs to find food and steal Buzz's money to survive. Kevin also gains a measure of independence: learning to do his own shopping, decorating his house, overcoming his fear of the basement furnace, and starts appreciating his family more.
  • While the Wet Bandits are bumbling and make quite a few mistakes^note like flooding the homes they rob as a kind of Calling Card, they're not completely Stupid Crooks. It is shown they spent weeks planning their heist of Kevin's neighborhood, even figuring out the time period when the Christmas lights would automatically turn on. Despite Kevin's attempts at deception, they still are able to figure out he's home alone.
  • When Kevin realizes a pair of thieves are trying to rob his family, he reacts like any other kid would: he tries to hide from them. His next plan was to try and trick Harry and Marv into thinking there are adults home, and only when that failed did he try and fight. And despite all the traps and Amusing Injuries Kevin inflicted on Harry and Marv, the traps don't work; Kevin fails to stop them from breaking in and kidnapping him. Kevin is completely outmatched physically by the two grown men, and he would have been killed if it weren't for Old Man Marley coming in to rescue him. Also, Kevin's traps were relatively simple strategies like knocking them down the stairs and tripping them with toy cars.
  • The film's message is that while your family can drive you crazy, they're still important and you should try and work your problems out. Kevin comes to regret his bratty behavior and after chatting with Old Man Marley, he realizes he loves and misses his family and doesn't want to be estranged from them. Kate comes to regret her own mistakes and she and Kevin reconcile with one another at the end of the film.
• Much like Halloween (1978) subverts Slasher movie expectations by focusing on investigation and suspense rather than Gorn, Horrors of Malformed Men differs from the gory Japanese B-movie genre it inspired - it's an adaptation of two mystery novels, therefore most of the movie is focused on investigation rather than violence. When the titular horrors show up, they're portrayed as tragic and emotionally taxing to the protagonist - the opposite of the gleeful approach to violence seen in B-Movies like Tokyo Gore Police and Samurai Zombie.
• The Fifties Alien Invasion craze began with It Came from Outer Space. (The War of the Worlds (1953) came first, but was an adaptation of a 1897 novel.) Thing is, the "invasion" in the film is nothing of the sort. The aliens are neither conquerors nor infiltrators, but stranded travelers trying to repair their ship. While they do take hostages, they're more than willing to release them in exchange for a promise of safety. The vigilante mob led by the local sheriff turns out to be a much more serious problem. The film was a reaction to the xenophobia that dominated the American consciousness during the early 1950's; portraying the outsiders as being as scared of us as we were of them was a fairly bold statement for its time. But as the Cold War worsened, the genre's priorities shifted to milking the Red Scare for all it was worth.
• It's a Wonderful Life is one of the first – and very few – films to tackle the subject of holiday depression, long before cynical takes on Christmas became common in pop culture. But unlike many of those later films, this one does not play the depression for comedy, although there are some welcome moments of comic relief here and there.
  • The film is also the Trope Namer for a person learning what their life would be like if they were never born. But the scenario is different from the usual portrayal: the film explores what it would take to drive a decent person to throw their life away: George Bailey had to sacrifice his wants and needs to protect his town from the avarice of Mr. Potter, to help his brother, and to provide for his children, and has been unable to enjoy the thrills and luxuries he wanted. George is driven to despair when his uncle misplaces $8,000 (which Potter steals), and the stress of the legal trouble leads him to take his anger out on his family. Potter nastily tells him he's worth more dead than alive, which eventually drives George to suicide, thinking all his sacrifices have been for nothing. Clarence, the Guardian Angel, shows how George's absence had consequences for everyone: his brother Harry died when George didn't save him (as did everyone on a troop ferry that Harry had saved from a Kamikaze attack), Mary never found love, his boss Mr. Gower ended up accidentally poisoning a kid, Uncle Billy ended up in an asylum, and Potter was able to turn Bedford Falls into a desolate slum without George there to provide people loans. The other characters, not knowing George in this alternate reality, get confused and annoyed by this odd stranger who acts like their best friend, which adds to George's growing despair. The film isn't feelgood pap, but a warning against throwing your life away.
• The 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer is the Trope Codifier of Taking the Kids and custody drama, which, as times change, has become an established trope. However, Mr. Kramer's Character Development creates a plot twist which does not change the legal situation, although it is enough to change Ms. Kramer's mind. It is also an early depiction of yuppies one year before The '80s, focusing on the shortcomings in their personal lives rather than their professional success.
• Despite its influence on the modern-day slasher film genre and kickstarting the career of Wes Craven, the original The Last House on the Left really bears no similarity to modern-day slasher films at all. There are no shocking out-of-nowhere "jump scenes" and none of the tension that has become a trademark of the genre, the killings are slow, obvious and fairly realistic, and shocking in that manner. The Soundtrack Dissonance is quite obvious and fairly odd, as are the comedic bits sprinkled throughout. Furthermore, all the killers, including the gang and parents, are seen as normal people, not almost supernatural and indestructible beings. By today's standards, it'd almost be seen as a dark comedy instead of a horror film.
• Despite being considered the archetypal example of the buddy cop film, Lethal Weapon and its sequels subvert and deconstruct many aspects of the genre. There are undercurrents of drama, but these are played with realistic seriousness rather than the campy melodrama of later examples. Roger Ebert argued that direct parodies of these films don't work for this reason; the creators are trying to introduce jokes into a film series that already has tons of jokes, with things like exploding toilets and guys eating dog biscuits.
  • Unlike most main characters in cop films, the lead (Riggs) suffers from suicidal tendencies and post-traumatic stress as a result of his wife's death, so much so that he nearly kills himself multiple times over in the course of his work. The reason for his Cowboy Cop antics is because he has a death wish, and doesn't care if he gets killed in the line of duty.
  • The characters routinely get called out for their antics, to the point that they're demoted several times. In Lethal Weapon 4, the Chief gives them a promotion under the express order that they stay away from field work. The characters also repeatedly face serious consequences for acting like cowboys, and they have reputations in the precinct for being reckless in the line of work.
  • The series played with the concept of the Bulletproof Vest long before it was prevalent in most crime works. In the first film, Riggs wears a vest and survives a drive-by shooting, but endlessly complains about how much the impact hurt for the rest of the film. In the third, a character survives an impact from a "cop-killer" bullet by using two vests at the same time, although this still causes injuries.
  • The Plucky Comic Relief is forced on the characters against their wishes, and although he does have some legitimate skill, he's kidnapped and suffers in Lethal Weapon 2 before being rescued by the main characters.
  • The second film has one of the most famous examples of Diplomatic Impunity in fiction. Yet the climax subverts it, with Murtagh just shooting the bad guy dead and not getting in trouble for it due to the guy being a criminal who was attacking the duo, just like what would happen in real life.
• While it's an influential movie in the Post Apocalyptic genre, Mad Max might have viewers scratching their heads if they're more accustomed to more recent fare. It doesn't exactly take place After the End, but rather, during it — the intro caption claims it's set "a few years from now". Instead of society having broken down into pseudo-medieval communities using scraps of the old world as weapons and armor, it shows dysfunctional but still-existing civilization: traditional law enforcement still exists, even if it's overwhelmed by gangs and random violence. It's also implied that modern manufacturing is still a thing, even if widespread poverty and crime has led to a lot of equipment being used as weaponry. Compare a scene from the movie where Max is watching the news with any scene from its third sequel, where the idea of television news would sound like something from the distant past. Thus, it feels more like a realistic depiction of a country (or world) engulfed by poverty than a ruined land where Max acts more like a Barbarian Hero.
• If you primarily know of John Wayne's work through Pop Culture Osmosis, watching his 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance can be a bit jarring. While not Wayne's first movie as a leading man (that was The Big Trail), it's largely responsible for solidifying American pop culture's image of him: it was the first movie to cast him as a Lovable Rogue cowboy in a ten-gallon hat and a neckerchief who defends the weak while snarking cynically, and it spawned his iconic Catchphrase "Pilgrim", among other things. It's also a vicious Genre Deconstruction of Westerns that's ultimately about the death of the Old West, and it ends with Wayne's character dying alone and unremembered after succumbing to his alcoholism, while another man marries his only love and takes the credit for his final heroic deed.
• Mary Poppins uses the When You Coming Home, Dad? trope quite heavily, and the Aesop is that George should devote more time to his children while he can. But the film also teaches the children a similar Aesop; that just because their father doesn't always have time for them, it doesn't mean he doesn't love them. They're also taught that raising a family while working a high-paying job is really hard work, so it's best not to judge someone too much. This is decades before countless '80s and '90s media featured neglectful parents Cutting the Electronic Leash to spend more time with their kids.
• The Matrix was the Trope Codifier for Bullet Time, though many forget that Neo didn't completely dodge all of the bullets fired at him, getting grazed badly enough for the Agent to almost corner him for the kill. And the Agent's own Bullet Time actually screws him over - he gets so focused on overcomplex dodging that he fails to notice Trinity sneaking up on him and shooting him in the head point-blank. Furthermore, unlike many of its imitators, the film actually provided an in-universe explanation for the effect - since Neo is The One, he is able to bend the laws of the system, which includes the ability to move faster than bullets, and being able to see and manipulate them. Notably, the sequences involving the effect only occurred inside the simulation, demonstrating its artificiality, and providing both the main heroes and villains with something to show that they are not slaves bound by the rules of the program. Very rarely does a film actually try to explain a special effect like this beyond simple Rule of Cool.
• Mean Girls deconstructed the story of the "elite" high school clique, despite being the story that most of the later works would imitate. Upon reading books and watching shows from the 2000s like The Clique, Pretty Little Liars, and Gossip Girl in which high school Alpha Bitches and their Girl Posses served as cool, sexy, glamorous Villain Protagonists if not outright protagonists, one might be inclined to view Mean Girls as a response to such stories. The catty members of the various Girl Posses are shown the damage that such soap-opera-like high school backstabbing does, the Girl Posse's infighting is portrayed as pointlessly self-destructive and shallow, the Alpha Bitch is a villain to be pitied and hated rather than loved and feared, she's a Villain with Good Publicity who recognizes when it's best to act nice to people rather than treating everyone like dirt non-stop, and the heroine's plan to unseat the Alpha Bitch from her position as queen of the school leaves the heroine coming off no better. The solution to it all, according to the heroes, is to just stop caring about who's in or out of the "cool" clique, with all of the main characters ultimately finding greater happiness and validation by channeling their energy away from these petty feuds into more productive pursuits that they personally enjoy. Also, Mean Girls was Based on an Advice Book that explored school bullying and cliques, drawing from its author's own real-life experiences with such things as a teenager, as well as interviews with then-modern teenage girls to find out what had changed. And yet, this movie was made in 2004, far before a lot of the other works about the elite clique of high school. A case could be made that its success directly inspired the aforementioned books/shows and their imitators (including, ironically enough, a sequel which missed the point of the original work).
• Metropolis:
  • Metropolis is one of the first science fiction movies set in a futuristic city dominated by technology. It uses this backdrop to comment on unionized labor, pointing out that such a majestic city would probably be built on the exploitation of ordinary workers.
  • It is usually considered to be the first Cyberpunk movie since it features a lot of common cyberpunk plot elements, such as a class war between a MegaCorp and its workers, the existence of artificial intelligence, advanced computer systems, and a futuristic city with Japanese influences. Unlike modern cyberpunk works, it also featured retrofuturistic technology that wouldn't look out of place in a Steampunk ^note The workers' machinery relies on steam engines. or Diesel Punk ^note Zeppelins, biplanes, and monoplanes appear as the equivalents of Flying Cars for the upper class. work since the movie was made in The Roaring '20s. From a current perspective, the movie is an unintentional mashup of the cyberpunk genre and its punk derivatives.
  • As noted above, Metropolis is partially steampunk. However, while modern steampunk fiction normally has an optimistic view of technology, the movie portrays the steampunk machines as an evil god that consumes the workers' bodies, a reflection of the terrible working conditions of the sweatshops set up in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
  • The Maschinenmensch is the classic example of experimental robot gone wrong. When Joh Fredersen orders the robot to rile up the workers so that he can condone the use of force against them, it goes horribly right with the workers creating a Big Blackout and Fredersen's son caught in the middle of chaos. However, this is justified as the Maschinenmensch's creator Dr. Rotwang intends on betraying Fredersen and tricked Fredersen into believing that the Maschinenmensch will obey him when, in reality, the robot only obeys Rotwang.
  • Dr. Rotwang, one of the film's villains, is a Mad Scientist with a metal hand. This may seem to be a common cyberpunk trope of a cyborg losing his humanity after accumulating too many technological parts, but the movie explicitly points out that Rotwang lost his hand while creating the Maschinenmensch as a replacement for his dead love interest Hel, demonstrating Rotwang's rather emotional response to his love interest's death. Furthermore, Rotwang has harbored plenty of animosity against Joh Fredersen ever since Hel chose Joh over him, so he was always planning on betraying Joh even before he lost his hand.
• Mission: Impossible: The famous "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop scene was the result of the heroes with their high-tech gear breaking into a high-tech vault nearly getting screwed because there was a rat in the vents, which made Krieger, the guy holding Ethan Hunt's rappelling rope, sneeze. At the end of the scene, they're nearly done in by simply dropping something (Krieger's knife).
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was one of the earliest depictions of a cynical outlook on American politics, predating things like House of Cards by decades. However, the movie is a surprisingly nuanced look at corruption in places like Washington.
  • While the film doesn't shy away from issues like cronyism or corrupt media, Jeff's problems don't come from his idealism, unintelligence, or the basic canard of the "system sucks", but the fact that he lacks any real experience in politics or Senate procedure. Once Jeff actually learns about how the political system works from Saunders, he becomes more effective, impressing the other Senators with his boys' camp proposal. His famous stand near the end of the movie requires a bit of coaching from Saunders.
  • While many Senators dislike Jeff, almost none of them are portrayed as completely amoral people, it more comes across as most of them being dismissive and unaware of the corruption going on. The President of the Senate, while still keeping to the rules, is presented as sympathetic and encouraging towards Jeff. Senator Monroe, the Senator most antagonistic to Jeff, looks down on him for Jeff's poor performance before the press, but comes to admire him for his hard fight in the Senate.
  • Even Paine is a pretty well-rounded potrayal of a Corrupt Politician: he is in the pocket of the political party boss, and is party to a serious graft scheme. But the reason why he is celebrated is because he still delivers on the needs of his constituents in spite of his corruption. He's also pretty genial to Jeff, and only turns on him when the Boys' Camp could potentially interfere with the land scheme. He finally confesses his misdeeds after seeing Jeff fight to the point of collapse to prove his innocence.
  • The film's message is pretty mixed: if you enter politics, you must learn the rules of the game and be on guard against corrupt and unscrupulous people who will try and destroy you, but ideals and justice are still good things to fight for.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail helped pioneer the Seinfeldian Conversation two decades before Seinfeld was a thing, most memorably in the famous "African Swallow" conversation. But unlike later works that did it, Holy Grail's Seinfeldian Conversation is also a deconstruction of the movie's setting, and it starts when a random extra picks up on the fact that he's in a ridiculously low-budget movie, and points out the many weird implications of the production's cost-saving measures.^note  The Pythons couldn't afford horses, so they had the characters pantomime horse-riding while banging coconuts together to mimic the sound of hooves. In the opening scene, a castle guard realizes this and refuses to play along, pointing out that coconuts aren't native to England. Arthur also reacts just like anyone in the audience would: he quickly gets sick of the conversation and tries to steer the plot back on track, then finally walks away when the guards won't stop yammering about coconuts and migratory birds.
• The Mummy (1932) is the Trope Maker for, well, the mummy. But Boris Karloff's Imhotep is very different from your stereotypical mummy. He's intelligent and speech-capable (and pretends to be a 20th-century Egyptian), doesn't stay in wrappings after he wakes up, doesn't shamble, and generally acts more like a sorcerer. His motivation is also different than you'd expect: he's not out to kill people for defiling tombs, he wants to be reunited with his lost love.
• The opening scene of Natural Born Killers had Bullet Time sequences five years before The Matrix. The first one is Played for Laughs, with the bullet coming to a Screeching Stop just before it hits the waitress' face to show her cross-eyed reaction to it before it splatters her brains, a scene you might expect in a Looney Tunes-style parody of bullet time. The second one, meanwhile, is a Knife Time sequence. Instead of moments meant to show how badass Mickey Knox is, they're brief moments of levity in what's otherwise his and Mallory's brutal Establishing Character Moment of them massacring a small-town diner.
• Nikita (released in the U.S. as La Femme Nikita) is often held up as one of the earliest examples (if not the Trope Codifier) of modern "female super agent" and "girls with guns" films, as it's centered around a beautiful, highly-trained female operative who becomes proficient in a variety of fields while working for a clandestine government agency. The unbuilt part comes when one actually watches the film and sees what exactly the film is trying to convey. Nikita is set up as a a largely-unsympathetic hoodlum that, even at her peak, is far from being a One-Woman Army. The plot goes to considerable length to showcase just how terrifying her training is — she is given no choice between whether to work for the agency or let them kill her outright, her attempt to flee ends with her being nonchalantly shot in the thigh in front of a group of employees, and her initial training tests make her feel completely threatened by the individuals who assign her the jobs (essentially, a nonstop process of breaking her down, buoyed by a Sink or Swim Mentor). The audience also gets to see the toll her training has taken on her. She has multiple psychological issues and hang-ups, she's utterly clueless about how to act in the real world (a scene revolves around her stalking a shopper around a supermarket and buying the exact same products because she has no idea what to eat), she panics the first time a job goes wrong (huddled up in the corner as The Fixer tries to rectify the situation), and she never stops trying to quit. Most adaptations of the film, and most modern "female super agent" works, include the hyper-intelligence and gunplay without delving into the psychological impacts the lead would rightly suffer from such a traumatic experience.
• North By Northwest was a major inspiration for many Spy Fiction works, such as James Bond and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and yet watching it reveals a lot more original and deconstructive touches:
  • Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill is The Everyman and not a super-spy. Likewise, espionage is generally treated realistically. Eve Kendall points out that she was a wealthy socialite who knew Vandamm in social occasions and the US Government turned her into a spy for them by largely continuing as his girlfriend and remaining close to him. Most espionage usually happens in social conditions and spies largely pose as civilians. It is the elaborate and baroque plot that really forces characters into action sequences.
  • The film makes it clear that a government spy agency, even the "good" guys, really do value the mission and intelligence gathering and they will be willing to let innocent people die rather than compromise the cover of their mission. Both the US government and Eve Kendall herself were willing to leave Roger to die by Van Damm's forces to better preserve Eve's cover. The only reason they help Roger at the end is because he's attracted too much heat and attention, and is phenomenally lucky as an Action Survivor.
  • More important, Hitchcock and Lehman sternly attack the entire profession of espionage and the Cold War. Roger Thornhill's main motivation in the final scene isn't stopping the Big Bad, it's rescuing Eve Kendall. Eve is the one who cares about the mission. The Big Bad gets captured, and The Dragon gets killed by a random sergeant.
    Roger Thornhill: "If you fellows can't lick the Vandamm's of this world without asking girls like her to bed down with them and fly away with them and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars."
• Now, Voyager has one of the first instances of the Beautiful All Along trope. Charlotte loses weight, plucks her eyebrows, gets a stylish new haircut and more fashionable clothes. But despite these physical changes, she still remains the same awkward repressed woman she was at the beginning — and her life doesn't improve until she changes her attitude. So the external transformation is less important than the internal transformation.
• Peeping Tom:
  • The Ur-Example of the Slasher Movie takes place mostly from the killer's point of view. In particular, Mark is a voyeur and uses a camera to create snuff films that he can watch later, which doubles as meta commentary on film-making and the audience.
  • The Sex Signals Death applied to Mark's victims is justified by the circumstances: he isn't able to get so close to normal everyday women and instead goes after prostitutes that willingly accept his cash. And the Final Girl only survives because Mark is actually in love with her.
  • Like Norman Bates from the same year, Mark is a striking contrast to the later icons of the slasher genre such as Jason, Michael Myers and Ghostface, being neither a superhuman juggernaut, a mocking sadist nor a silent brute but a perfectly normal looking, awkward but polite young man who is greatly disturbed by his violent urges but is unable to resist them and has a sympathetic backstory in his father's abuse and falls in love with his last intended victim and doesn't die in a spectacular fashion or survive against all odds but dies from simply taking his own life upon realizing he's been caught out.
• Pleasantville was, together with the Fallout games, a turning point for the use of '50s nostalgia in fiction thanks to its deconstruction of such, with the wholesome iconography of The '50s subverted to paint it as a Crapsaccharine World where a vapid pop culture and strict conformity mask a deep well of resentment and boiling unrest. Yet while Fallout more or less played the subversion straight, in Pleasantville the subversion goes both ways. David and Jennifer, the modern '90s teenagers who get sucked into the '50s sitcom world of the titular Show Within a Show, do cause it to become a more well-rounded place through their influence, yet far from being shown as more enlightened, their experience in the town also forces them to reflect on their own values. Jennifer in particular starts out playing the role of a Seemingly-Wholesome '50s Girl, but becomes genuinely wholesome as her interactions with the show's characters cause her to focus more on her studies rather than simply living for pleasure, such that she chooses to stay behind in Pleasantville at the end.
• The Producers is the Trope Namer for Springtime for Hitler, in which characters deliberately try to fail at something for profit. But it also shows how easily such a scheme can go wrong: Bialystock and Bloom's plan is a very risky legal gamble in which they make money by deliberately overselling shares in their play (i.e. borrowing more money from investors than the play can possibly make) and deliberately trying to make the play bomb so that their investors won't expect to get their money back. But when the play (a musical celebrating Hitler) unexpectedly becomes a smash hit due to audiences mistaking it for an irreverent satire of Nazism, their scheme blows up in their face as they're left with obligations that they can't pay back, and face charges of fraud. They ultimately attempt to blow up the theatre to get themselves out of trouble, and both of them go to jail after being found "incredibly guilty" by a judge.
• Psycho
  • While probably not the Trope Maker, the film embedded the Villainous Mother-Son Duo in popular culture. However, while Norman and "Mother" do own Bates Motel, "Mother" is just an evil Split-Personality Takeover of Norman created to hide the fact that he killed his own mother during a psychotic episode. In fact, his dead mother isn't indicated to have been evil and controlling in any way, and tried to encourage Norman to be more independent and not be so attached to her.
  • Psycho is the ur-Slasher Film, but would probably be a Deconstruction if it was made today. Norman Bates, while he does have a Freudian Excuse as most villains of the genre do, isn't some masked, lumbering, and silent killer or a wisecracking sadist, but a meek, socially awkward, and kindhearted man with a mental illness that causes him to kill without even realizing it, there's no sex or gory kills whatsoever, only two people die at his hands, and he's stopped rather easily when a stronger man knocks him out and he gets arrested.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark:
  • Raiders is one of the most influential action movies ever made, and Indiana Jones himself is the modern Action Hero. Viewed on its own, though, it's a surprisingly deconstructive take on adventure stories. Indy ends the movie just as bruised and battered as you'd expect him to be, and the famous opening sequence ends with him anticlimactically giving up the precious Macguffin—demonstrating that his smarmy rival often outsmarts him through his Pragmatic Villainy. And despite showing enormous courage and fortitude, Indy nonetheless fails in his mission: the Nazis ultimately succeed in getting the Ark of the Covenant, and are only defeated because they didn't realize that the Ark kills anyone who opens it.
  • Indiana Jones may not have been the first Adventure Archaeologist in the history of fiction, but he's definitely the definitive example that all later ones are compared to. But Raiders of the Lost Ark, unlike most of its imitators, actually addresses a lot of the misconceptions about archaeology spawned by movies. Indy doesn't spend all of his time having adventures in exotic locations: he has a steady job as an archaeology professor at a university. After he loses the Macguffin in the opening sequence, he proudly shows Marcus Brody a vast collection of smaller, less flashy archaeological finds that Belloq didn't bother to notice because he was only looking for treasure. In one sequence, Indy even lectures his archaeology class about a valuable archaeological site that was nearly destroyed by careless treasure-hunters who (wrongly) believed a local legend about a golden coffin that was supposedly buried there. The Last Crusade continues the trend, with Indy explicitly telling his students that archaeologists are scholars, not treasure-hunters, and most of their work is done in a library. Even though this advice is later humorously turned on its head (it turns out that one of the places on the trail is literally under a library), it is established they are only able to accomplish the Grail Quest due to Indiana's father spending decades studying academic literature on the Holy Grail.
  • Indiana Jones was also one of the greatest popularizers of the Ghostapo trope, which portrays the Nazis as seeking power from ancient and mystical sources. The films are very different from where the genre eventually went, however. The Nazis are never at any point shown actually wielding occult energy, nor is it ever implied that there is any mystical explanation behind their success and rise to power. While the Nazis in these movies would certainly like to wield the power of the supernatural, they're slapped down hard when they try, and the films make it clear that they never had any chance of success. The entire Ghostapo aspects of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade ultimately amount to a couple of weird failed experiments, with no impact at all on the outcome of history. By contrast, later film universes tend to portray Nazi scientists who succeed in wielding supernatural powers, leading to alternate histories in which they come within a hair's breadth of destroying the entire civilized world, or prolong World War Two into a secret occult war that doesn't end until Hitler's death in 1958.
• Thanks to his Actionized Sequels, Rambo is shorthand for a badass soldier who takes on whole armies and wins while suffering only minor setbacks at best, and when the average person thinks of his films, they think ultra-patriotic war movies in which the enemies of America are destroyed. With this, it's easy to forget that the first film, First Blood, was an anti-war film protesting the degree to which veterans of The Vietnam War were dehumanized and mistreated. Rambo here is a homeless man unable to keep a job thanks to his now-useless skill set, who is tormented daily by PTSD from the war and the fact that he is the only survivor of his squad (he learns right at the start that the only other survivor he knew of is dead), but keeps his feelings bottled up just to function as a human being. His enemies are not a foreign army, but local small-town policemen who abuse him for no good reason, symbolizing the civilian mistreatment of veterans returning from the war and how veterans felt about it.
  
  The one time Rambo is against a group of enemies, it is a single-digit number and he takes them on one at a time using stealth and cunning. When faced with 200, he backs down and surrenders with encouragement from his ex-commander, and his reign of terror ends in him suffering a mental breakdown where he lets out all his bottled-up feelings summarizing how tormented and unable to live as a civilian he's become. What's more is that throughout the film, he goes out of his way to not kill anybody because he just wants the abusive cops to leave him alone; the only exception is both a complete accident and a Karmic Death. That's not even getting into how the film was intended to end with Rambo killing himself because he can't adapt to civilian life, or how it was based on a novel where Rambo does kill lots of people but is portrayed as a villain! The overall impression one gets from First Blood is a deconstruction of Rambo's popular image—or it would be, if it weren't his debut.
• Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon actually deconstructs many aspects of the oft-imitated plot structure that it lends its name to. Instead of using its famous "Three contradictory flashbacks" format as a simple plot gimmick, it's a deeply philosophical character study that uses the format as a vehicle for discussing human beings' inherent inability to tell the truth, examining the moral implications of this idea in full. At one point, one character even concludes that almost all of mankind's evils arise from their attempts to avoid confronting the truth by lying to themselves. By the end, the story has ceased to be about a murder trial at all, and become the story of said character's struggle to regain his faith in humanity. Notably, the traditional "Fourth true flashback" is also strongly hinted to be another lie. We're initially led to believe that the Woodcutter (a neutral witness to the murder) is the only one telling the truth...until it turns out that he also left out several details to cover up the fact that he was the one who stole the murder weapon.
• Rebel Without a Cause is often cited as the definitive teenage delinquent/teen movie, dealing with teenagers as protagonists, forming gangs and resisting their parents. Yet unlike later teen movies which glorify teenage years and high school life, the film is a good deal more serious, touching on the loneliness and alienation that troubled kids face, and how self-destructive and wasteful teen gang fights are. The famous planetarium scene even touches on the ideas of Existentialism, with the kids being made aware that they live on a fragile planet in a formless universe with no real place to house ideals.
• Red Dawn (1984): The movie was the Trope Codifier for America undergoing an invasion and is often regarded as little more than yet another patriotic and jingoistic 80s war film. But it isn't all some feel-good patriotic piece, but a soul-crushing depiction of the realities of war: fear of death, massacres, collaboration with the enemy, the "good guys" committing a war crime, and treason. The ending drives the point home - America was indeed freed, yet the Wolverines' sacrifices are barely acknowledged.
• The Return of the Living Dead:
  • This film is the Trope Maker for brain-eating zombies but has a dark explanation justifying why they do so—Trioxin zombies are in constant pain due to decomposition, and brains contain endorphins, which are natural painkillers. Later depictions of brain-eating zombies either don't bother explaining why zombies specifically target brains or assume that zombies eat brains to increase their low intelligence as seen in zombie fiction like Warm Bodies and iZombie.
  • Trioxin zombies are the first zombies to say "braaaaiiins", but they are also capable of speaking normally as long as their vocal cords remain intact. As noted by the movie, talking zombies are actually dangerous, especially when the Trioxin are clever enough to call and fool the authorities into sending reinforcements that the Trioxin can ambush for more brains.
  • Trioxin zombies introduced the idea of brain-eating zombies to the public; because of this, it's not uncommon to find people who believe that most if not all zombies eat brains. Some people even wrongfully attribute this invention to the zombies of George A. Romero, who even had to address this misconception in an interview. Ironically, part of the horror/humor of The Return of the Living Dead was that the Trioxin zombie was a subversion of the Romero zombie. In fact, the protagonists, who are familiar with Night of the Living Dead (1968), first try to kill a Trioxin zombie by Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain, both of which would work effectively against a Romero zombie but failed miserably against a Trioxin. In addition, the Trioxin zombies have an explanation for their existence—unintentional side effect of a military herbicide; in contrast, the Romero zombies never get a true explanation for their origins.
  • The Return of the Living Dead is one of the earliest zombie movies to feature running zombies, predating 28 Days Later which popularized fast zombies. However, the movie also deconstructs the concept of fast zombies with Tarman, whose deteriorating musculature made him slower than most of the other Trioxin zombies and thus limited his movement to a more typical Zombie Gait.
• Viewed today, Michael Bay's The Rock can come off as a deconstruction of the mindless action and gung ho American patriotism that Bay's films are frequently criticized for—even though it was the second movie of his career, and his first military thriller. For one thing, the main antagonists are American terrorists fighting for an unusually sympathetic cause, with the Corrupt Bureaucrats that motivated them presented as the true villains. For another, the movie spends almost as much time condemning America's treatment of veterans and presenting a damning view of government secret-keeping as it does on action. Furthermore, the heroes aren't military types — once a Navy SEAL team is slaughtered, it's up to what the general in charge describes as "a 70-year-old convict and a lab rat" to save the day.
  • Wait...a group of Well-Intentioned Extremist soldiers fighting for an unusually logical cause, helped along by Western Terrorists and Corrupt Bureaucrat leader, with lines condemning America's mistreatment of war heroes and decrying the lies and propaganda of a corporate military regime, and the main heroes being a group of misfits, outcasts and civilians? Is this The Rock we're talking about or the plot to Transformers: Age of Extinction?
• Saturday Night Fever provided the template for the modern dance flick, and a slew of imitators that followed were unapologetically feel-good escapist fantasies. However, the glitzy glamour of the disco scene and the film's most copied moments — lead character Tony Manero strutting down the street to The Bee Gees, the dance scenes, the soundtrack — belie the fact that the film is a grim deconstruction, not only of the disco scene of The '70s, but of New York as a whole. Do Not Do This Cool Thing is on full display — Tony is a bonadife celebrity in the disco clubs, but is routinely mocked, ignored or chastized by others in his day-to-day life, to such an extent that supporting character/dance partner Stephanie calls him out when they have lunch for having no prospects, no formal education, no future, and no idea of what he'll do once disco inevitably dies. It is precisely this reason (and Tony's pursuit of her) that leads her to reject his advances. Though Tony and Stephanie win the dance contest, the former believes that the judges' decision was racially-motivated (as he believes the second-place Puerto Rican couple objectively danced better than him) and ends up handing the trophy to them. Tony's friends are big on Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, but it causes nothing but problems, and eventually leads to a defining night while the sole female member of the group is gang-raped, another falls off a bridge (implied to have been Driven to Suicide due to being the Butt-Monkey of the group) and Tony himself goes through a brief Heroic BSoD where he rides the subway all night in shock and confusion. At the end of it all, Tony Did Not Get the Girl — he makes it clear that he's planning to move to another borough, and they agree to be friends instead. The film even engages in Deliberate Values Dissonance by portraying Tony and his friends as racist and sexist louts who routinely insult women and throw casual racial epithets at other dancers.
• The first film in the Saw franchise, which popularized the Torture Porn genre in the 2000s, was surprisingly bloodless for the immense Gorn that's usually associated with the franchise. The most brutal Death Trap that the viewer is shown (and the one most in line with typical traps of the series), the Reverse Bear Trap, is one that its intended victim escapes unharmed, and for the others, the viewer is mostly told what they did to their victims as opposed to shown. Most of the serious gore only came in the sequels. What's more, the Jigsaw Killer wasn't much of a Torture Technician, instead forcing his victims into situations where they have to mutilate themselves in order to survive, and most of the traps weren't the complex clockwork machinery of later films, instead being comparatively simple things like crawling through razor wire, walking barefoot over broken glass, having to read messages on a wall by candlelight to solve a puzzle while coated in flammable jelly, or being chained to a pipe and given a hacksaw that can't cut through the chain but can cut through the foot it's attached to. Today, people watching the first Saw expecting non-stop carnage would probably be disappointed when they get a low-key detective thriller instead.
• Scream:
  • Some horror fans have blamed Scream for its influence on the horror movie genre, arguing that it popularized a Lighter and Softer, more self-referential tone that sacrificed genuine scares for Hollywood glamour, snarky meta humor, and PG-13 ratings to get teenage butts into theater seats, one that plagued mainstream horror for almost a good solid decade after the first film came out. Funnily enough, that glamour and snark were precisely what set Scream apart from the rest of the Slasher Movie genre in 1996, a time when slashers were seen as disreputable and past their prime. As a slasher with genuinely well-done production values, talented TV actors, and smart writing that commented on the genre, Scream was hailed as a reconstruction that demonstrated that the slasher still had a lot of life and fresh ideas left in it. Unlike most of the imitators of Scream, its usage of postmodernism served a very clear purpose: to anticipate the audience's expectations for a cliché slasher movie before subverting them to better scare and/or entertain the audience. Furthermore, it was decidedly R-rated, not only serving as the Trope Namer for Gutted Like a Fish but also showing such gore twice in the first fifteen minutes, in scenes that had to be pared down to avoid an NC-17 rating.
  • Speaking of Scream, it also gets the blame for popularizing postmodernism in slasher movies, where all the characters are fully-aware of the tropes and cliches of slasher movies and work within those rules to try and survive, even if they don't fully break the fourth wall and acknowledge they're actually in a slasher movie themselves. Scream, especially the first film, is also one of the only few who justify this meta-commentary. The killer is an Attention Whore who plans to ride their slayings into infamy and is aware that the more it resembles a "real-life horror movie," the more it works in their favor: both to have the slayings get the attention of a sensationalist newsmedia and to get Moral Guardians to take up their defense and paint them as a victim (instead of a villain) in their ongoing crusade about horror and slasher movies corrupting the youth of America. So, the characters surviving by following the "Rules" of horror movies works because the killings resemble a horror movie on purpose as part of the villain's plan. Later "meta-slashers'' lack this commentary and have the characters survive by adhering to the "rules" of slashers... just because.
• Screwed in Tallinn (Swedish original title Torsk på Tallinn) is a 1999 mockumentary which indulges in all the awkward aspects of the Mail-Order Bride phenomenon while it was still rather uncommon in Sweden, both in Real Life and in popular culture.
• Seven Samurai popularized The Magnificent Seven Samurai and Training the Peaceful Villagers tropes used in homages and remakes of the film from The Magnificent Seven (1960) (including the 2016 remake) to A Bug's Life. However, the movie actually deconstructs the tropes used by its imitators as well as those found in other action movies. The villagers aren't helpless—they simply need strong leaders; in fact, they manage to salvage samurai weapons and armor by attacking and killing samurai. By extension, the seven samurai aren't invincible warriors just because they are Samurai. The bandits aren't murderous thieves or faceless Mooks—they're shown relaxing, complaining, weeping in terror as they run for their lives...and, of course, since the Gory Discretion Shot hadn't been invented yet, it isn't subverted. While the War Is Glorious trope did exist, the movie thoroughly subverts it through Kikuchiyo, who angrily criticizes samurai that sack villages.
• The Shawshank Redemption is the Trope Namer and arguably the Trope Codifier of Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook. Indeed, Andy is an innocent man who is sent to a corrupted prison, but Andy works the system to bring Laser-Guided Karma down on the wrongdoers. The narrator, Red, also resists the corruption, finds redemption, and leaves prison as a free man.
• Smokey and the Bandit was the first mainstream feature film to use citizen-band radio as a plot device. CB radio became used among truckers only with the 1973 oil crisis, four years before Smokey was released, and it was one of the works which popularized the technology and the community around it. In contrast to Hollywood CB, Smokey gives a realistic depiction of the technology. A few decades later, wireless communication devices and social media became commonplace; making the film's depiction of the CB community, and its social implications - used as a tool for crime, law enforcement, entrapment and social resistance - seem Hilarious in Hindsight (see Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction).
• The use of Alucard as a Sdrawkcab Alias first arose in Son of Dracula in 1943, the middle of the monster movie craze. Every single character figures it out almost immediately.
• Soylent Green:
  • Shirl unbuilds the "basement-dwelling gamer" archetype. First, she is the basement-dweller and gamer, an incredible rarity even for today when most of such people are male^note To add to the twist, she was the only one playing the arcade machine, while Simonson and his (male) accomplices were on the other side of the room, talking business!. As for her predicament, she is unable to leave, start a family, or get a job because she is supposed to be "furniture" (i.e. a hooker) for Simonson's living quarters, and he kept her along with the rare and valuable arcade machine to flaunt his wealth and taste. Never mind that in this dystopian world, people who are caught outside are quickly arrested and likely be sentenced to death.
  • It was also one of the earliest examples of Enemy Eats Your Lunch — Thorn steals food from his rivals' flats not necessarily to mock them but due to the lack of fresh food in overpopulated New York City, and a converstion with his superior implies that Thorn is far from the only police officer to do this. There is even a several-minute scene of him and Sol dining because of this.
  • It features the often-copied, parodied, and homaged example of Human Resources: "Soylent Green is people!" However, the deconstruction comes from the fact that Soylent Green isn't just cannibalism — it is the only food people have left. As pointed out near the end, the oceans are dead and the plankton for the previous Soylent products (that were not made out of human remains) are now extinct; the oxygen in the atmosphere is slowly dissipating; nearly all the natural resources are used up, and humanity is headed for its final collapse. In short, it's tragic desperation, not cannibalism per se.
• Splash: The film is one of the earliest examples of the Magical Girlfriend, Madison the mermaid, but also takes a nuanced, and deconstructive, look at this trope.
  • Madison and Allen's attraction began when they were kids when the former saved the latter from drowning.
  • Madison doesn't pursue Allen because of romance: she just wanted to return his wallet, which he lost in the water.
  • Madison's Innocent Fanservice Girl act, a common characteristic of the supernatural girlfriend, ends up getting her arrested by the New York authorities, who also force her into tourist attire.
  • Madison's total ignorance of human culture and refusal to speak about her true origins creates severe tensions between herself and Allen, to the point where Madison herself questions whether or not their relationship can actually work.
  • Madison's fantastical origins attract the unwanted attention of Kornbluth, a miserable scientist who is hungry for attention after years of being a pariah in the scientific community. He yearns to expose Madison's fantastical nature to the public, getting into all kinds of laughably horrific situations due to his bumbling... and actually succeeds after getting close enough to splash Madison with water. This leads to her being detained by the US Government, who plan to dissect her as a science experiment and leads to Allen becoming a pariah for having been in the company of a mermaid. Allen is angered by Madison's deception and plans to ditch her for good... until his brother Freddie reminds him of how happy Madison made him. Kornbluth himself regrets his mistakes and offers to help Allen.
  • Madison and Allen end up getting together in the end... but this comes at the cost of Allen losing his normal life and being forced to live underwater with Madison forever.
• Ginny from Splendor in the Grass unbuilds the Quirky Ukulele trope. She's a liberated Flapper girl who wants to be an artist and is far hipper than anyone else in her small town, and her main hobby is playing the ukulele, which she plays along to jazz records. She dates many men, who clearly see her as a fun breath of fresh air, but unlike in later examples, she's not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Instead, her promiscuity ruins her reputation and it and her "quirkiness" are implied to stem from mental issues.
• Star Trek: Generations is the Trope Namer for Dropped a Bridge on Him, relating to how Kirk met his end. Except that while Kirk's manner of death was rather abrupt, his actual death scene was treated with a lot more significance and dignity than most other characters that would meet anticlimactic deaths, with rather mournful background music accompanying him having a Final Speech with his successor Picard before he finally slips away, followed by Picard honoring him with funerary rites.
• Starship Troopers breathed new life into the Space Marine trope when people didn't catch that it was a Stealth Parody of the original novel. The "hardened badass" marines are actually unquestioning drones who are poorly trained and get slaughtered by the thousands because of their incompetent strategies and leadership. The buglike monsters they're mowing down are strongly implied to be a formerly innocent and peaceful race defending their homes from the xenophobic humans, who are using them as a scapegoat for their personal woes.
• The original Star Wars trilogy is one of the most influential film franchises in history, playing a key role in the evolution of both Summer blockbusters and science-fiction cinema. At the same time, though, the original film was also a fairly low-budget passion project conceived more-or-less singlehandedly by a filmmaker who was widely regarded as an oddball auteur at the time, and was previously best known for movies that were generally classified as arthouse films. As a result, the original Star Wars (and its sequels, to a lesser extent) can feel considerably rawer and more experimental than many of the films that it inspired, and it tends to subvert and/or deconstruct many of the tropes that it either codified or popularized. To name a few examples:
  • The Millennium Falcon is one of the most iconic spaceships in the history of science-fiction, and a defining example of the Cool Starship. Ironically, though, it was specifically designed to look weird rather than cool. One of the most innovative and influential things about the original Star Wars was the unconventional way that it portrayed space travel through its visual language, depicting spaceships that varied wildly in visual design instead of just looking like either flying saucers or rocket ships. The Millennium Falcon was the prime example of this, with its silhouette supposedly being inspired by a half-eaten hamburger with an olive on it. With that in mind, Luke Skywalker's famous reaction to the ship ("What a Piece of Junk!") can seem much more understandable, considering neither Luke nor the audience had ever truly seen anything like the Millennium Falcon, and it really did look like a random assemblage of parts that couldn't possibly fly across the galaxy.
  • While the Millennium Falcon is a Cool Starship in A New Hope, one of the main problems in The Empire Strikes Back is how the ship is unwieldy and difficult to fix. Han's modifications can be remarkable when the ship is in peak performance, but when it breaks down, it's very difficult and complicated to fix, to the point Han and Chewbacca are two of the only people who know how to do repairs on it, and it spends 99% of the movie with systems like the hyperdrive not working.
  • The Empire Strikes Back may be one of the earliest cases of an Actionized Sequel, but the presentation is very different. While most sequels become actionized as a way to up the ante, Empire could be seen as a Happy Ending Override of A New Hope; while the destruction of the Death Star was certainly a blow to the Empire's regime, it becomes clear that it was a small victory in a much larger war. Now the Empire recognizes the Rebel Alliance as a credible threat and aims to crush them with the fullest extent of their galaxy-spanning war machine. The battle on Hoth shows that from the Rebel's perspective, they just Awoke The Sleeping Giant, and are woefully out-manned and out-gunned in every way. Even supposed safe havens like Cloud City are not immune to the Empire's insidious influence, and are easily brought to heel by Darth Vader. It's rather telling that the film opens with Luke, The Hero, almost dying from a random animal attack, thus illustrating that no one is safe. One could even go so far as to say Lucas used Empire to deconstruct the Hero's Journey that he built up in A New Hope long before the prequel trilogy.
  • There Is Another is generally a trope used to create hope or optimism. But the trope-naming instance in Empire was partly used to remove Luke's Plot Armor. When Yoda said there was somebody else, it was to reassure Obi-Wan that they'd still have a chance if Luke was captured, corrupted, or killed. This meant that the audience knew Vader could win at Cloud City without completely jeopardizing the good guys, and so the suspense would be increased.
  • By now, absolutely everyone knows the famous twist at the end of Empire, to the point that it singlehandedly made it a cliché to have a dramatic Reveal where the villain turns out to be the hero's father. It can be hard to remember that, by today's standards, the big reveal actually reads like a deconstruction of the trope, as it deals with its inherent complications far more handily than most of its imitators. The revelation that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father isn't just a surprise — it explicitly contradicts what Obi-Wan tells Luke about his father's fate in the previous film, carrying the disturbing implication that he hid the truth from Luke so that he wouldn't have any qualms about murdering his own father.^note Out-of-universe, it's because George Lucas didn't decide that Vader and Anakin were the same person until after he made A New Hope, leading to some continuity problems that they then had to explain away in Return of the Jedi. As you might expect, this leads to a severe case of Broken Pedestal, and one of Luke's final lines in the movie is an anguished "Why didn't you tell me?" as he realizes that he was lied to by the person he trusted most in the world. And the twist is only a twist because Anakin Skywalker was rechristened after he fell to the Dark Side, and refused to answer to his old name. Later, Lucas would devote another four films to show just how far a person would have to fall from grace before they — and their loved ones — genuinely considered their old self dead.
  • If your first exposure to the Japanese Jidaigeki genre is from reading up on George Lucas' inspirations for Star Wars, actually watching a few of the films that inspired him can be a bit of a shock.^note The very samurai-influenced Jedi got their name from jidai geki (literally "artifact of history" or "period piece", i.e. Historical Fiction). Several "elder samurai" characters from classic jidai geki films (Kambei Shimada of The Seven Samurai and Hanshiro Tsugomo of Harakiri, in particular) can be pinpointed as likely inspirations for the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi. And Akira Kurosawa's leading man Toshiro Mifune was allegedly Lucas' first choice for the role of Obi-Wan. The most well-known jidai geki films in the West had more than their share of action and spectacle, but many of them were also Deconstructions of the glory days of Feudal Japan, portraying the twilight years of the samurai and openly questioning whether the lofty ideals of bushido had any real meaning in the modern world (especially since World War II had ended only a decade or so beforehand). Star Wars was—among many other things—a Lighter and Softer tribute to the work of filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi, emphasizing the romanticism of their films while downplaying their tragedy and cynicism.
  • The original trilogy is generally cited as the Trope Codifier for The Empire, but it can be surprisingly nuanced in its depiction of life in an authoritarian state. It's pretty strongly implied that most Imperial troops are just Punch Clock Villains from backwater planets who enlisted in the military to make a decent living while seeing the Galaxy, and even The Hero initially plans to enroll in the Imperial Academy to escape the drudgery of life as a farmer on Tatooine; as revealed in a Deleted Scene, his best friend even outright joins the Imperial fleet before having a change of heart and defecting. Rather than being a dictatorship from the beginning, the Empire is (ostensibly) run by an Imperial Senate and a bureaucratic council for around 20 years before the Emperor finally dissolves the Senate. Moreover, Darth Vader is the only member of the sinister Sith Order who actually serves in the rank and file of the Imperial military, and it's shown that many ordinary officers openly hate the Sith just as much as they hate the Jedi, dismissing them as superstitious old holdovers from an ancient religion.
  • The assault on the Death Star is arguably the first Aerial Canyon Chase in a motion picture, having been copied and parodied in countless works, usually to show off Ace Pilot skills. In this original setting, the trope was Recycled In Space (assuming that Space Is Air), and just as suicidal as it would be in Real Life, with many experienced pilots on both sides crashing their fighters into the Death Star. Luke and Darth Vader survive mainly through their connection to the Force.
  • The Imperial Stormtroopers are often widely mocked for their inability to shoot the heroes. They are indeed the Trope Codifier for the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy after all. However, it's worth noting that the Original Trilogy provided at least two justifications for why they had to miss. During the Death Star escape scene of A New Hope, the Stormtroopers were under orders from Tarkin to let Luke and his pals escape so that they could be tracked to the Rebel base, so they were trying to miss. In the Cloud City scene in ESB, they were following Darth Vader's plan by letting Han and Leia live so that Luke can be lured into his trap.
  • Part of the reason Darth Vader made such an impression on viewers in 1977 was that he was portrayed as so unfathomably powerful that the hero of the film explicitly stood no chance against him in a fight—which is why Luke never even attempts to fight Vader in the original film. Vader's only one-on-one fight scene is with Obi-Wan, who's a seasoned veteran with decades of experience...and still loses. Luke only comes into direct conflict with Vader in the climactic attack on the Death Star, where Vader jumps into a TIE fighter to lead an Imperial squadron—and even there, he's ultimately defeated by an unexpected cheap shot from Han Solo. Now that action-driven sci-fi and fantasy films have a much bigger presence in Hollywood than they once did, and costumed supervillains in the vein of Darth Vader (some of them outright inspired by him) are fairly common, the original Star Wars can look oddly restrained for choosing not to end the movie with a climactic duel between the hero and the villain. But since Star Wars (being a fairly unconventional movie for its day) was released before the "rules" of such films had been established, it was free to play by its own rules.
  • On the topic of Darth Vader, his overwhelming presence in pop culture and countless imitators tends to obscure the fact that he's a very deconstructive, tragic and even somewhat pitiful figure. For starters, he's notably not the guy at the top of the totem pole. In fact, he was only the Big Bad in one film: The Empire Strikes Back. In A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin was the main villain with Vader as The Dragon. He was Vader's superior and he was the one who commanded the Death Star and ordered the destruction of Alderaan. In Return of the Jedi, Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious is the villain, in addition to being the overarching villain of the story. Moreover, while he was at his most active and threatening in The Empire Strikes Back, he completely fails in both his given tasks, i.e. crushing the rebellion and capturing Luke (the rebel command staff escapes at Hoth, and so do the heroes at Bespin), and his real plan, i.e. converting Luke to the Dark Side and pulling a coup on Palpatine, and those failures strip him of his command, being given a minor overseer task in Return of the Jedi and denied command of any ground or air forces at the Battle of Endor. Vader is also deeply self-loathing beneath all his intimidation, to the point where he outright considers pre-fall Anakin Skywalker to be literally a different person. Lucas himself has affirmed that Vader was intended to be a frightening and cool adversary but never an ultimate embodiment of evil, seeing him as the man who "goes down the corner and gets Satan's cigarettes" and a "flunky" to a bigger and more evil organization. The franchise is one of the most famous examples of It's Personal with the Dragon, as Obi-Wan and Luke have the closest connection to Darth Vader. All in all, Vader seems like a retroactive Deconstructed Character Archetype of a type of villain he himself served as the template for.
    George Lucas: Ultimately, he’s just a pathetic guy who’s had a very sad life. He’s so overwhelming in that first film, but you get to the point where you say, “Wait a minute, if he’s so powerful, why doesn’t he run the universe?” He even gets pushed around by the governors! They know the Emperor is the final word, so what happens is the same thing that happens in any corporation: everybody worries about the top man, they don’t worry about his goon. And by the time the Death Star is finished, it gives them the sense that they have a bigger, better suit than Darth Vader. In a standoff between the Death Star and Darth Vader, they have no question about who would win, and it’s not this mumbo-jumbo Sith guy. So it’s even more tragic, because he’s not even an all-powerful bad guy, he’s kind of a flunky.
• Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet is seen as the first fiction film about The Korean War and its commercial success inspired a slew of films set in the Korean War. But in sharp contrast to what came later, and what you would expect from a war movie in The '50s, it is a film that is pointedly anti-racist, features a Politically Incorrect Hero, and attacks both the sentimental tropes of the war movie genre and the ideology of the Cold War.
  • It has a squad of multi-racial figures, including an African-American and Japanese-American, but unlike later American war movies which feature this multi-cultural team as a given, this film addresses the tensions in a newly desegregated institution at a time when much of America is still segregated. It also addresses the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The film's social and political criticism is such that it got invited to the Pentagon.
  • This film is known via Pop-Cultural Osmosis for Short Round, the Korean Boy who the White American Action Hero befriends and serves as his Kid Sidekick. Steven Spielberg offers Homage to this film with his Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but unlike that film which sentimentalizes their interaction, Fuller's film has Zack having a condescending relationship to Short Round (calling him "gook" at first, which the boy objects to) and who eventually dies in the skirmish, insisting that a child has little to no place in such a conflict.
• Strangers on a Train, both the original Patricia Highsmith novel and the Alfred Hitchcock film, is the Trope Namer for "Strangers on a Train"-Plot Murder, in which two characters trade murders so the police cannot determine a motive and catch them. However, neither version plays the trope as straight as later examples: the idea is so insane to a normal person that the protagonist Guy laughs it off as a joke. He doesn't find out until a few days later that the other character, Bruno, was completely serious and actually went through with his murder. The rest of the story centers on Guy trying to expose the truth, while Bruno forcibly involves himself in Guy's life and tries to pressure him into fulfilling his end of a murder plot that Guy unknowingly agreed to because Bruno is too psychopathic to realize that Guy was being sarcastic.
• Targets is widely viewed as being the movie that ushered in a wave of horror films revolving around ordinary and human evils. But it's quite different from many of those that came after it; hero Byron Orlok is an aging actor, while villain Bobby Thompson is a normal-looking, seemingly friendly man whose weapon of choice is a gun. His killings are also shown in a rather mundane manner and he's never given a definitive motive or reason for his acts. The bad guy's also not an unstoppable physical menace either, but a borderline Non-Action Big Bad: his initial murder spree consists of him shooting at passing cars from on top of an oil storage tank, he's forced to flee to a Drive-In Theater when the police start closing in on him, and he's rendered no threat when Orlok disarms him.
• Taxi Driver: The final shootout looks like a deconstruction of every action film shootout ever made: there are no flashy edits or jump cuts, no musical cues, no improbably cool weapons or marksmanship and it barely lasts two minutes. There is nothing but raw violence, and yet it was made long before many films that used all those techniques.
  • Travis now comes across as a harsh deconstruction of the "quiet loner/vigilante with a troubled past" archetype seen in many films since such as the Driver in Drive (2011) or Joe in You Were Never Really Here. For a start, it's made clear that Travis isn't just quietly charming or stoic but has a serious inability to form relationships with others and misunderstanding of social norms so severe he takes Betsy to a porno film on their first date and genuinely can't understand why she is upset. He's also lacking in any love interest or someone to bring out his softer side as he has no close friends and he's heavily implied to have a bad relationship with his parents, he pushes away Betsy and then blames her for it and his attempted friendship with Iris comes across as reflective of his troubled views on women in addition to a subtle implication that he is attracted to her as well despite his contempt for her pimps. He also planned to assassinate a Presidential candidate at first out of little more than a misplaced desire for attention as the candidate is someone Travis previously expressed admiration for but backed out at the last moment. And unlike most later characters who are shown as extremely efficient at violence, Travis' only vigilante actions were killing an armed robber simply because he was in the store at the time and murdering three pimps, the latter of which he barely makes it through and, depending on how you read the ending, didn't even survive despite being a young and physically very fit man who served in the Marine Corps and in Vietnam and his targets being untrained, middle-aged and out of shape. It's overall made extremely clear that Travis is not someone to idolize or even find compelling and is less of a brutal but moral lone hero than a dangerously unhinged man who just so happened to direct his violence towards a more acceptable group of people and the ending heavily implies he's just as unstable as ever and will do the same again.
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is an early Slasher Movie that's credited with originating multiple elements of the genre. However, when viewed today, it comes off as an unconventional example of a slasher flick.
  • For one thing, the movie's nowhere near as gory as its title would suggest, quite different from many later movies in the genre, which are full of blood and guts. In fact, the movie only used two pints of blood. It also doesn't have as many chainsaw deaths as you'd expect.
  • This movie's bad guy, Leatherface, isn't your typical slasher villain. Most bad guys of the genre are at least somewhat clever, but he's Dumb Muscle and heavily implied to be mentally handicapped. Moreover, while he's certainly tough, he lacks the apparent invincibility of many later slasher villains, as shown by the cut on the leg he receives from his own chainsaw at the end of the movie. On the flipside, he's considerably faster than your typical slasher villain, as shown in the chase at the end. But as fast as Leatherface is, even that has its limits — a truck just so happens to pass by while Sally is running away from Leatherface on a roadway. The driver sees the chainsaw-wielding maniac, lets Sally get in the truck bed, and floors it, leaving Leatherface to scream in frustration that Sally is getting away. No Offscreen Teleportation or inexplicable continuation of the threat here; Leatherface isn't faster than a car, so Sally escapes. Perhaps the biggest departure, however, is the fact that unlike most slasher villains, who generally work independently, Leatherface is in fact the "muscle" of a larger group.
  • It's not common for slasher movies to feature an entire group of bad guys, but this movie features a Cannibal Clan as its antagonists. Leatherface isn't targeting the protagonists out of revenge or just because, he's acting on orders. In fact, it's left ambiguous how much agency he actually has. Even today, it's not common to see a slasher villain kill his victims because he and others want to eat them. The protagonists are marked for death by a Hostile Hitchhiker, a gas station attendant catches Sally and acts as the group's cook, and it's The Patriarch, "grandpa", who runs the whole show. This is partly because the movie's plot draws deliberate parallels to the meat industry, with Leatherface representing the slaughterhouse worker who kills and butchers the livestock. He's only part of the process, albeit an important one. Today, a Slasher Movie where there are multiple villains would be considered a very unconventional one (the Scream series is the only other notable slasher with multiple villains, and even that was a twist when the first film was released).
  • The movie's climax breaks certain rules too. While he does get injured, Leatherface isn't seemingly killed at the end of the movie. It's the Hitchhiker who dies, and not at the hands of Final Girl Sally, the authorities, or an expert on the bad guys. He gets run over by a trucker, who goes on to attack Leatherface with a pipe wrench. The movie ends on the implication that the justice system will deal with the remaining villains, including Leatherface (though the very first sequel would ignore this).
  • Even the main cast is quite different from an archetypical slasher film. Usually, they follow the pattern of spending a long time establishing character and personalities for the large cast of characters, which feeds into the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality, where the horny characters and the jerkass characters die earliest followed by the sensible characters. None of that is true here. There are only five leads, and while we follow them all for a while, none of them have personalities or character traits are developed beyond Franklin's brattiness. Sex isn't really brought up that much, let alone depicted. All the characters aside from Sally Hardesty are dead before the third act, and none of them are asshole victims. The third act is a nightmarish descent into soulless depravity instead of gornographic. The girl who dies first is a brunette while Final Girl Sally is a blonde, and she never Took a Level in Badass to survive.
• Them! came out in 1954, when the giant monster movie was still new, and the first half of the movie is clearly... a Police Procedural (just with really bizarre clues), until we finally see what 'they' actually are. Them! itself was extremely influential. A number of its successors imitate the police procedural structure... even when, in terms of the plot, there's actually no mystery as to what's going on. Both Police Are Useless and Cassandra Truth are heavily averted; initially the police actually put up a decent fight against the ants, but when it becomes clear the problem is far beyond them, they call in the army, who believes them without question. The professor is not an Ignored Expert, and both the police and army defer to his knowledge throughout the film.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs, a sequel to In the Heat of the Night, predated Shaft by some years and was a more conventional crime drama than later street-crime-seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-black-protagonist productions. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song came out shortly after Tibbs and added, among other things, the fast-paced action scenes with funk music backgrounds that later became really popular through Shaft.
• This is Spın̈al Tap is the Trope Maker for the Mockumentary. However, it is not a straight parody of the Rockumentary shot at the band's Glory Days; instead, it's a deconstructed Rockumentary where the characters are Jaded Washouts. Spinal Tap is also Played for Laughs, while later mockumentaries might be more serious.
• The Three Stooges:
  • The trio was very iconic for their pie fights, but many of their episodes used anything but pies, preferring to use something messy in the vicinity. One early short, "Pop Goes The Easel", have the Stooges splat clay on the faces of their adversaries. Another would use pastries and other food on a buffet table, and in one where the Stooges portrayed Wild West cowboys, they'd use projectiles like mud and a beehive. As a bonus, they'd often launch said projectiles with a catapult-like contraption (a stone-carved artistic "hand", a tree branch, etc.)
  • In some shorts, Curly has some goofball tic that will cause him to go berserk, usually giving him superhuman strength and endurance. So why not take advantage of this and use it for something positive? Well, they did — in "Punch Drunks", the Stooges' second short, and the first where this gimmick was used. There, Moe and Larry take advantage of Curly's tics and have him rescue a woman's car out of a ditch, and win a bunch of boxing matches to become champ.
  • The short Three Little Beers unbuilds the goofy golf comedy. In this case, the Bizarre and Improbable Golf Game exists because the Stooges know nothing about golf, often confusing it with other sports like hunting. Also their antics were such that no sane staff or groundskeepers would allow — once the destruction was seen, the Stooges were quickly thrown out, and naturally never got to enter the tournament introduced in the beginning of the short. This was decades before bizarre golf comedies like Caddyshack and Happy Gilmore came to be.
• To Sir, with Love is a Save Our Students movie where an educated, determined black teacher is helping out a bunch of troubled, inner-city, mostly white youths. Sounds like a response to movies in the genre being criticized for perceived use of Mighty Whitey and White Man's Burden, right? Well, it came out in 1967, decades before the movies being criticized for it were made.
• Trading Places: The 90s and 2000s would later feature lots of comedies where a Jive Turkey of a black man is made part of a white world and 'shakes things up'. However, the black character, Billy Ray Valentine, is in fact brought into the white world on purpose: the Duke brothers want to settle the Nature Versus Nurture dispute, seeing if Billy Ray, a homeless black man, could become a successful businessman if he was brought into the rich man's world. Billy Ray not only turns out to be a good businessman — fitting very well into the world — but succeeds with his own street smarts. After going from Rags to Riches, Billy Ray throws a party for his lower-class friends, but he realizes that he doesn't get along with them anymore as they're just mooching off his newfound status, so he has them thrown out and he devotes himself to his new life, becoming more polite and mature in the process.
• TRON has cyberspace before cyberspace was invented. In fact, the digital world isn't referred to as "Cyberspace" at all; the creators seem to favor the term "Electronic World". Likewise, the protagonist of the first film, Kevin Flynn, is an unbuilt Tech Bro in that he's got the charisma, good looks, and athleticism of that trope along with the immature behavior and initial motive just to get the credit and money for his inventions. He evolves into a benevolent version of that trope, but it's not until events in the sequel bite him in the butt that he gains maturity.
• Unbreakable is a deconstructive film that explores what a "realistic" superhero would actually be like, long before ‘realistic’ superheroes were even a thing in motion pictures. It’s older than Batman Begins, preceded only by actual comic book deconstructions such as Watchmen. It also goes even further than later deconstructions: David is entirely human, has only some above-average abilities and no super-gadgets, and struggles with accepting his role because he thinks heroes are just the stuff of stories, whilst his Eccentric Mentor Elijah speculates that heroic characters are in fact inspired by real-life heroes such as him. Elijah proves how dangerous applying tropes to real life can be; to force it into a narrative that makes sense to him, he arranges the deaths of hundreds of people to cement himself as a super-villain and find his natural opposite, David’s superhero. Instead of a dramatic final confrontation, David's response to learning this is to just call the police and he is clearly devastated to learn the truth about a man he had come to see as a friend. Similarly, Elijah, far from being a cackling supervillain or a manipulative sociopath, is portrayed as a brilliant but troubled man whose belief in such stories and making himself into a villain is his own way of coping with his crippling medical condition and is genuinely saddened at having to become David's enemy, having come to also see him as a friend. He also gives himself up voluntarily, even knowing what it will mean.
• WarGames: Every hacking-related trope from the past 30+ years owes its existence to this film, right down to the first cinematic reference to the term "firewall". Yet the hacker boy who saved the world nearly precipitated its destruction in the first place (way to save on major characters). Plus, even though the film helped popularize the Everything Is Online trope, WOPR wasn't supposed to be accessible from the outside. It was a grave switching error at a phone company that made it possible. It doesn't help that much of what gave WarGames its punch is fading from collective memory. Having a plucky young hacker almost precipitate World War III was an allegory on how nonsensical the Cold War was to the average person.
• Whatever Happened To Baby Jane was the Trope Maker for the bizarre "Psycho Biddy" subgenre of horror, wherein the villain is a woman from middle age to very old, usually played by a former movie star who can no longer find work as the main actress. What other movies forget, though is that in that movie, the victim is older than her tormentor, and bound to a wheelchair - it was as much about an "evil old lady", as it was about a frail, forgotten and helpless one being humiliated by her younger sister. That's probably why it's the one movie in the genre that received critical praise. And the "innocent victim" turns out to have been the real villain: Blanche ended up in a wheelchair after nearly killing Jane with her car, and framed Jane for the crime so that she could have Jane weight on her hand and foot. Jane's lunacy and torment was the result of years of Blanche's manipulation and abuse. Once Jane learns the truth, her vindictiveness and fury go away.
  • And two years before Baby Jane, another movie featured an "old lady killer", who was revealed to have been Dead All Along - the real killer was her son. The movie's name? Psycho.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the Trope Namer for live-action humans interacting with cartoon characters. However, the film shows the social and physical risks of such interactions.
  • Parts of the movie show how dangerous Toon Physics are when applied to normal humans without powers. Eddie's brother was killed when a malevolent toon dropped a piano on his head, and the plot is kicked off when Marvin Acme has a safe dropped on him by another toon. Eddie faces quite a bit of peril when he enters Toontown. Judge Doom's toon powers make him an especially dangerous opponent to Eddie since he has all the powers of a toon but with little moral restraint.
  • The film also makes many thinly-veiled allusions to real life racial discrimination, with Toons being mocked and disliked by humans and forced to live in a separate neighborhood, despite being popular entertainers. Judge Doom's Evil Plan involves tearing down their neighborhood, which is a real life fate that befell many other vibrant minority communities.
• 1939's The Wizard of Oz popularized, if not introduced, the visual effect of portraying mundane life in monochrome or bland lighting and using lush color to present the more exciting and wonderful world of freedom and adventure. In reality, it was just being faithful to the Frank L. Baum book which described Kansas as being completely "gray". However, most later films and commercials that use the technique don't center the plot around a protagonist who specifically desires to return to her relatively uneventful and colorless life in the end.
• Wolf Creek is one of the codifiers of the Torture Porn genre of horror movies, but relies less on showing horrific pain and/or large amounts of gore, focusing instead on the suspense of what tortures might happen to the protagonists. What happened to Kristy is never shown, and the horror is only implied. The victims all escape the traps, and while some of them still die, they have rather mundane deaths that aren't particularly gratuitous or gory. The villain isn't given any sort of Freudian Excuse as to why he does what he does; he's just a racist asshole who tortures and kills people because they pressed a Berserk Button of his or got in his way.

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