Unintentional Period Piece / Turn of the Millennium - Live-Action Films

• In 2012, all televisions featured are of the CRT variety. Whilst it's not too much of a stretch to imagine a convenience store with one — despite happening after analog television was discontinued — it seems unrealistic to believe that a state-of-the-art cruise liner would have a CRT television rather than a flat-screen television. Noah's hair is also a swooping fringe that comes straight out of the late 2000s. Granted, the film is called 2012 and was released just three years prior to the year in question, so it's pretty blatantly not going for a timeless feel.
• There's a shot of the Twin Towers in 28 Days, making it clear that the movie was released one year before 9/11.
• The 2005 Judd Apatow comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin is very explicitly a product of the early-to-middle part of the 2000s. The electronics store where the main characters work (the two products we see them pitch are a combination VCR/DVD player and a bulky, pre-LCD big-screen TV), Trish’s business selling other people's items on Ebay, the extended PT Cruiser driving sequence, the low-rise jeans and sequins-heavy fashion, the pervasive trans- and homophobic jokes... all point blatantly to the turn of the millennium. However, Andy's fanboy-ish passion for classic nerd properties like Marvel Comics and Star Wars, his interest in computers and the fact that he rides a bike instead of a car—while intended to show how pathetic and undesirable he is—would hardly be marks against him in The New '10s.
• 13 Going on 30: The opening is set in the 80s, with Jenna turning thirteen, and her turning thirty in the third act would place the movie in the 2000s. She works at a fashion magazine, and any mention of celebrities falls under this trope — examples include Eminem's initial rise to fame and Jennifer Lopez at her peak. The soundtrack and the fashion also combine to place the Present Day scenes squarely in the early aughts.
• An American Girl: Chrissa Stands Strong is an example, even though most American Girl productions do not do this for the doll of the year collection. The film was produced at a time when the anti-bullying movement was just starting to gain mainstream acceptance, plus there's obvious usage of late-2000s fashion trends for the characters' outfits.
• The 2006 satire American Dreamz. The plot revolves around a U.S. President based heavily on George W. Bush deciding to read the newspapers for the first time, causing a nervous breakdown as his black-and-white worldview is shattered. To get him out of his funk, his Chief of Staff (based heavily on Dick Cheney and Karl Rove) books him as a guest judge on the finale of the titular talent show, a parody of American Idol hosted by a British Caustic Critic in the vein of Simon Cowell. The show's two finalists are a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing Farmer's Daughter who exploits her boyfriend, a wounded veteran of the Iraq War, to win the sympathy of viewers in Middle America, and a jihadist who infiltrated the show to launch a terrorist attack after his mother was killed in a US bombing in the Middle East — and now realizes that he can nail the President in that attack. Every single point in that plot description firmly ties it to the era when reality TV ruled the airwaves, watercooler discussions revolved around celebrity gossip and The War on Terror dominated the political agenda.
• American Psycho is very explicitly a product of the early-to-middle part of the 2000s, but not in its setting or soundtrack - as it was made at a time when a good chunk of 1980s pop & rock was just on its way to being Vindicated by History, and it shows. Most of Patrick Bateman's music taste is played for laughs (for example, Huey Lewis and the News and Phil Collins, along with the nowadays very politically incorrect choice of Whitney Houston) instead of not being a mark against him, for example.
• An American Carol takes place in a pre–Barack Obama USA. The entire plot is about supporting the Iraq War, which ended three years later.
• Antitrust was filmed at the height of the dot-com boom of the late '90s/early '00s and hit theaters in 2001, only a short time after the bubble started leaking. As such, the hacker and geek culture this film portrays is an excellent snapshot of the salad years of the bubble in 1999-2000, when one could program a good idea in their garage and be able to get millionaire venture capitalists ready to front money on almost a moment's notice once they saw it. The film's use of a parody of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates as the Big Bad, together with the heavy amounts of Product Placement for Apple that the film carried, also reflects the widespread public antipathy that existed among tech geeks towards Gates and Microsoft at the time, with Microsoft seen as a monopolistic MegaCorp that would destroy the nascent free Internet and Apple seen as a plucky underdog rival that was used by creatives, schools, and almost nobody else. Nowadays, their reputations have completely flipped. Gates, having long since retired from Microsoft's day-to-day operations, has rehabilitated his reputation to a point through his charity work, while Microsoft's products are now seen as Boring, but Practical rather than The Antichrist. Instead, it was Apple, having turned itself around in the '00s under a returning Steve Jobs, that became the go-to point of reference for writers satirizing the modern Silicon Valley MegaCorp due to its dominance of the American smartphone market as well as for being practically the only computer and phone brand existing in fictional works (and its overall influence in the industry) and the "walled garden" ecosystem it created on its App Store — one that, incidentally, resembles the closed-off network that Gary Winston and NURV planned to reshape the Internet into in the film.
• Bandslam came out in 2009, and features teens taking pictures and recording videos via digital cameras as opposed to smart phones. There's also Will's mother's attitude towards the kids at his old school bullying him — she doesn't ignore it but it's treated as something they must live with, and no one ever intervenes to stop it. The band promotes themselves through MySpace and there's barely a mention of social media otherwise. Charlotte was once considered cool because she has her own Wikipedia page, and that's where Will finds information on her, as opposed to Twitter or Facebook. He finds out about her father's sudden death from a teacher and wouldn't have known otherwise, when in the days of social media and smart phones being the norm, there surely would have been a status update about it or well wishers posting on her social media pages.
• The Beach reveals the time of its creation right off the bat, and not just with its Y2K-era soundtrack and style.
  • It opens with the protagonist Richard describing Southeast Asia as a place where "dollars and Deutsche Marks get turned into counterfeit watches and genuine scars". Two years later, Germany would retire the Deutsche Mark as its currency upon the introduction of the euro. A later scene also has Richard imagining that he is in a video game — specifically, a PlayStation game, complete with a filter designed to make the film resemble the blocky, primitive 3D graphics of the time. The closing scene takes place in an internet cafe with a long row of G3 iMacs, a computer whose bubble-like design was then on the cutting edge of The Aesthetics of Technology but which is now seen as a time capsule of early 2000s computing (Apple itself moving on to its more famous aesthetic not long after).
  • Most importantly, however, Sal's effort to keep her island paradise a secret could only have worked in a time before smartphones capable of remotely uploading pictures directly to social media, and with it the attendant "influencer" culture of Instagram et al., became the norm. Françoise is seen using a disposable camera in one scene, while Richard makes a call on a pay phone; today, both of them would be using smartphones for such. This last point makes Sal even more of a Tragic Villain, as a modern-day viewer knows with the benefit of hindsight that, despite all her best efforts, her island will eventually be discovered and exploited by the outside world. Tellingly, this is in fact what ultimately happened to the actual island that the movie was filmed on, largely because the film turned it into a popular tourist destination, such that the government of Thailand had to restrict access to it to help restore the environment. Bettina Makalintal, writing for Vice, said that the story chillingly predicted the worst excesses of influencer culture years before it was a thing.
• Be Kind Rewind:
  • The film (early 2008) is based on a video store that only sells VHS tapes, currently on the verge of going out of business in the face of DVD (due to the store being owned by a Disco Dan who's sticking with the obsolete format out of stubbornness). In 2006, VHS was dead on its feet and Blu-Ray—which isn't mentioned at all in the film—was already starting to creep its way into stores, and in 2008, Blu-Ray was starting to decisively beat DVD, making the film somewhat dated even upon release. Surprisingly enough, as The New '10s marched on, independent video stores like the one in the film actually started making a minor comeback as videotapes became retro and Gen Y succumbed to the Nostalgia Filter. This narrows the setting of the film even more to the few years when VHS was at its nadir.
  • One element notable in its absence is that the duo's No Budget films more or less exclusively use practical effects, such as passing off a large black safe as the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, shining a green flashlight under a clear tarp to create Slimer from Ghostbusters (1984), or singing a movie's theme rather than editing the music over it, with the only things that could be called computer effects being incredibly basic features built into the camera (i.e. inverting the colors to simulate night). This puts it at a period when computer effects and editing software weren't as cheap and easy-to-use as they are today, when nobody YouTubers can manage more convincing effects in Adobe Premiere—though it does lend the film a lot of its charm and comedy.
• Bend It Like Beckham is based around a girls' soccer team in Britain, and two characters are trying to get scholarships to play NCAA (college/university) soccer in America in hopes of eventually making that country's professional league, the Women's United Soccer Association. The WUSA would cease operations just a year later.^note The States didn't have any better luck with women's pro soccer later; its next pro league, Women's Professional Soccer, only played from 2009 to 2011. The current National Women's Soccer League, the first truly successful women's pro league in the States, didn't start up until 2013. The film is obviously set at the time when David Beckham was at his peak as a player, and a scene at the airport near the end captures the 2000s media frenzy surrounding 'Posh & Becks' as a power couple. Jules's mother is likewise portrayed as cluelessly embarrassing because she believes her daughter is a lesbian for playing football — even ten years later, this attitude would make her seem intolerant at best and abusive at worst.
• Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is the sequel to The Blair Witch Project (which actually is a period piece, being set five years before its release). Because it satirizes the media frenzy surrounding the Blair Witch, it's placed squarely in the very early 2000s - where Burkittsville was overrun with tourists who were fans. One character is a cameraman, and all the cameras he uses are late 90s/early 2000s technology - with a plot point being the tapes that everything is filmed on. Two other characters are writing a book and bring the manuscript with them - with mention that they've only backed up their notes on a computer; even six years later, they'd be using laptops for everything. None of the five twentysomethings seem to possess a cell phone, and only communicate remotely through email. Jeff's fashion is also straight out of the Y2K era.
• The 2000 adaptation of Charlie's Angels starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu.
  • Just as the original series was a snapshot of the '70s women's liberation movement, so was this film a snapshot of what the feminist movement looked like in the Y2K era, a time when women were encouraged to be in touch with their sexuality and femininity in the name of reclaiming it from lecherous men. This notion came under significant backlash in the post-#MeToo feminist atmosphere of the late 2010s, which saw it being criticized by some as merely dressing up Playboy-era sexism and objectification as a form of female empowerment, especially given the film's heavy use of the Male Gaze to portray the Angels as sex symbols.^note While this stance is hardly universal even among feminists, the overall cheerful and unapologetic way this is portrayed shows that it was made before criticism from this angle became prominent. The heavy dosage of cultural appropriation pertaining to the various disguises that the Angels wear, particularly its exoticization of Japanese culture, also marks it as a product of its time.
  • Meanwhile, the film's approach to action was clearly inspired by the airborne brand of kung-fu and Bullet Time effects that were seen in The Matrix^note The first film was such a success and caused such a major shift in culture — and Special Effects, with the proliferation of Wire Fu and Bullet Time in action sequences — that it was imitated constantly. Many elements of the film, like the martial arts fighting, the slow-motion gunfights, and the "bullet dodge" scene, were so frequently copied and parodied throughout the Turn of the Millennium that audiences grew tired of them. Viewers today can find it very difficult to see how fresh and exciting the film was when it first released. from the year prior. Not only that, but the Angels being embroiled in a plot involving them having to fight to save privacy in the digital age could serve as a quaint glimpse into the anxieties of a pre-9/11^note The fact that the film opens up with the Angels apprehending a man who had explosives strapped on him while on an airplane and it's Played for Laughs now looks extremely tone-deaf post-9/11., pre-cell phone, Y2K era. And the glossy, playful, brightly colored aesthetic provided by one-time music video helmer Joseph McGinty Nichol (AKA McG) was clearly emblematic of the obliviously carefree spirit of the mid to late 1990s pop culture. Female led action or comedic films since Charlie's Angels are either darkly serious (such as The Hunger Games), have a self-deprecating edge (such as Trainwreck with Amy Schumer), or boast a genuine level of drama and conflict (such as Pitch Perfect and Bridesmaids).
  • Doug Walker, when reviewing Charlie's Angels as The Nostalgia Critic said that it's the epitome of a 2000s time capsule. He adds that if Space Jam was the "most 1996 thing ever made", then Charlie's Angels is the "most 2000s thing ever made".
  • All in all, Charlie's Angels was a pretty stylized film even for its era (from as previously mentioned, McG, a maximalist music video director). But so much of that was representative of cinema at that time. Practically everything in the film was made up of needle drops, cuts every second, a short runtime, slo-mo/bullet time, silly comic relief, and everything being extremely "horny on main".
• The 2004 action-thriller Cellular starring Kim Basinger and Chris Evans was one of the first films to acknowledge the popularity of cell phones and to use it as a plot point. However, because technology is the film's driving force, it was destined to become dated very fast. The movie rested on the idea that the movie's kidnapped heroine (Basinger) would have a working, active landline that she could finagle and use to communicate with the outside world. According to Forbes, landline phones were still fairly common at the time of Cellular's theatrical release. Today, however, the majority of American households don't use them at all. The heavy reliance on a Nokia 6600 phone (a clunky, proto-smartphone with a tiny screen, a grainy camera, no wi-fi, and no lights) also made the film age really fast. Had Cellular been made at least five years later, then Kim Basinger's lifeline would no doubt be an iPhone or even an Android.
• Cloverfield stands as an example of a Post-9/11 Kaiju Movie, the monster's rampage through New York explicitly designed to call to mind the 9/11 attacks and the state of emergency that New York was under at the time. Furthermore, its portrayal of New York was of a city in the middle of the Bloomberg era's gentrification, with the days of The Big Rotten Apple long behind it but the twenty-something protagonists still being able to afford apartments in Manhattan. And finally, there's the fact that the entire film is shot on a traditional camcorder, with cell phones only used to send and receive calls and text messages. Even though there was a scene where bystanders were taking pictures on their cell phones of the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty, they still used flip phones as opposed to a smart phone.
• The 2005 film Cry_Wolf deals with high school students spreading rumors about a serial killer on the loose. Their main method of doing this is via emails and AOL instant messages. It's quite obvious that this was made in a pre–social media era, as the kids having phones that can access AOL is meant to show that they're richer than average – before cell phones in general and eventually smartphones became everyday devices for average teens. Additionally there's a scene where Mercedes sends a photo via her camera phone to Lewis, and he has to wait for it to load.
• Cursed is an example of a film that became dated right out of the gate as a result of its Troubled Production. The protagonist Ellie works as a production assistant on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, with the late night host making a cameo in one scene. By the time the film was finally released in 2005, after two years of delays and reshoots, Kilborn had left the show and been replaced by Craig Ferguson.
• While Daredevil was surprisingly forward-thinking in a lot of ways (something best demonstrated by the director's cut), it also has a lot of things that inextricably tie it to the early 2000s. The gratuitous overuse of Nu Metal and Post-Grunge (the former of which was already on its way out at the time, and the film's soundtrack was one of its last stands) is a big one (especially the product placement of Evanescence, which alone would be enough to tie it to that time period), while the Hell-Bent for Leather costuming, heavy usage of wire-fu, and quite a few of the dialogue choices are also extremely reflective of the time it was made.
• The James Bond film Die Another Day tries to avoid dating itself by making the bad guys a faction of the North Korean military that's extreme even for them, but still manages it because the main Bond Girl is a sympathetic NSA agent, meaning it could've only been made prior to that agency's reputation collapsing in The New '10s after its warrantless wiretapping scandal was made public.
• Dracula 2000. As if the title alone wasn't enough of a giveaway, Dracula's Matrix-inspired Badass Longcoat, the Nu Metal soundtrack, and the Product Placement for Virgin Megastores (which has since pulled out of the US with the decline of record stores in general) all take what was intended as a modernization of the Dracula story and leave it feeling more dated than a film that was made in 1931.
• The first three Fast and the Furious films were a loving revue of early-mid-2000s extreme sports culture, especially tuner/car racing culture. Later films in the series (starting with the fourth) tend to be less obvious about it beyond the characters' choice of Cool Cars, and seem to be more of an homage to the era.
  • The first film's main conflict can come off as bizarre to modern viewers, seeing as how it is over the theft of a hot new technology to resell on the black market: namely, combination TV/DVD/VHS players. Within ten years of the film's release, VHS had gone completely out of style, and DVDs were on the decline, in the face of emerging next-gen media formats like Blu-Ray, and within twenty years, streaming media was threatening to put the idea of a physical "player" out to pasture outside of niche communities.
  • The third film, Tokyo Drift, was released in 2006 and has characters using handheld camcorders in the American-set scenes (with cell phones nowhere in sight) and Bow Wow's character, a reseller of various consumer goods, showing off a pair of brand-new, unreleased Air Jordans that, in real life, came out that year. This wouldn't be that notable, except that it creates a Continuity Snarl owing to the fact that, within the series' timeline, it takes place after the events of the sixth film in 2013, largely to explain how Han showed up alive in that film despite having seemingly died in this one. On the other hand, the presence of flip phones in the Japanese-set scenes isn't as outdated as non-Japanese viewers might think, as, for various reasons, smartphones took much longer to catch on in Japan than in other countries, with old-fashioned "feature phones" still holding considerable market share as late as 2014.
• In the original Final Destination, the under-reaction to a guy saying a plane is going to explode, especially when it turns out to be true, clearly shows that the movie was made before 9/11. The two agents investigating Alex and the other survivors do suspect that he had something to do with the crash given that he knew about it in advance (thanks to his premonition), but they never once use the word "terrorism"; had the film come out just two years later, they most certainly would have. To drive it home, in Final Destination 5 (made in 2011), the police having the same under-reaction to the opening disaster as the agents in the first film is one of the ways in which it's foreshadowed that the film is a Stealth Prequel.
• Freaky Friday (2003):
  • This one doesn't seem very contemporary with the outdated technology that Dr. Tess Coleman uses so frequently. It's used to suggest she's a workaholic who keeps herself on call much more often than she should for the sake of her family, a theme that might be harder to convey with a simple smartphone that would replace all of those gizmos had the movie been made even ten years later.
  • Her daughter Anna performs in a rock band whose music is in the pop-punk style that was emerging in popularity back then.
  • On a lesser note, the House of Blues venue she dreams of playing in and does in the climactic concert scene has moved to a different building nearby since this movie was made.
• From Justin to Kelly, a 2003 fame vehicle for American Idol first-season winner Kelly Clarkson and runner-up Justin Guarini. It portrays the internet as something that only nerds used, an idea which was hilariously outdated even in 2003. The film's whole MTV-styled Spring Break premise also dates it. MTV has a looser grip on pop culture than it did even in 2003, and the Great Recession has made the idea of such a glamorous spring break seem less believable. The whole setting comes across as Totally Radical now.
• The Girl Next Door drops the bombshell that Danielle is actually a former porn star about half an hour in, after Eli had to search around and find a film. The movie came out in 2004, before the internet was a vital part of a teenager's life, and there's no mention of social media at all. The third act involves them shooting a home porn movie that's actually a sex education video and having to distribute it via video tapes. If the movie had been made in The New '10s, they could have done so digitally or at least had DVDs made instead.
• It's very obvious The Glass House is set in the early 2000s (it was released in September 2001); Ruby and her friends use pagers to communicate rather than mobile phones (which are also scarce amongst the rest of the cast), some of the teen characters' clothing and hairstyles follow late 90s and early 2000s fashion trends, Ruby has an iBook G3 laptop which was launched in 1999 and discontinued in May 2001, and Ruby uses dial-up to connect to the internet, among others.
• Somewhat amusingly, Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) tried to modernize the Xilien aliens for audiences in the 2000s when it brought them back as the villains, after they hadn't been seen since 1965's Invasion of Astro-Monster. Instead of the form-fitting, Raygun Gothic–inspired Space Clothes that they originally wore, they get shiny, monochromatic black trenchcoats with Goth-inspired hairdos... which are pretty obviously inspired by The Matrix. Ironically, the Xiliens' "modern" look is more dated than it was in 1965.
• 2002's Halloween: Resurrection tried to be "modern" by bringing the Halloween series into the world of Reality TV and the internet. Instead, it winds up badly dating itself to the early 2000s. Survivor, The Osbournes, and Pulp Fiction are name-dropped or otherwise referenced by the characters, and more importantly, the film's then-slick portrayal of the era's technology is now positively antiquated — most notably with how the film treats text messaging and mobile email as something novel and revolutionary (the Final Girl being the only character with a cell phone/PDA that can do that).
• While it was intended to reflect the period, Michael Almereyda's 2000 film version of Hamlet is better as a retro period piece than as the ultra-contemporary vision it was at the time of its release. Every communication device that existed back then gets its turn with Shakespeare's words, including the cell phone, fax machine, answering machine, computer, and video camera. The posh New York home of ruthless CEO Claudius, trust-fund brat Hamlet, and the rest of the characters carries a stronger air of doom now that we know the political and economic events on the horizon. In hindsight, even the Blockbuster store where Hamlet gives his most famous soliloquy is headed for death.
• Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle:
  • New Brunswick did have a White Castle before it closed in 2020. However, in 2016, a White Castle had opened in South Brunswick, which is approximately 20 minutes from New Brunswick, so nowadays, Harold and Kumar wouldn't have had to drive all the way to Cherry Hill.
  • Since the 2010s, there's an increased push to legalize marijuana across the US, with NJ becoming the 13th state to legalize it in 2021.
  • The main characters only know Neil Patrick Harris as the star of Doogie Howser, M.D. (which stopped airing more than a decade before the film was released), and they don't see anything particularly strange about his shameless womanizing. Harris' role in this film would lead to his unexpected Career Resurrection after he was cast in How I Met Your Mother the following year, and he would come out as gay the year after that.
• The 2003 Chris Rock vehicle Head of State fell into this pretty hard. It's a comedy in which the whole premise is that a Black guy is president. Yeah, how crazy would that be? That would never happen!
• The film He's Just Not That into You (2009) is a reflection of what dating was like in the late part of the decade, right before the ubiquity of smartphones in The New '10s. Smartphone technology had changed so rapidly between 2007, when the film was shot, and when it was released in 2009 that some aspects of the film looked dated when it came out.
  • While characters use dating sites, they are actual websites accessed through browsers on desktops or laptops. Sites such as these (for example, OKCupid) still do exist, but as the years went by young adults began to favor smartphone apps like Tinder.
  • All the main characters still had landline phones in their homes and work numbers that they gave to their dates. Everyone had a cell phone but they had not replaced landlines yet.
  • Voicemail messages are the primary communication method. Texting is mentioned just once, when Mary mentions a potential love interest known only as "the texter", which was not in common use because cell phones usually didn't have keyboards and typing a text with a numeric pad was rather cumbersome.
  • Mary said she was rejected on seven different devices. Smartphones would eventually consolidate many of these devices.
  • MySpace was still in relatively common use when the film was shot in 2007, but when it came out this was becoming dated. In The New '10s, it would be completely overshadowed by Facebook and other newer social media tools, such as Instagram and Twitter.
• The entire High School Musical series. The fashion, styles, and music in the film trilogy seemingly go out of their way to mark them as being products of the mid-to-late 2000s, almost as though they were Grease-esque nostalgia trips made for the decade as a whole.
• A branch of the supermarket chain Somerfield features prominently in Hot Fuzz. By the summer of 2011, all branches had been either renamed to Co-op or had been sold to other chains ^* Audiences outside the UK might not know this, thus having a supermarket that's not Asda or Tesco's might actually enhance the timelessness of the film .
  • Also: Nicholas' phone is a Nokia 3310; his membership of SO19 and participation in raids on terror cells is a clear nod to the original purging of al-Qa'ida sympathisers in Britain as a result of the War on Terror; and the Town with a Dark Secret wouldn't stay above suspicion for very long if travellers and street performers kept vanishing without trace; their families would be posting on social media about their disappearance, and Sandford would keep coming up as the last place they had gone to.
• I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is a 2007 Adam Sandler comedy that can't decide whether it wants to support gay rights or make fun of gay people. If this film had been released even five years later, it would surely be seen as homophobic. The plot of marrying for insurance reasons was made redundant several years later by the Affordable Care Act.
• In Search of a Midnight Kiss is an independent romantic comedy released in 2007 set on New Year's Eve in an unspecified year, but very obviously 2006 or 2007. Even if you weren't aware of the date of release, you could easily place it just by watching it: The main character describes how he worked at a video rental store before his move to Los Angeles, the opening scene shows him on MySpace, there's a reference to George W. Bush and the Iraq War and he sends an email to his ex-girlfriend using a very Windows Vista looking version of Microsoft Outlook. The plot of the movie is kicked off by him going on a date set up by an ad on Craigslist personals, which faded in relevance after the surge of smartphone dating apps and was discontinued entirely in 2018, and the female love interest he meets is shown using a very mid-00s looking flip phone, while the protagonist has no cell phone at all (something that would've been seen as very unusual even in 2006/07, especially for a 29-year old.) Furthermore a good chunk of the movie is based around them being lost in LA, something that would not likely happen if made just a couple years later and they had smartphones.
• Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back takes the titular drug dealers of The View Askewniverse (itself listed under 1990s Film) and brings them into the Turn of the Millennium... but only just. The plot revolves around superhero movies as they existed in the early '00s, with Hollywood recognizing that they're no longer box-office poison but still getting the hang of how to properly adapt the genre to the big screen, before Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, and especially the Marvel Cinematic Universe codified the tropes, style, and feel of modern superhero movies. What we see of the Bluntman and Chronic movie looks specifically like a parody of the broad camp of Batman & Robin instead. Throw in jokes about an Animal Wrongs Group, Miramax Films' Oscar Bait reputation, the Scream films, Good Will Hunting, and Ain't It Cool News, and you have a snapshot of early '00s movie geek culture. The quasi-remake/sequel Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, released in 2019, mines a lot of its humor from just how much things have changed since 2001, especially with regards to how superhero franchises became a money-printing machine for Hollywood and geek culture took over mainstream pop culture.
• Jennifer's Body is a time capsule of the mid-late 2000s emo scene. The film's soundtrack is filled with emo-flavored alt-rock and indie rock, most notably with the Fake Band Low Shoulder that sacrifices Jennifer in the first act and serves as the Greater-Scope Villain; the main joke about them was how a band that makes such whiny, simpering music was in fact worshiping Satan like they were an old-school metal band. Furthermore, save for the titular Jennifer, most of the cast, particularly the Final Girl Needy and her boyfriend Chip, are portrayed as stereotypical Emo Teens, especially in their fashion sense.
• Josie and the Pussycats (2001) acts as a perfect time capsule of the early 2000s for many reasons:
  • The film takes place in a world where Teen Pop Boy Bands and Girl Groups are the biggest things in pop music, the major labels wield near-supreme control over what becomes popular, MTV is still thought of as a music network first (and Total Request Live host Carson Daly even makes a cameo As Himself), and everyone gets their music from brick-and-mortar record stores. File-sharing isn't even mentioned, despite the fact that Napster was at the peak of its popularity and infamy when the film came out, and it and later file-sharing services would set off the rapid downfall of the record industry in the 2000s before it began to recover with the rise of streaming and legal download services.
  • One of the main Running Gags in the film concerns an over-the-top parody of Product Placement, with virtually every setting being utterly plastered in brand names/logos and many lines of dialogue littered with mentions of specific brand names. Quite a few of these brands have faded from relevance, most notably Moviefone (while still technically active today, its original use during that era has been rendered obsolete by the internet), America Online (rendered obsolete by high-speed internet), and the Sega Dreamcast, which had just been discontinued a week before the film's premiere. What's more, this product placement is plot-relevant, as the Big Bad Fiona's Evil Plan involves using Subliminal Seduction to drive pop culture trends and turn the youth into consumerist sheep. And get people to think she's cool, but that's a different story. Made in the wake of the 1999 Seattle WTO protests and the publication of Naomi Klein's No Logo, the film's villains serve as an encapsulation of the fears of the anti-globalization and anti-corporate movements of the time.
  • The film also updates the titular band's sound to Pop Punk, which was on the ascent in the early 2000s. While Josie, Melody, and Valerie's outfits and videos are reminiscent of Destiny's Child and early Britney Spears, the actual music sounds more like Avril Lavigne and Good Charlotte. On a similar note, it also predicted how that style of pop-punk would sweep aside the bubblegum teen pop that was at its peak at the time the film was made, with the Fake Band DuJour (a parody of the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC) dying in a plane crash at the start of the film, to be replaced by Josie and the Pussycats as MegaRecords' new superstar band.
  • On a darker note, the World Trade Center towers are prominently featured during the Pussycats' arrival in New York. This film was released just five months to the day before 9/11.
• Kick-Ass with its many references to MySpace, which had already become dated between the time the movie was filmed and when it was released. It wasn't as dated in the source material, which had been released in 2008.
• The King of Kong was filmed over the course of 2007 and 2008. Everyone uses flip phones, people competing for video game high scores record their performances on VHS tapes, and nobody has a digital camera. What really marks it as being from that era is that, only a few years after the film's release, Billy Mitchell, one of the competitors (and the film's "villain"), was exposed as using emulators to achieve his scores, leading to him being banned from submitting high scores in the future, with later evidence proving almost his entire career as a professional gamer was a con. It certainly makes the ominous tone of his scenes in the film Hilarious in Hindsight.
• Linda Linda Linda does generally a good job in avoiding being a period piece, but the scenes set in the music classroom show it having posters of bands that only were popular in that period, such as The Music.
• Love Actually seems like a time capsule of early-2000s British culture:
  • The Prime Minister's opening monologue openly references the 9/11 attacks, which happened just two years before the film was released. When watching it after 2010 or so, it's pretty clear that the monologue was written when the attacks were still in recent memory.
  • Bill Nighy's character (an aging rockstar) elicits stunned reactions from a talk show audience when he claims to have slept with Britney Spears. The movie was made in 2003, during the last window of time when Spears was widely viewed as a sex symbol; within about a year of its release, she began having some widely publicized struggles with mental illness, which mostly turned her into a punchline in jokes about "crazy" celebrities up until she was Vindicated by History once people started reckoning with the misogyny and intolerance towards those with mental illness that were common in 2000s pop culture.
  • Though unnamed, the fictional US President in the film (played by Billy Bob Thornton) is pretty clearly a parody of George W. Bush, and the (fictional) Prime Minister's subplot is partly based on the public perception of Bush's relationship with Tony Blair at the time. The subplot ends with the PM standing up to the President after feeling disrespected by him, which earns him enthusiastic applause from a crowd; at the time, much of the British public was upset about Bush allegedly taking the American-British military alliance for granted after his decision to invade Iraq, which was highly controversial.
  • The PM's list of 'great things about Britain' includes references to David Beckham's right foot (and left foot). In 2003, he was captain of the England football team, and overall an important figure in English sport as a player. In 2006, he stepped down as captain, and retired from international football in 2008, before retiring from football altogether in 2013.
  • Billy Mack's entire storyline is based around releasing a track and getting to the top of the Christmas Top 40 music charts (a very big deal in the British music business). But The X Factor started the year after the film's release, and between 2005 and 2008 (and again in 2010, 2013 and 2014), the winners of that show always got the UK Number One.
  • Ant and Dec appear in one scene As Themselves, where they interview Billy Mack in front of an audience of teenagers. The movie was made when the duo still primarily hosted kid-oriented programmes, though they stopped shortly before the film was released.
• The 2003 John Whitesell film Malibu's Most Wanted is two hours of Jamie Kennedy mocking hip-hop culture while portraying a wannabe white rapper who embarrasses his upper-class family with his attempts to pass himself off as "ghetto". Even if the music, slang, and fashion weren't clearly dated to the early 2000s, its portrayal of the Culture Clash between the upper-class white denizens of Malibu and the lower-class black denizens of South Central L.A. definitely would be. It's hard to imagine a movie playing such a subject for laughs a decade later, considering the lingering effects of the Great Recession and the national conversation surrounding racially motivated Police Brutality in the following decade.
• The Master of Disguise not only has a soundtrack that's filled with early 2000s pop songs, but is stuffed with references to many things like Shrek, Malcolm in the Middle, the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, The Olsen Twins, and (in a deleted scene) All That.
• Matchstick Men ends with a dramatic plot twist where the main character's long-lost teenage daughter is revealed to be a con artist posing as his long-lost teenage daughter. The twist is foreshadowed in an early scene where Roy and Angela first meet and exchange contact information, and she gives him a number for her "private line"—providing a cozy excuse for why she and Roy's ex-wife have different phone numbers. The movie came out during the last window of time when it was considered rare for teenagers to own cell phones. If it had been made even five years later, Angela would presumably have just given Roy her mobile number, and the issue of her "mother" having a different phone number than her wouldn't even have been an issue.
• The 2001 Disney movie Max Keeble's Big Move shows its age not only from obvious factors (i.e. the music, fashion, etc.), but also by having a plot point involving the theft of a Palm Pilot PDA from antagonist Dobbs and showing an iMac G3 computer in the bedroom of title character Max. If you want a specific example on music featured in the movie, the leitmotif of Max's crush Jenna is the Britney Spears song "...Baby, One More Time", which plays almost every time she appears onscreen. The opening dream sequence features a cameo from Tony Hawk, giving more proof that the movie came out during the early 2000s, when Tony Hawk was at the height of his popularity and extreme sports were in the pop culture spotlight. The film's plot would also have to be extensively rewritten after social media became commonplace; with Max not only being able to quickly find out about the changes in his family's moving plans, but the ruse of his going-away party would be impossible to pull off. The film also presents a very early-2000s depiction of bullying not just from other students, but from the school principal as well. Not only would this be far less likely to happen nowadays, but faculty members taking such actions would likely be fired and face potential legal charges.
• Mean Girls.
  • It's telling that, in a Deconstructive Parody of high school cattiness and how even nice people get caught up in it, cyberbullying is never mentioned once, despite it becoming a hot topic by the end of the decade. Gretchen's cell phone (which only shows up in one scene) is a then-cutting-edge flip phone that's used to demonstrate how rich she is, the characters interact with and spread rumors about each other almost entirely through "low-tech" means (such as the "Burn Book", which is a physical, pen-and-paper journal as opposed to a private webpage or online group), and a "three-way calling attack" could only work in a time when landline phones were commonplace. In the early-mid 2000s, even teenagers were just starting to get used to the internet and cell phones being omnipresent forces in their lives as opposed to novelties — MySpace had been launched just nine months before the film was released, and had yet to really take off — and this film's portrayal of technology marks it as a clear product of that immediate pre-Web 2.0 time.
  • The showcasing of Regina George and her family's materialistic life, while meant to show how empty and hollow her life truly was even in 2004, also marks the film as having been made before the Great Recession, when flaunting immense wealth was in style. While the scene of Regina's little sister shaking her booty to trashy hip-hop-infused pop will resonate for as long as there is raunchy dance music (and said sister being named Kylie is Hilarious in Hindsight), the fact that she's shaking it to "Milkshake" by Kelis definitely doesn't. Regina's mom is also shown wearing 'youthful' clothes in an attempt to be hip... which, in 2004, meant garish Juicy Couture sweatpants and tracksuits that, in hindsight, make her look even more pathetic.
  • The portrayal of the Ambiguously Gay "losers" Janis and Damian illustrates the prevalent attitudes towards LGBT people among teenagers at the time. Regina suspecting that Janis was a lesbian was enough to get her to kick Janis out of her social circle and spread rumors about her sexuality, leading to her present outcast status, while the Plastics list Janis in the Burn Book as a "dyke" (a term that wouldn't be acceptable after 2010) and Damian as "too gay to function". This sort of casual homophobia on their part was shown as a sign of their Alpha Bitch tendencies even in 2004, but characters with such tendencies in 2014 would be portrayed as downright bigoted rather than merely callous, given that nowadays homophobia is seen by teenage girls as roughly on a par with racism, at least in the American Midwest where the film is set. It illustrates how, while tolerance of LGBT people had come a long way from the teen movies of The '80s where such attitudes were often treated as normal and went without comment, full equality and acceptance was still several steps away (this was the year when Massachusetts became the first US state to legalize same-sex marriage, an occasion that sparked controversy and moral panic), and being gay, or even Mistaken for Gay, could make somebody an outcast.
  • The scenes of Coach Carr's health class, in which he hysterically warns his students that they will die from ,STDs and pregnancy if they have underage sex, are a parody of abstinence-only sex education. This was pushed heavily by religious conservatives in the '90s and 2000s as The Moral Substitute for more conventional and comprehensive sex education in response to the "teen sex epidemic" of the era, but was later discredited as ineffective and has mostly been replaced outside of the South.
• Meet the Parents:
  • The first film subverts this in a key scene where Greg is escorted off a plane for uttering the word "bomb". The film was released in 2000, one year before 9/11. Nevertheless, this is played straight with Pam's younger brother, who has posters of then-popular acts in his bedroom, including Li'l Kim.
  • The second film, Meet the Fockers has Jack arguing with Bernie and Roz about privacy in light of the Patriot Act, which was a hot-button issue back in 2004.
  • The third (and final) film, Little Fockers, was made between 2008 and 2010, featuring Greg using a high-end Nokia (the smartphone revolution being just around the corner) and Jack using MySpace in one scene (which had recently surrendered its social media crown to Facebook).
• Mission: Impossible II opens its credits with music by Limp Bizkit, firmly dating it to the rapid rise and even quicker fall of the first wave of Nu Metal in the late-90s/early-2000s (and even then, Nu Metal itself would have a sort-of revival in the 2010s).
• The 2006 zombie film Mulberry Street is a time capsule of New York in the middle of the Bloomberg era that uses its Zombie Apocalypse as a metaphor for gentrification. The protagonists are a group of working-class people who find themselves slowly being pushed out of their apartment on the titular street in Manhattan's Little Italy, watching their community grow increasingly unrecognizable as their local bars crawl with yuppies and hipsters and their rents keep rising.
• My Name is Bruce, that came out in 2008, begins with two couples of emo teens that were having a date at the local cemetery inadvertently unleashing an ancient Chinese spirit. The rest of the film avoids being dated to a specific period, but the inclusion of emos makes it clear that it is set in the mid-late 2000s.
• Napoleon Dynamite weaves in and out of this trope thanks to taking place in an Idaho town that is several years out of date where "modern" pop culture has yet to reach. As a result, the film's fashion, music, and overall aesthetic make it resemble a place where all the used, worn-out, "retro" hand-me-downs of The '80s gathered together and kept right on going, with songs from the '90s and 2000s sticking out like sore thumbs and used for deliberate effect. Kip's internet is also a pay-by-the-hour dial-up service. While broadband was spreading rapidly by the mid-2000s, it was still a luxury in many rural areas if it was available at all. Ten years later, even the most remote places were guaranteed to have access to at least DSL on computers (which is carried through phone lines) and 4G LTE data on cell phones, with the remaining dial-up providers existing mainly as legacy services for older people who didn't want to upgrade. A modern version of that scene would have Kip worrying about data usage.
• The New Guy. The Alpha Bitch Courtney getting Tony Hawk (making a cameo As Himself) to show up at her party is presented as a sign of how cool and popular she is, one major scene takes place in a now-defunct Sam Goody record store, and Creed is portrayed unironically as a band popular enough to get people to turn out for a homecoming concert to see them. The protagonist's ruse also would've fallen apart in a day if he'd tried it in the age of social media.
• Premonition came out 2007 and it shows: The cellphones are flip-styled, there are still answering machines, the TV in the house is still a bulky CRT and the characters are shown using their cellphones while driving like it's normal ( which causes the fatal accident of the movie), in contrast with today's strict traffic rules to curtail distracted driving.
• The film Old School, released in 2003, begins with a scene of Mitch (Luke Wilson) being held up at airport security after inexplicably triggering the new security measures. At one point a man from the National Guard is summoned, pointing his rifle at Wilson while he is scanned. While most of the post-9/11 security measures are still in place, the National Guard was a fairly temporary measure.
• Odd Girl Out does deal with cyberbullying, having come out one year after Mean Girls, but still dates itself to the mid-2000s, especially with regards to how social media never comes into the equation. All of the bullying is conducted via instant messages, and the Girl Posse create a website specifically to mock Vanessa. Likewise, one stunt is telling Vanessa there's a party on somewhere when there isn't. In the age of Facebook, when almost everything is done with an Event Invite, Vanessa would have likely found out before she arrived at the empty building. Furthermore, she's recorded getting taken into the ambulance by a guy with a video camera, rather than a smartphone. Finally, a minor plot point is the bullies not getting outright punished because the principal can't prove that they're behind the threatening messages (thanks to them using screen names), with the Beta Bitch ultimately getting off scot-free; by the end of the decade, bullying was taken a lot more seriously.
• One Hour Photo was released in an era where film photography was already starting to be replaced by digital photography. These days, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who regularly needs to get film developed. This makes the main character even more pathetic, knowing with the benefit of hindsight that he's devoted so much of his life to a dying industry.
• Phone Booth was released just as the last phone booths in New York City were beginning to be removed. Even five years later, the plot would have been impossible. Phone booths still exist (and some were even put up in the 2010s) but they're much rarer then they were at the time of Phone Booth's release.
• The 2002 film adaptation of Queen of the Damned attempts to give a Setting Update to the original 1984 novel by having Lestat's band play contemporary Nu Metal (which the studio had hired Jonathan Davis of Korn to write) as opposed to '70s/'80s hard rock (Anne Rice specifically cited Jim Morrison as inspiration when writing). However, not only was Nu Metal on its way out by 2002, but the filmmakers didn't update the rest of the setting to match, leaving a film that grew dated to the early 2000s as time went on.
• Rambo IV was starting to look like this post-2010 when Myanmar finally took tentative steps towards political freedom... but then the government was accused by numerous humanitarian organizations of committing similar war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people in late 2016.
• Redline, a little-known Fast & Furious-esque film from 2007 (not to be confused with the 2010 anime film of the same name), could only be filmed during 2006. It was produced by Daniel Sadek, a Lebanese-born tycoon, with the sole purpose of showing off his many super-sport cars (a number, to give his then-fiancée, a soap actress who's career was starting to decline, a chance at stardom and to save his crumbling mortgage empire, as the housing bubble had cooled off. The film's most memorable anecdote, an accident involving actor Eddie Griffin wrecking an Enzo Ferrari during a promotional race, became known as a major example of the excesses of the era.
• Saved! is a satire of Christian youth culture in the 2000s, a time when evangelical Christians had reached the apex of their political and cultural power. It's most apparent with the attempts by the school's youth pastors to appear "hip" to their students, and in the subplot involving Mary's boyfriend Dean being outed as gay and sent to reparative therapy (a treatment that is nowadays extremely controversial, and in a number of states banned for people under 18) in a failed attempt to turn him straight.
• Saw VI, released in 2009, is notable for having a plot far more political than any other films in the series. The Jigsaw killer's main victims in the film are workers at a health insurance company that denied people (including Jigsaw) coverage for having pre-existing conditions, while the opening victims are two predatory lenders who gave out bad loans to people who they knew wouldn't be able to pay them back. As such, it's a clear relic of a time when health care reform and the subprime mortgage crisis were both at the top of the American political agenda.
• The Scary Movie franchise, over the course of its long run, parodied such pop culture touchstones as Bullet Time, Budweiser's "Whassup?" ads, Nike sneaker commercials, celebrity sex tapes, Michael Jackson's sex scandal, the original iPod, and more, as well as whatever films (horror or otherwise) were popular in the time when each movie came out.
• A major feature of the Scooby-Doo movie was its snarky jabs at the slang, music, fashion, and general behavior of college students around the late '90s and early 2000s... except that what they were mocking was, for the most part, already on the way out by the time the movie was released in 2002.
  • The sequel ends on a blatant promotion of the tie-in game for Game Boy Advance, showing off the secret code that could be used in the game. This scene remains in prints of the film made well after the GBA was succeeded by newer handhelds such as the Nintendo DS.
• In School of Rock from 2003, Dewey Finn's ploy could not work in a world with the internet/social media. A glance at his friend Ned's Facebook (or, LinkedIn, Facebook's more "professional-oriented" counterpart) or a YouTube video of Dewey with his first band would immediately tip the school off.
  • Dewey also asks to be paid in cash in order to keep up the subterfuge. In The New '10s, online banking (direct debit) has become ubiquitous, and anyone who specifically requests to be paid in cash clearly has something to hide, not to mention taxation requirements would not permit it anyway.
• Each of the works in the collective oeuvre of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg (except for Vampires Suck, which was released in 2010 and focused on one work in particular) is one of these not only to the 2000s as a whole, but to the specific year in which it was released.
  • Epic Movie, or rather 2005/Early-To-Mid 2006: The Movie, with the main movie references including Casino Royale (2006), Click, the first The Chronicles of Narnia movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Nacho Libre, Snakes on a Plane, The Da Vinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand, Borat, and Superman Returns. References outside a specific movie include "Brangelina", Paris Hilton, Sudoku, 50 Cent, and Britney Spears.
  • Meet the Spartans, or rather 2007: The Movie, with references to 300, Transformers (2007), Shrek the Third, YouTube and the infamous "Leave Britney Alone!" viral video, Budweiser's "Real Men of Genius" ads, Dancing with the Stars, Deal or No Deal, Spider-Man 3, Little Miss Sunshine, American Idol, Ugly Betty, and Ghost Rider (2007).
  • Disaster Movie, or rather Late 2007/2008: The Movie, with references to Alvin and the Chipmunks, Amy Winehouse, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, Enchanted, Hannah Montana, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, High School Musical 3, The Incredible Hulk, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man, Juno, Kung Fu Panda, The Love Guru, Sex and the City, Speed Racer, Superbad and 10,000 BC.
• The French action movie Skate or Die, from 2008, whose entire plot hinges on the year's mobile phone technology level: Most phones were able to film short videos but were not yet able to upload them by themselves, so the protagonists need to buy the time to stop at a desktop computer long enough to get the video evidence out on the net, without their pursuers catching them mid-upload.
• In Snakes on a Plane, an important plot point hinges on the fact that the Rich Bitch Mercedes is the only person on the entire plane who has a Cell Phone that can both take pictures and send them without plugging into a computer first. Mercedes herself is a parody of Paris Hilton and other socialites, particularly with her purse dog Mary-Kate, while the rapper Three G's is a parody of mid-2000s bling-era rap.
• Snow Day has a soundtrack that's filled with many turn-of-the-millennium pop singers like Hoku and 98 Degrees.
• Southland Tales. It's next to impossible to tell just what in the blue hell the film was actually about in the first place, but one thing is for certain: its depiction of a dystopian near-future, one where a nuclear terrorist attack turns America into a Police State dominated by Mega Corps while energy shortages lead to the creation of an alternative fuel source that may destroy the fabric of reality, was very much informed by the "Bush-era America" time in which it was made.
• Spider-Man:
  • The scene where a bunch of New Yorkers comes together to Spider-Man's aid and one shouts "You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!" definitely serves as a reminder of the post-9/11 patriotic sentiment prevalent at least until it turned out al-Qaeda exaggerated their claims (it would disappear by 2006 as the conflict turned against the West). Especially given that that particular scene was added in post-production, after the attacks had occurred.
  • While the pop soundtrack ages as all pop soundtracks do, the appearance of pre-backlash Nickelback and the cameo by Macy Gray are standouts.
• Stick It, released in 2006, has all the elite gymnastics routines scored out of a 10-point maximum. This surely made sense at the time, as the "Perfect 10" scoring system was, after all, the system that had been in place for decades... but it also happened to be the system that was phased out in elite gymnastics that very same year in favor of a new open-ended scoring system.
• Stop-Loss is obviously set towards the tail end of the Iraq War (it came out in 2008), and the scene where Brandon finds out he's been stop-lossed has him say "the President himself, he says this war's over". He's also asked if he's "gay or pregnant" when he protests being sent back to Iraq, referencing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.^note It prevented discrimination against closeted gay military personnel while barring openly gay applicants, a compromise solution put forward in 1994 to allow gay people to serve in the military without spooking conservatives. Before this, the military saw gay soldiers as a security risk vulnerable to blackmail, and actively attempted to root them out. The policy was repealed in 2011 when openly gay people were permitted to enlist and serve. The soldiers also make their home movies with video cameras, all the cell phones are flip phones, and Brandon has to use a payphone at one point.
• Stormbreaker, the film adaptation of the Alex Rider books, wears its 2006 setting proudly; Alex Pettyfer sports a 2000s surfer dude hairstyle and uses a flip phone to text his love interest. When he's being given his spy gadgets, one of them is disguised as a Nintendo DS, and a gag is that he's given Mario Kart to play. The cinematography showing off the Millennium Bridge and the soundtrack further places this in the 2000s.
• The Sum of All Fears is based on a 1991 novel about Arab terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb on American soil and misleading the U.S. government into thinking that they were attacked by Russia. The film would have remained surprisingly on point, had the execs not decided that Arabs pulling this stunt was unrealistic and that it was more believable to use a secret cabal of Fascist-leaning European businessmen as the villains. If you are surprised to see the film here and not in The '90s section, it's because it actually hit theatres in 2002, and was alread dated upon release.
• Superbad burlesqued the much-ballyhooed loose morals of 2000s-era teenagers (contrast this with the fact that, in the 2010s, young people became infamous for their relative prudishness and shunned such typical American rites-of-passage such as losing their virginity, getting a driving license and pretending to be older to buy liquor). It is also a prime example of the era's odd fascination for '70s-era aesthetics that would be regarded as weird in the eyes of the 2010s. The humorous portrayal of the inept, power-drunk cops is firmly entrenched in the 2000s as well, something unimaginable after the much-publicized cases of police brutality occurred during the ensuing years.
• Superhero Movie, though not as much of a time capsule as the other "____ Movie" parody films (it came out in 2008 and mostly parodies the Spider Man and X-Men Film Series trilogies, with a few nods to the Fantastic Four film saga, all of which were released throughout the decade), can mostly be dated by virtue of what isn't there. After 2008, the genre would mostly be defined by the Dueling Works of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, along with the lingering impact of The Dark Knight Trilogy — none of these franchises get so much as a wink, clearly meaning it came out when Batman Begins was still a one-off and Iron Man wasn't even out yet.
• S.W.A.T. (2003) came out right at the height of the George W. Bush administration — and it shows. Tellingly, the villain is a thoroughly despicable French criminal who's repeatedly subjected to anti-French epithets (back when the French were still easy to mock because they opposed the invasion of Iraq), while the Latina Token Girl on the S.W.A.T. team is called "J. Lo" at least once (back when Jennifer Lopez was still a household name, and before Gigli caused her career to decline). But far more telling is the portrayal of the rough-and-tumble methods used by the S.W.A.T. team. LL Cool J's character bashes a civilian for her "liberal" views after she dares to criticize him for roughing up an African-American perp in South Central, and there's an extended scene where the two main characters mock a S.W.A.T. candidate because he's never had a civilian complaint against him, and prides himself on handling every past situation nonviolently. These scenes couldn't possibly have passed a test audience a decade later, considering the large-scale controversy and protests against Police Brutality and the militarization of police beginning in The New '10s, which made police reform a hot-button issue.
• Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby: NASCAR, while still reasonably popular in the Sun Belt and rural areas, is nowhere as relevant as it was during the time the film was made. Its attitudes towards homosexuals and the French also date it to the mid-2000s.
• Team America: World Police. Much of its humor is directed against targets like Michael Moore, Kim Jong-il, the films of Michael Bay, anti-war celebrity activists like George Clooney and Sean Penn, and America's gung-ho behavior in The War on Terror, all of which were political and cultural touchstones of the year (2004) when the film came out. Now that America's (mostly) left Iraq and terrorism has faded from the agenda, it can feel rather dated, especially with Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011.
• The Terminal shows us 2004, an era in which people still buy books from Borders, still buy expensive trinkets and gadgets at Brookstone, still use payphones and the few people who own cell phones only use them to make voice calls.
• Transformers (2007) is unmistakably from 2007, given the Product Placement prominently on display. The Autobot ranks notably include a GMC Topkick and a Hummer H2; you'd probably recognize that the idea of portraying those colossal gas-guzzling status symbols as protagonists had been increasingly unattainable for over one year and would become unfashionable the following year, with both the Topkick and H2 being discontinued in 2009 and 2010 respectively.
• Tropic Thunder has several elements that date it to the late 2000s, aside from the many instances of Values Dissonance:
  • Tugg Speedman (played by Ben Stiller) has recently made an Oscar Bait film in a failed attempt to gain more respectability as his action film series is losing steam.
  • The Running Gag of Tugg's insistent demands for a TiVO is rather quaint, considering that most cable boxes have built-in DVR's and streaming services have supplanted its purpose.
  • Kirk Lazarus (played by Robert Downey Jr.) is a No Celebrities Were Harmed parody of actor Heath Ledger (both are Australians known for taking method acting to an extreme and both have made movies dealing with homosexuality), who died in early 2008.
  • Jeff Portnoy (played by Jack Black) is popular for a series of raunchy, fart-joke laden comedies in which he plays multiple parts in fat suits, in a parody of Eddie Murphy's films of the time, particularly his 2000 film Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.
  • Alpa Chino is a parody of 2000s Glam Rap, a genre that is no longer popular either.
  • Les Grossman (played by Tom Cruise) is a parody of the since-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.
  • The cameos by Tobey Maguire, Tyra Banks and Jennifer Love Hewitt might also count, as the three of them were already fading from the spotlight in 2008.
• The 2002 film The Tuxedo not only features a lot of early 2000s-era fashions and trends, but the plot also involves an scheme regarding water supplies years before this became a major problem, not to mention bottled water is referred to be pricier than gasoline, which firmly puts the film in a time before the oil crisis.
• Undercover Brother's main plotline follows an African-American general played by Billy Dee Williams, who plans to run for president, and the villainous scheme to prevent him from entering the White House. This aspect of the film (just like the Chris Rock film Head of State from around the same time period) naturally became dated the moment that Barack Obama actually became America's first black chief executive in the White House.
• Underworld, with its central "Vampires vs. Werewolves" premise, seems to have been conceived (in part) as a modern update on the old Universal Horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. So instead of black velvet evening gowns and spooky organs, it featured a whole cast of characters in Matrix-inspired black latex trench coats, and its soundtrack prominently featured Evanescence's Amy Lee just as she was becoming a goth icon. It still maintains a pretty loyal cult following (there's a reason it spawned four sequels, after all), but most of what made it seem "modern" in 2003 now makes it seem nearly as dated (if not more) as the old-fashioned horror films that it was updating.
• V for Vendetta may be set in 2020 but it was made in 2005 and it shows! There is reference to "America's war", talking about the Iraq War - which is shown to have raged on for years (in reality, US troops left Iraq in 2011). For something set in 2020, there is a conspicuous lack of smart phones and social media, which of course were not mainstream when the film was made. It also portrays Sutler's England as persecuting gay people to the degree that they are taken away to concentration camps, and Gordon Dietrich has to remain closeted for his own safety. Seemed plausible in the 2000s, where society was still largely intolerant to LGBT people, but rights improved significantly in The New '10s - making this part of the film look particularly startling.
• Whip It's soundscape is a loving review of popular indie rock music in the late 2000s. There's barely any mention of social media, and the roller derby team promotes themselves through a dedicated website rather than Twitter or Facebook. Bliss also finds out about Ollie's exploits through his band's website — and has to use a payphone to call him at one point.
• A minor example is the 2008 road movie The Yellow Handkerchief. Set and filmed in Louisiana in the same year, the setting contains many references to Hurricane Katrina, which had only happened a couple of years earlier. There's constant references to the storms, public transport gets suspended and overall the movie captures the feeling of Louisiana's people trying to put their lives back together. More superficially Martine's cell phone is a 2000s flip phone, Gordy takes pictures on a disposable camera (which he gets developed at a one-hour-photo place) and the two teenagers don't mention social media once.
• You, Me and Dupree is from 2006 and firmly implanted in an early-mid 2000s setting. Lance Armstrong is frequently referenced in adoring terms and makes a cameo appearance as himself, something unimaginable after he was busted for doping and had his Tour de France wins revoked. A minor plot point involves a videotape collection of porn, which even a couple of years later would be at least be lampshaded as not being on DVD or the Internet (in fact the Internet is not mentioned at all at this stage). The soundtrack includes Coldplay's then-brand new song "Fix You", at a time the band was unknown in the US. Molly's wealthy father is involved in a massive housing project, placing it before the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
• Zack and Miri Make a Porno:
  • This film came at the tail end of an era where you could theoretically become wealthy with a home made sex tape. With the expansion of the internet in full flux and adult content, both professional and amateur, widely available, this doesn't seem to be the case now.
  • The numerous pop culture references that the characters make to The '70s and The '80s makes this a rare example of a work that dates itself with what was considered nostalgic at the time. Most Millennial (aka Gen Y) viewers may find themselves wondering where any references to the 90s are, not realizing that the movie was released only nine years after that decade had ended, and that it was written by Gen X'er Kevin Smith (with most of the cast born around the same time as him).

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