I was watching E.T on TV and couldn’t help but think how great of a movie it is. But I remembered that I saw it at kind of the perfect age, seven. I say perfect age because a little younger than the movie’s hero which is perfect because when you’re seven, you really want to be ten and when you’re ten you really want to be fourteen, at least that’s how I felt. So you really get into a “fascination mode” watching someone a bit older doing amazing things with an E.T.
Same thing with watching Akira at 11 (full story here), when the hero is sixteen. Same thing watching The Matrix at 20, when the hero is in his mid twenties.
I feel lucky to have seen these three monuments at the theater at a perfect age but also, if they marked me so hard was because I didn’t know anything about what I was going to see. Like, nothing except the main poster before getting tickets.
Also, sound. From the first ten minutes of E.T. exclusively based on sound effects and no faces, to Akira’s unique music and soundscapes to the tightest audio I had experienced with The Matrix, they all left a big mark on my forehead and my earholes.
Also, social commentary. E.T. is clear about what its director thinks of divorce. Re-watching it, I see how personal it was to Spielberg and I find that it’s awesome to point things out with determination, but in a honest way in a science fiction movie. Akira’s cyberpunk tone seemed a little too dramatic to me in 1991, but in 2012 it feels oh so powerful: corrupted gigantic decadent and shallow society controlled by the army in 2019? It looks like we’re doing it, we already have the drones and the decadence with the 1%. Again for a science fiction, action movie what a great vision twenty years ago. The Matrix social commentary is too obvious and too painful: yes, people are mostly like the dude who wants the fake steak as we can see how people prefer the comfort of freedom-killing silos on the web instead of being in the real, server-side-I-install-my-own-shit and I’m free web.
So to me that’s where the art VS profit discussion falls short because these three movies have both. Strong vision, innovation but also enough compromises to make it to a larger crowd, would it be by cutting off the complexity (Akira) or spending time explaining what’s going on (The Matrix). Because these movies are widely considered landmarks and really punched me in the face, I think we should analyze more these successes instead of going for Indie VS AAA VS Art VS Profit pointless game discussions, creatively speaking.