Something Wild and Sid & Nancy came out when I was 16. While they are both fantastic films, with amazing soundtracks, they also kind of took whatever route the wheel of my life was on and bumped it out onto a different path I think.
what movies changed you, when you were begging to be changed?

The Bridge to Terabithia

Made me realize to value friendships and don’t take them for granted. For example, if I get invited to friend events (parties, lunches, dinners, etc), I’ll most likely say yes. Never good to keep saying no because the invites will stop.

And if I haven’t texted someone in a while, I’ll reach out and just catch up.

Just kind of woke me up to some harsh reality.

Thought-provoking thread Kurt! For me, The Empire Strikes Back was a major force in my understanding of my own spirituality and religion. Batman 1989 was also a big player for me, having not grown up with a father and with a mostly-absent mother (she was attending school and tried here best). A lot of science fiction like Jurassic Park, along with help from my grandparents, got me interested in science and especially astronomy and biology.

OJ Simpson Made in America. Even though OJ is obviously a murderer, it opened my eyes to something I hadn't before considered, the fact that some people get more angry at the EXACT same crime or even a minor offense when a person is a different race or different religion, lgbt etc. After that I started noticing it everywhere. My redneck Aunt posted a video of a metric ton of garbage left on the streets after a PRIDE parade. Then all her redneck friends were steaming about it. But all their comments started with something along the lines of "I don't care if you're gay, straight, black, white or blue...." When in reality every last one of them was just mad because LGBT people exist. I don't know why I was so oblivious to this before. But yeah, when some misdeed occurs, some people get more angry than they would if it was just another person like themselves. OJ Made in America really opened my eyes to it.

I think maybe the fact that whatever was being done, whether a major crime or something less egregious, blinded me a little bit. Like the first thing that came to mind was the fact that something occured that was obviously wrong and shouldn't have happened in the first place. So I never thought to look at the fact that peoples anger was at a different level depending on WHO did it.

Mississippi Burning and A Time To Kill.

When I was younger I was a bigot. I have no rational explanation as to why, I wasn't raised that way. But as I got older and was finally around people of different color my views changed and these two films had a great influence on me. It did take a bit longer to come around on homosexuality though.

Now I feel kind of shallow because my examples hinged on how those movies turned a square nerd into a square nerd who thought he was a non-conformist rebel!

I love the responses, and it sounds like you and I had similar upbringings, Joel ...

Formed my worldview? Not sure...

Confirmed my worldview?

Idiocracy

Not a "movie", per say, but Cosmos, the Carl Sagan doc from the late 70s/early 80s. I found it in the library when I was 17 and totally changed how I look at the world. I still quote from that series.

As far as movies, Easy Rider and Into the Wild. Had a similar effect as reading On the Road did. Sure, while things don't turn out well for all of those characters in the in, the journey of discovery and showcasing there's a lot of world out there really made me want to travel.

More recently, along the same lines, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Didn't seem to do well but such a fantastic movie of self-discovery, breaking out of personal ruts and getting out into the world.

I also watched science documentries at a young age. (Likely one big reason why I later majored in engineering in college).

My parents often got issues of Scientific American magazine which I also read through a lot.


Similar sentiments here too.

When I was a preteen, something which might have formed my worldview (for the worse) would have been documentaries about Nazi Germany. Not knowing any better, I was doing "sieg heil" salutes which my parents reprimanded me for repeately. At the time, they forbid me from watching any further documentaries about nazis.

After that, I was more influenced by "Get Smart" reruns.


As I got older and was still impressionable as a teenager / young adult, other stuff which informed my worldview was stuff like:

- Network (1976)
- Glengarry Glen Ross
- Wall Street (1987)
- Dr Strangelove

Confirming my worldview later in life, would be stuff like:

- Wag The Dog (1997)
- Tomorrow Never Dies
- Idiocracy
- Boiler Room

Idiocracy just kills me ... that movie should be in the Smithsonian.

(On a tangent).

When I was a younger, I was egotistical enough to think that most of the population consisted of morons. It took me many years to disabuse myself of this notion, where I gradually became more self-aware and realized that behavior which looks "idiotic" on the surface, may very well be masking unrelated issues which have very little to do with IQ intelligence.

What eventually confirmed the latter for me later in life, turned out to be "The Big Bang Theory" sitcom on CBS. The "mirror image" or "bizarro world" version of an Idiocracy microcosm, turned out to be "The Big Bang Theory" where high IQ folks can be just as "idiotic" as uneducated "morons".

I've never heard of Idiocracy so just looked it up. Thanks for the recommendation, folks. Will be checking this one out shortly.

movies for me don't shape my world view. that is my up bringing and so forth. movies are intended for entertainment purposes only.

if i watch a docudrama however, i learn more about a subject(s) or a time in history. if i want to know more about said subject, i'll look into further and simply understand what someone or a group went through and if i had preconceptions, they would change for the most part.

even if i watch a movie based on true events, i'll still watch with a grain of salt knowing that some or most is fictionalized or has taken liberties for entertainment value. thus, the need to research after to see what's true and what is not.

but, shape world view, no. i strictly watch most stuff for the value of how much it makes me happy or sad or depressed or other emotions, but i know it is ALL entertainment.

In a similar context, the best education I ever got outside of school as an impressionable young adult, was to observe how booms and busts happen in real-time. At various places I frequented or worked at back in the day, there was tv screen on CNN or a financial news channel (such as cnbc, etc ...) playing all day. I could see how the "irrational" behavior of financial markets functioned from an outsider's perspective.

In those days, I also saw how bubbles cycled and/or the bottom fell out in various markets such as: comic books, vinyl records, star wars figures, etc ... I eventually realized a lot of things in the world functioned on "psychology" and not science.

First, I love some of the responses in this thread about how movies helped open some folks eyes as to what the world has to offer, and encouraged some folks to look at folks of color or who are LGBTQ+ in a different light, that is awesome. Unfortunately, I look at movies a bit more like Oldboy in that I cannot come up with any particular film (or films) that shook me to my core (or made me think a bit more deeply about what life had to offer) during my formative years as a young kid/teenager/young adult.

That being said, I grew up watching a lot of Disney films like Pollyanna, Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, The Shaggy Dog, or films like Annie multiple times, so I am sure that these films had a tendency to shape how I look at things in the modern world with a glass half-full viewpoint instead of just feeling that we are doomed and everything is falling apart.

I was not just locked into watching Pollyanna as a kid all the time in my household, as my Dad also let us watch films like Airplane, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark a lot growing up, but if you watch enough wholesome Disney films (including animated classics like Dumbo) enough times some of the messages in these films is bound to influence, however lightly, how you think about life around you as you grow up.

TV coverage of the NASA missions probably did more for me than any one movie.

As an 11 year old watching Dances with Wolves was when I first realized all the “white settlers as heroes” was a bunch of bullshit. It’s changed my view of American History from the treatment of Native Americans to Columbus. All that stuff we learned in school was crap.

FWIW if you consume art and it doesn't inform how you view the world, you're doing it wrong, IMHO. That's one of the functions of art.

i consumed Armageddon, but it didn't give me the sense that the world would blow up from a meteor. i must have viewed it wrong.

Armageddon made me STAUNCHLY anti-asteroid.

Also, as dumb as that movie is... I cry at the president's speech

I became rabidly anti-Aerosmith ...

That came out around 1998 I think and kind of eerie how it kind of predicted what would happen after 9/11 or something close to what happened in that movie.

I agree with all of this...shockingly... and a bit surprised so may allow fantasy affect their view.

But will agree that the Aerosmith song in Armageddon is shit.