Let's make a list of movies that have based themes, even if the writers and directors perhaps weren't doing that on purpose. Include spoilers if you want, but please mark them in advance.
I've got two in mind.
Appaloosa from 2007 with Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris. A western about two lawmen for hire who come to a small western town and get hired on to take down a land baron who murdered the previous Marshal. Pretty typical setup as far as westerns go, but the movie introduces a female character about a third of the way through who is pretty realistically portrayed. She has zero action scenes, she quickly starts making moves on the senior lawman, played by Ed Harris, but also tries to get her hooks into his deputy. At some point when there is a falling out between her and Ed Harris, she accuses Viggo's character of trying to make moves on her and Ed Harris's character straight brushes it off by saying he doesn't believe her and believes Viggo because they're friends. There's no 'what if she's telling the truth' drama. She also later tries to hook up with the evil land baron character. Very based themes about the nature of women, hypergamy, positive male friendship, and the untrustworthiness of women.
Side Effects from 2013 with Jude Law, Rooney Mara, and Channing Tatum. A psychological thriller about a psychologist, Jude Law, diagnosing a windowed housewife, Rooney Mara, who murdered her husband, Tatum, and tries to plead insanity due to the supposed side effects of an anti-depressant she was on. I won't spoil the whole movie, but not everything is as it seems, and there is a sordid lesbian romance later on in the movie, where it is revealed who was lying about what and who is manipulating who. You'll be very satisfied at the end when the guilty party ends up getting what's they deserve. Also a lot of based themes about the nature of women, though I don't want to go into specifics due to spoilers.
...can we make a special exception for Paul Verhoeven movies? dude's pozzed as fuck, but damn does he manage to trip over based a lot... Robocop, Starship Troopers, Total Recall...
oh, and not Paul Verhoeven, but Demolition Man was a popcorn action flick that was based as all hell...
The fact Demolition Man became prescient is just the cherry on top.
indeed.
Winter Soldier is also based. There is a monologue about how Hydra used force back in ww2 to control the world and that did not work so now they are using fear as they found out that people will gladly give away their freedom for safety.
I always chuckle at Ragnarok when Thor says Asgard is a people, not a place. Like whoa cool it with the nazi talk bro.
Winter Soldier is probably one of the best movies of the MCU, if not the best, and its criminally underrated by Whedon slop surrounding it.
Parts of Harry Potter are the classic example, right? I’m not going to say there’s no evidence of Rowling’s libtardism, because there definitely is, but you have a universally-armed society, and government incompetence, corruption, and/or overreach is an important plot element in five of the eight movies.
Also, this one is more of a funny minor bit, but in Goblet of Fire when Harry and Ron have blown their chances to get dates to the ball, the two leftover girls that were still available were the Indian sisters.
ALso importance of family. And concept that official goverment can be wrong and "conspiracy theorists" right - when Harry tells that Voldemort came back but Ministry denies it and pretends he is crazy.
Daily Prophet runs a continuous smear campaign against Harry so he publishes his story in the wizard equivalent of Infowars and Alex Jones. Then becomes hunted by, and takes down, a corrupt deep state that is trying it's best to disarm the Hogwarts students by nerfing their Defense against the dark arts lessons.
Also (magical) ethnic separation
The Ginger Weasleys are openly discriminated against by everyone, to the point they are attacked.
That one is hard to classify because you can spin it a few ways. You could say that it's "based" because Draco and the other Slytherins represent arrogant "elites" looking down on the lower class Weasleys. Or you could say it's an example of her libtard bias because she made the rich people comically evil and the poor underclass people noble and good. And, of course, anything touching on Slytherin in general has to acknowledge that a large part of the framing for the whole conflict is a cartoonishly simple anti-racism message. Remember, the Malfoys hate the Weasleys because they don't like their sympathetic attitudes towards muggles.
(You could also say that what's going on with the bullying is not really any of those things, and it's more of a satire of or reference to some British private school dynamic I'm not culturally equipped to fully understand).
Gingers are traditionally bullied ruthlessly in UK schools. They have been for more than a hundred years.
Being a ginger is a very visible sign of having Irish ancestry. There are a bunch of cultural reasons that the Irish were loud, stupid, prideful, drunks. They were always poor, always Catholic (strongly Papist) in a country where Papist plots had tried to assassinate fucking everyone important, thousands of times.
The Irish Papists were trying to blow up the common people of London in the Troubles, which didn't really end until after the World Trade Center and the New York "Irish" stopped funding their terrorist bullshit.
Private School Houses are a thing. "Old School" ties and loyalty to the fellow alumni of the "Old School" is a class marker of the upper class. Something like more than half of UK Prime Ministers were graduates from Eaton boys school.
The Weasleys are stand ins for poor Irish Catholics, and they are poor because the dad works and the mother stays home and looks after their huge family.
More traditionally, Irish drink and gamble and beat their wives, then go to Church on Sunday to worship the Pope and be sorry for what they have done.
Sicario, shows the glowies financing the drug cartel
Transformers, mocks the police
Das Boot, shows the good guys in a Submarine during WW2.
Not sure if we can consider it non-political but Firefly/Serenity is all about not bowing down to government and that the government will use propaganda and force to keep control. Simon is the one character that is being overlooked, he gave up everything to save his sister from the government but still thinks the rebels as uncultured savages and his arc is learning to appreciate freedom.
There was always an amusing irony with how popular the show was with millennials, and yet many of those same millennials would probably recoil at any suggestion that anyone who served under the Confederates in the civil war could be anything less than pure evil.
People who don't understand the Confederacy, even among 'historians' are depressingly common. There's a dipshit on YouTube in particular that keeps popping up in my feed whenever I'm watching Civil War stuff, who is a zealous believer in the idea that the Civil War was purely about slavery from top to bottom. He refuses to accept the idea that even one of the lowliest privates could have had motivations for fighting other than preserving slavery. He thinks the entire concept of States Rights is not only unimportant, but was never important to anyone.
Which is utter nonsense. I'm a proponent of both States Rights and secession right now, and would absolutely join a State military to fight for it if the issue were on the table. If it's possible for me, in the 21st century to still value the concept that much, despite all the damage that's been done to State sovereignty over the last nearly 200 years, of course men of the 1860s would be willing to do the same.
Which is funny, because its literally on every record that the leader of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee, only joined for loyalty and love of his land instead of any true care about slavery. A man who could have had everything in life, signed it away for his passion.
You'd think the kind of Leftist who parrot these kind of points would understand the idea of "I fucking hate my government and what they support does not represent me, but I also hate these other groups even more."
Is it that At-Shun guy?
The whole holy war against slavery thing came back into the mainstream. It's so silly how a war between two slave holding republics is about ending slavery. It is really sad if you give any deference to the South at all, you get accused of being a "Lost Causer" and are villified
Lol yup. That's the one.
Yeah, I get that suggested to me as well.
And You can guarantee some dipshit on future YouTube would be claiming the war was about whatever is considered the most extreme "far-right" opinion of the public today, and not any opinions you actually hold. It wouldn't even be something considered extreme today. Like two future guys will be arguing 'The red states were fucking racist against Undocumented Citizens! They even called them Illegals!' - 'Nuh uh - the war was about states rights!' - 'Yeah, states rights to do what? Block innocent Undocumented Citizens from voting!'
Well, what we call "based" is just the normal, default behaviour of the non-retarded human being.
Trolls World Tour: Each tribe of Trolls has their own genre of music. It's wrong of the global hegemony to go around to the other tribes and attempt to force globohomo on them.
Not even we can all live together in peace. The message is we should each live among our own tribe in our own genre and leave one another alone.
didn't he actually oppose the war, but joined the confederacy when virginia voted to?
American History X
What point is that movie trying to make if not pro segregation? Yes black will murder your dad, Spanish speaking foreigners will take your jobs and then blacks will also murder your brother, but don’t be racist because life’s short. Especially when a black murder you.
The point is supposed to be that hate begets hate. I think it's supposed to be nihilistic. The presumption is that if they'd never gotten into the white power stuff in the first place, then they would've been fine in California.
My eyes have seen the glory of the trampling at the zoo.
Rollerball (1975)
Celebration of individual exceptionalism. James Caan is a star future sport athlete that undermines the world elites imposed mediocrity by winning so much that they need him to retire
I love that movie so much. It has such a raw grittiness to it.
They could never make anything like that today.
Flesh and Blood: A group of mercenaries kidnap a princess and defend a castle in a siege. It was the first movie I saw where the kidnapped princess wasn't some honorable holdout for her true love. (I just had to look this movie up again because I couldn't remember the right name, and realized it's yet another Paul Verhoeven movie.)
The Incredibles The entire movie is essentially an argument for Carlylism. The heroes are super humans who are forced to hide after their inferiors weaponize the law against them, while the villain is essentially a jealous bioleninist who recognizes the only way for him to be exceptional is to kill everyone with actual talent and merit.
Of course the sequel fucked it all up.
Reign of Fire is a movie that showed that in a world ending apocalypse, the first things the British do is build a castle, adapt to living in fear and hide to try to wait out a fucking dragon invasion that spans the globe.
Its not until a psychotic American shows up sitting on a tank that they even try to fight back whatsoever, and he has to teach them how fucking technology works (they use helicopters and radar instead of the Brits using a fucking falcon and a telescope) as well as basic biology like "if you shoot things they die."
And just like real life, only after almost all the Americans get killed trying to save them that the Brits grow enough of a spine to fight back and then act like they are the heroes for weathering the storm.
Great movie, but the political joke there is almost hilariously on point.
The Nightmare Before Christmas. Pay attention to the last lyrics of the "Jack's Obsession" song.
"You know, I think this Christmas thing
Is not as tricky as it seems.
And why should they have all the fun?
It should belong to anyone.
Not anyone in fact, but ME!
Why, I could make a Christmas tree!
And there's no reason I can find
That I couldn't handle Christmastime!
I bet I could improve it too!
And that's exactly what I'll do!"
Emphasis mine. Sounds familiar, right? "Video games should belong to everyone." "Tabletop RPGs should belong to everyone." "Superheroes should belong to everyone." "Star Wars should belong to everyone." "Dark Souls should belong to everyone." And so on and so forth. Wokies always use this logic to take stories, franchises, industries, and subcultures that are niche and/or male-oriented and make them "for everyone," but in truth, all they do is make it more for themselves and their fellow wokies. And just like Jack when he decides to take over Christmas, with the arrogant belief that he could do it better than the people who've been making it for centuries, they completely ruin the thing they stole and turn it into something it never was and that nobody likes.
I'm taking that to mean "might have mentioned something political incidentally but doesn't ram the author's views down your throat like modern media does and leftards try to deny by claiming it was 'always' political".
Basically anything with John Wayne in it, especially now given that they kvetch over his very existence.
The first two Dirty Harry films. The first one has a retard that gets worshipped by the media for "duin nuffin wrong" before he gets a bullet to the dome. The second made Pauline Kael cry even harder than she did over the original; that alone is worth your watch. These are accidental because this was literally <5 years removed from Eastwood's spaghetti western stint, and he didn't realize how pozzed the America he grew up in had become.
Taken (2008). Cheesy, yes, also a shameless rip-off of the first season of 24 (down to the daughter being named 'Kim'), but with an excellent message at the heart of it; to protect what's yours and make anyone who threatens that harmony pay dearly. First sequel's fairly good, though the third one is garbage.
I know Elysium wasn't supposed to be based, but it kind of was.
Everyone living in squalor in some favela style shithole
Healthcare is universal and fucking terrible
Inflation through the roof, $5 coins
Out of touch elected leaders and corporate elites live on an uninvadable artificial arcology where they have the best of everything, including military equipment, and are able to own property
Whole story arc is group of criminals trying to hijack the overloaded Healthcare system
It's like what happens when you vote Democrat nonstop.
Any Eastwood movie will be boomer tiered based.