5 Movie Messages That Only Make Sense If You Ignore Reality

See, all the women in the village are crazy about Gaston's good looks and athletic superiority. None of them care that his personality sucks ... except Belle. She's not into him at all, because she values "inner beauty" and recognizes that Gaston is a pompous prick. Which means the main character already learned the movie's lesson before the movie even started.

In the end, nobody really learned to value "inner beauty." The prince had repented years ago, and Beast didn't need to teach Belle to see past the superficial because she already did that back at home, in her village of non-sentient forks. This is nothing but a story about a magical jerk getting very lucky when he finds the one girl within a thousand miles with a were-buffalo fetish.

Although honestly, she nailed these, right? That's exactly how you say it when someone really do be trippin'.

Does she power through all the adversity and use it to grow as an actor? Not even close! After her attempt at a one-woman show doesn't bring in an audience big enough for her liking, she packs it all in and moves back with her parents. The dream is dead ... until it's revealed that one of the seven people who attended her show was a casting director who now wants her for an audition. Think that's convenient? The audition is for a strangely unique part based mainly on the actor playing it. No script, no interruptions -- just tell a story about your aunt jumping into a river, and the role of a lifetime is yours!

How did she ever have trouble getting a job?!

This is an outrageous "Find a genie in a lamp and it turns out to be Shaq" level of luck. What are the odds of something like this coming along the very moment she resigns herself to a life of sweatpants? After the long journey of determination and heartbreak, the overall message seems to be that you shouldn't worry so much about finding an agent or landing roles, since casting directors are always attending one-woman shows to scout for unknown actresses -- not for predatory sex, but for huge acting parts tailored precisely for them.

This is already relying on about 20 unlikely coincidences to get a pretty simple message across, but in the third movie, they retcon the story so that the robber wasn't even the guy who shot Uncle Ben in the first place. Ben was actually killed by the robber's partner, and it was an accident anyway. So Spider-Man's origin story is that he swore to always do everything he could to fight injustice because one time he didn't stop a guy from robbing a dirtbag, and in an unrelated incident, the man's friend accidentally killed someone Peter loved. We're not sure where the moral is in there, but it sure seems a lot of people are dying around this "Spider-Man" fellow. Maybe that blasted wall-crawler is a menace!

Still, Hannibal's expertise proves invaluable. Well, his expertise and the lucky fact that he already knew the serial killer they were looking for. As fate would have it, Bill even kept the head of one of his victims as a souvenir.

So yes, Lecter was ultimately very useful in finding Buffalo Bill, but most of that success only happened because the FBI made the wild decision to ask him, a crazy murderer, for help. And even more miraculously, he happened to know the killer they wanted him to profile. And after that miracle, some poor bastard with a removable face got close enough to let him escape.

Over the course of the movie, each child shows an utter lack of self-control, and promptly gets mutilated. The fat one nearly drowns in chocolate, the one obsessed with TV gets shrunk, one girl swells up into a blueberry and is taken away to be juiced, while another is hurled to near-certain death by millionaire Wonka's army in order to teach her a lesson ... about greed. Meanwhile, good boy Charlie is generally polite and follows most of the rules, so he's rewarded by being made Wonka's heir. The lesson is, of course, that wickedness will always be punished, while goodness is rewarded. How nice!

Except ... Charlie had to literally win the lottery to get that reward. What about all the good kids who didn't luck out and randomly find a golden ticket to fame and fortune? "Being honest pays off in the end" doesn't work as a moral if it only pays off during a once-in-a-lifetime, billion-to-one chance. And if it was so important to put the candy company in the hands of an honest child, why look for the most honest out of a group of five? There's a decent chance that any group of five random people will be total pricks in any scenario.

Interestingly, the 1971 movie found a way to make the moral worse. In that one, Charlie and his malingering grandpa sneak away from the tour and secretly sample some dangerously gassy soft drinks, which is nearly the exact same crime that gets one of the "bad" children turned into a blueberry monster. The drinks make them float toward a massive ceiling fan, and they narrowly avoid being chopped into pieces by burping down to safety. Wonka lets it slide, implying that maybe the test had nothing to do with honesty after all, and he merely needed someone who could survive the psychedelic maze of death traps that made up his factory. So again, the movie's moral isn't so much "Be good" as it is "Be extremely lucky, and don't tell OSHA."

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