The Movies That Defined the Millennials Generation
The generation who grew up at the turn of the century also saw the idea of “going to the movies” change quite a lot.
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We Millennials will forever occupy an awkward space. Born at the turn of the century, and changing of the tide in technology and culture, the oldest among us can vaguely remember a world without the internet—and certainly a childhood without social media. Many of us grew up during the so-called “end of history” good vibes, as per some of our most oblivious Boomer parents, and then lived to see how history changed again, often in horrifying or difficult ways.
Coming of age between two global economic disasters and often ridiculed for clinging to our adolescent mess in that wake, Gen-Yers bounce between older worldviews rooted in the 20th century, and the next generations who know only the 21st. Perhaps that’s why many of our most popular films are derived from brands and familiar, iconic characters we recall from childhood. Others, however, reflect a longing to turn the page–or to burn the whole book down. They got style, class and crass, and just may yet make “fetch” happen. So without further ado, here are some quintessentially Millennial movies.
The Little Mermaid (1989), The Lion King (1994), and the Rest of Disney Renaissance
It seems right to begin with movies that nestled comfortably in the landscape of countless Millennial childhoods: the Disney Renaissance flicks. Since even the oldest Gen-Yers weren’t born until the start of the 1980s, there was nary a kid among them not obsessed with Disney’s returned dominance in pop culture. Of course they didn’t know movies like The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994) marked something of a comeback for the Mouse House; they just knew they wanted to learn all the words to “A Whole New World” or “Hakuna Matata!” (And to cover their eyes when Mufasa fell into that stampede.)
These movies hold up, especially the first four listed above. And save for The Lion King, all had the heavy influence of Broadway songwriter Howard Ashman. You could say he helped develop a renewed love of musicals in the next generation, as well as for animated stories that were enjoyed by all ages, including many Millennials who continued watching long after they grew up. – David Crow
Home Alone (1990)
Another family movie which seemed to speak to a whole expanse of ‘90s kids was the one which suggested there was no problem that couldn’t be solved by Macaulay Culkin and a VHS copy of fictional gangster flick Angels with Filthy Souls. Perhaps not coincidentally director Christopher Columbus and writer John Hughes’ Home Alone likewise proved a VHS staple for millions of children. With its power fantasy about a kid being left home alone in a massive mansion he fills with booby traps to thwart some holiday robbers, the movie is all Yuletide sentimentality (or schmaltz, depending on your disposition). But accidentally or not, it tapped into a feeling of technological superiority among the youngins’ that would come to define much of the decades to come. – DC
Jurassic Park (1993)
For kids whose grade school years overlapped with the early ‘90s, Jurassic Park might very well have been their Star Wars. They watched the Star Wars Trilogy too, of course—but on TV, which was also the home of Indiana Jones, E.T., and Tim Burton’s Batman. Jurassic Park, by comparison, arrived as the last dash of old school Spielbergian fun, bringing roaring Tyrannosaurs and velociraptors back to life and in the flesh (or at least CG). It was magic.
It was everywhere, too, with the marketing push for this movie helping drive what would be the highest grossing picture ever up to that point. Of course Jurassic Park was also a savvy thriller derived from Michael Crichton’s paranoia about commercialism’s creeping influence into technology. Still, the movie ironically stands as a landmark for a generation whose cinematic diet would later be defined by the influence of commercialism and new technologies. Soon the modern franchise would ensure that all dead things constantly returned from extinction, including this story. – DC
Toy Story (1995) and Early Pixar
If we can include one more defining family film of Millennial childhoods, it should probably be the other animated revolution occurring in the ‘90s, although not initially at Disney. In fact, John Lasseter co-founded Pixar Animation Studios after being fired from Disney proper for pursuing computer-generated animation. But you can’t fight the future, and for the kids of ‘95, it really did feel like landing on an alien planet when a three-dimensional Buzz Lightyear walked across Andy’s bedspread.
Toy Story worked in large part because it ditched the Disney formula and that of so many other previous animated movies. Instead it told a heartfelt story about friendship and growing up, and set a bar that Pixar would spend the rest of the ‘90s and 2000s constantly raising with a variety of increasingly ambitious animated films, including Monsters Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), Wall-E (2008), and Up (2009). There were also the Toy Story sequels that, like Andy, matured with its audience from childhood to young adulthood, and then tearfully seeing them off to college at the end of the trilogy. We’re not crying, you’re crying! – DC
Scream (1996)
A bit on the Gen X/older Millennial border, Wes Craven’s Scream was a watershed moment in pop culture, no matter how you quantify young people of its era. Here was the first mainstream horror movie where all the characters have seen other horror movies, growing up renting them from Blockbuster. Hell, there’s even an audience surrogate character played by Jamie Kennedy who felt like he wandered over from a Kevin Smith joint in order to poke holes in the slasher movie formula.
In some ways, it echoes the disaffection and cynicism of the previous generation with none of the characters taking the fact they’re being stalked by a guy in a Halloween mask that seriously; they’d rather wax precociously about the meaning of life by way of strained Exorcist metaphors. But the movie’s post-modern and self-referential humor would prove much more acutely a harbinger for many of the Millennial favorites to come later on this list. Scream set the tone that most American horror movies of the late ‘90s and early 2000s would emulate, raising the next gen on kills, giggles, and eyerolls. – DC
Titanic (1997)
If only there were a word to describe the hulking great presence of this movie in the late 1990s. The extreme… bigness of it. Titanic was, at the time, the most expensive picture ever made, the joint most Oscar-nominated picture ever, the first film to sail past the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office, and not only had one of cinema’s longest theatrical runs (well over a year, son) but also one of the longest runtimes. Contrary to director James Cameron’s wishes, it was commonly shown in theaters with an intermission. On early VHS, the movie was spread across two cassettes. Titanic was, there’s no other way to describe it: really, really large.
Because of its size, Titanic got stuck in the pop culture pipe and just stayed there. That song and its tin whistle intro, the heart of the ocean diamond, “draw me like one of your French girls,” the sweaty hand on the car window, the debate over whether there was room on that floating door for Jack… for anyone there at the time, Titanic never really went away. Probably the only real-world disaster killing 1,500 people which was monetized to sell nail polish, it launched Kate Winslet into stardom and its huge success made Leonardo DiCaprio the man he is today. It’s less a movie than a presidential term we all lived under. The day that somebody stands on the deck of a ship and doesn’t hear “I’m the king of the world!” will mean that the last of us finally died out. – Louisa Mellor
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
The ‘90s were big in bringing back and reimagining the classics. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Daniel Day-Lewis as “the Last of the Mohicans.” Even teen entertainment got into it by remixing literary and theatrical classics as modern teen dramedies, and 10 Things I Hate About You is the best of them*.
A loose reworking of the Bard’s The Taming of the Shrew, 10 Things is still set in a faraway land where every high school is a literal castle by the sea, and each new kid is as a total hunk like Heath Ledger, the new Aussie heartthrob who would croon Frankie Valli during gym class, and take spunky alternative girl Julia Stiles paintball-balloon fighting (is that even a thing?). It’s a postmodern daydream for the Ren Faire set. – DC
*We are arbitrarily ruling Clueless to be a Gen-X movie.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Another seminal horror movie that would define trends in the genre for decades to come, The Blair Witch Project is not the first found footage chiller (that honor goes to 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust). It was, however, the first to trick large swaths of the moviegoing public into thinking this was real. It pioneered “viral marketing” in the process.
It’s impossible to stress how seriously back in the day that The Blair Witch’s website convinced folks to believe this footage was literally discovered in a remote spot of Maryland backwoods. To audiences who watched it in 1999, either at home or on VHS, the film’s central characters appeared to be real film students who vanished into the forest, searching for a legend based on alleged history. The film also remains one of the most effective horror movies of its kind, with the Sundance indie forgoing the cheap jump scares which would come to define its imitators. The film instead derives most of its horror from how Heather Donahue and the other characters react to inexplicable phenomena. If you can meet it still on that wavelength, it remains unsettling, and also indicative of the online hype that would soon define Millennial entertainment. – DC
American Pie (1999)
Love it or hate it, American Pie, and to a lesser degree its sequels, represented a moment for young audiences at the turn of the millennium. Sure, the moment is a crude movie version of that one kid telling you ad nauseam about the sexual exploits they never had over the summer (maybe at band camp?), but the fact is we all remember that kid, and this movie, with a chuckle or a cringe.
That more or less sums up American Pie’s brand of humor as well, with director Paul Weitz and writer Adam Herz relying on “lad gags” about horny dweebs humping pies and dancing on webcams while failing to seduce their painfully underwritten, and leeringly naked, high school crush. Like more than a few 2000s comedies that American Pie would be a precursor to, this movie’s aged terribly, but at the time everyone was convinced it had something Important™ to say about adolescence. Or something. – DC
Donnie Darko (2001)
Donnie Darko isn’t just one of the earliest examples of an indie film coming out of nowhere to find a somewhat surprising Millennial audience in the 2000s; it’s one of the strangest films in that category. How did this low-budget movie that was denied proper theatrical promotion following the Sept. 11 attacks go on to become a massive financial success that defined a generation?
The answer can be found in the quality of the movie itself. Industry figures, pre-teens, teens, and college students all saw a piece of themselves in this strange story of a teenage boy who is informed by a man in a bunny costume that the world will end in just under a month. The timing of the film’s theatrical release may have been unfortunate, but it also arguably helped this movie find an audience that also felt like the world was closing in on them before they even had a chance to understand how they fit into it. In terms of cultural relevance, it certainly didn’t hurt that Donnie Darko’s soundtrack is one of the purest encapsulations of a particular time, place, and mood. – Matthew Byrd
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001 – 2003)
We come to it at last, the great movie trilogy of our time. There were a lot of them in the 2000s, and even more in the decades that followed. Yet Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings adaptation remains the one movie series to rule them all. Foregoing the low budgets, self-deprecation, and often sheepishness of previous “high fantasy” movies, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings pictures truly lived up to the moniker of “epic.” With sweeping Howard Shore music, breathtaking set builds, and stunning New Zealand location photography, Lord of the Rings landed like a Lothlórien spell.
It didn’t hurt either these came out when Millennials’ age range ran the gamut from pre-school to college dorm rooms. It would prove the formative cinematic fantasy for the first generation widely reared on obsessing over the lore and minutiae of filmmaking and worldbuilding—great stuff for new DVD special features and internet blogging. The movies remain absolutely fantastic to this day, as well, more than earning their historic 11-Oscar sweep in 2004 for The Return of the King (though Ian McKellen was robbed for Fellowship of the Ring). – DC
Harry Potter Movies (2001 – 2011)
Aside from maybe our heckin’ doggos and pumpkin spice lattes, nothing screams “Millennial” quite like the Harry Potter phenomenon. From the moment Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or Philosopher’s Stone to you Brits) was published in 1997, J.K. Rowling’s coming-of-age saga about the Boy Who Lived and the Wizarding World he needed to save was the definitive bildungsroman of its time. Of course the Harry Potter stories may not have had the same impact if the movies that Warner Bros. adapted from the books had sucked. Thankfully, they did not. In fact, they were very good!
Featuring eight total films over the span of a decade, the Harry Potter film series was a remarkable cinematic achievement. Just as the books allowed an entire generation to grow old with Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger, so too did the film series invite viewers to develop alongside Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint’s core kiddos. Thanks to a multi-billion dollar box office haul and constant marathons on television, the Harry Potter movies constitute the magical background noise of the Millennial experience. Now if only its author’s incessant social media posting hadn’t made all those Dark Mark and Deathly Hallows tattoos feel so cringey. – Alec Bojalad
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
The revived popularity in animated movies intended for kids, and then the postmodern vibe those youngins’ later embraced as teens, starts to come of age with the eldest millennials in Moulin Rouge!, director Baz Luhrmann’s absinthe-kissed technicolor fever dream. As the first film to show there was a new young adult audience for musicals, Moulin Rouge! was nonetheless a departure from their grandparents’ toe-tappers.
Mixing the hyper-kinetic editing of modern MTV music videos with Bollywood storytelling, and throwing in some of the biggest pop hits of the previous 30 years despite the movie being set in 1899 Paris, Moulin Rouge! is hypnotically artificial and capital letters ROMANTIC. Yet if you grew up as a Millennial theater kid, or knew them, it was a perpetual mainstay on any college dorm room TV, which signaled a new era for tonal, stylistic, and genre mash-ups. – DC
Spider-Man (2002)
Spider-Man wasn’t the first superhero movie, for Millennials or otherwise. But a case can be made it was the first modern one, and definitely the first to come after 9/11 changed the world, including the psyches of a lot of Gen-Y kids still in high school or younger. In that context, it was more than just a popular summer movie; Spider-Man set the tone and tenor for American escapism that we still wrap around us like a warm security blanket 22 years later. It’s a movie where a band of New Yorkers team up with the Web-Head to fight the Green Goblin by shouting, “When you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!”
The movie is also among the better superhero origin story films, with director Sam Raimi showing a deference for the comic book source material not seen since the days of Dick Donner, as well as a visual playfulness and sense of mischief that would be lost in the glut of imitators that soon followed. Spider-Man is a potent, economically told power fantasy in which an everyman teenager (Tobey Maguire) gets the dream gift of superpowers that turn him into a god—but they also come with the burden of responsibility and, soon enough, tragedy. Raimi and Maguire’s ability to thread that needle between wish fulfillment and soap operatic melodrama helped reassure millions of young people that it’s going to be alright. – DC
Mean Girls (2004)
The life cycle of Mean Girls might say more about Millennial entertainment trends than the picture itself. In short: it’s all about IP, baby. IP and memes. Book-turned-movie-turned-abandoned-video-game-turned-made-for-TV-sequel-turned-stage-musical-turned-back-into-a-movie… even frogs have a simpler time of it. Mark Waters’ 2004 picture starring Lindsay Lohan as math whizz Cady Heron though, is the original version, and the best.
Inspired by Rosaline Wiseman’s parenting guide Queen Bees and Wannabes, Mean Girls is a story about sacrificing yourself on the altar of popularity. Home-schooled Cady is thrown into the social strata of an American high school and has to establish her place in the pecking order. This she does by becoming the thing she initially fears the most: a ‘plastic’ bitch. Then lessons are learned, a tiara gets snapped apart, and everybody ends up happily ever after (except Janis Ian, who’s forced to wait until the 2024 version to come out as queer because 2004 was still the dark ages, apparently). It’s a great movie and the spawner of so many Millennial memes—from “grool” to “It’s Oct. 3” to “Four for you, Glen Coco”—that refuse to die. You go, Glen Coco. – LM
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
This very weekend, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright’s rom-zom-com is being re-released in theaters for its 20th anniversary, and people are buying tickets despite a) the cost of living crisis, and b) the fact that in the UK, Shaun of the Dead used to have its own TV channel. (For almost a decade, ITV2 played almost nothing but Shaun of the Dead and its Cornetto Trilogy follow-up Hot Fuzz. Nobody knew why, but like the vending machine at my school that used to spit out free crisps, nobody reported it in case it stopped. It did stop, eventually, but by then streaming had been invented, so crisis averted.)
People are buying tickets to see Shaun of the Dead for the billionth time because it’s our film. It’s the film we watched as teenagers and students and as savvy young adults with pub opinions on the speed at which zombies should or should not move. When COVID first started, our WhatsApp groups filled up with suggestions that we should all just go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for it all to blow over. Cut us and we bleed “you’ve got red on you.” Happy birthday, Shaun. – LM
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 shaped the 21st century in profound and horrible ways. And for those who came of age in the 2000s, the sense of pessimism and gloom was only heightened by the losses endured and inflicted during the ensuing War on Terror years. With the U.S. and some of its allies embarking on Middle East wars defined by nebulous goals, non-existent exit strategies, and growing casualty lists, Millennials also got a front row seat to the culture wars of previous decades suddenly reignited in red, white, and blue.
The movie that most directly addressed this emerging culture shock was Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the rare documentary that could become a blockbuster and gross $119 million in the U.S. alone (that’s $200 million today). Released during an election year, Moore’s Fahrenheit was advocacy filmmaking aimed at discrediting the current U.S. President George W. Bush. And he did so by laying out facts that only became more glaring in the decades since about the U.S. invading Iraq despite the country having nothing to do with 9/11, nor containing the fabled WMDs the Bush administration told the world were developed by the Saddam Hussein regime, even as some suppressed American intelligence suggested otherwise.
Yet the film itself is ultimately a persuasive work of political oppo-research… up to a point. It became one of the biggest hits of its year for almost half its domestic market, but the other, larger half still re-elected Bush. Even so, it remains a time capsule of a time and moment where the red/blue tribalism in America was about to become omnipresent. – DC
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
The Devil Wears Prada is a fascinating collection of apparent contradictions. It is both a fable about a young woman landing a dream job in a big city and the crystallization of a generation’s anxieties about adulthood. It’s a takedown of the pretentiousness of the fashion industry and a loving look at its mystique and value. It is very 2006 in some elemental ways, yet there is a timelessness to its tale that suggests it could work in multiple eras with only a few, largely superficial tweaks.
Perhaps the movie’s ability to effectively cover so many seemingly contradictory concepts helps explain its incredible reach. Like Mean Girls and The Notebook before it, The Devil Wears Prada destroyed whatever “girl movie” label may have been applied to the project early on en route to a $300 million box office, numerous award nominations, and a new generation fully appreciating the timeless talents of Meryl Streep via one of her most iconic roles. You don’t need to be able to recite the cerulean sweater speech from memory to appreciate how this movie does it all while wearing high heels. – MB
Superbad (2007) and the Judd Apatow Era
Nobody dominated comedy in the mid-to-late aughts like Judd Apatow. After shepherding the cult classic Freaks and Geeks to network television, Apatow went on to become a brand name at the movies. More often than not, it was merely that brand name being provided. Of the many classic 2000s comedies falling under the “Apatow” banner, only The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, and This Is 40 were written and directed by Judd. While those are all good-to-great features, Apatow’s real talents lie in his ability to scout talent and bring it to the silver screen. Films like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Bridesmaids all received the Apatow EP-credit stamp of approval, and all belong in the classic comedy canon. No Apatow-produced effort, however, typifies the Millennial era as keenly as 2007’s Superbad.
Written by longtime Apatow associates Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Superbad captures the confusion, anxiety, frustrations, and gut-busting hilarity of one’s adolescent years—and not coincidentally so as Rogen and Goldberg began writing the project in their teens.
Actors Michael Cera and Jonah Hill step into the two Rogen and Goldberg-coded roles as high school seniors just trying to sleep with someone—anyone—before their final summer vacation ends. Superbad is a spectacularly funny film, complete with star-affirming performances from Cera, Hill, Rogen, and even Bill Hader and Emma Stone. More importantly though it speaks to two hallmark Millennial experiences: 1. Being a massive loser, and 2. Booping your buddy on the nose. – AB
Juno (2007)
Are you OK there, homeslice? You’ve barely touched your hamburger phone. It’s no secret that Millennials are known for having a, let’s say, unique vocabulary. What few outside of the generation realize is that roughly 44 percent of those weird verbal tics are lifted directly from 2007 coming-of-age dramedy, Juno. Written with a charmingly distinctive voice by Diablo Cody, Juno is filled with characters trying to affect the usual Millennial ironic detachment but finding connections in spite of themselves.
Elliot Page stars as the titular Juno MacGuff, a teenager staring down an unplanned pregnancy thanks to the nerdy sexual allure of short-short-wearing boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). As Juno tries to find a couple to provide her baby a suitable home, she comes to realize that Generation X comes along with its own problems as well. Though Juno is inextricably linked to its Millennial audience, it’s truly a timeless story about growing up… and yes, hamburger phones. – AB
The Dark Knight (2008)
Christopher Nolan is one of those few modern populist auteurs that Millennials have been, more or less, aware of from the beginning, or at least Memento. They’ve grown up watching his career in real-time, as opposed to seeing it as something handed down. It’s thus tempting to put that neo noir on this list, or perhaps his most popular original movie, Inception. Yet like so much of Gen-Y culture, Nolan made his biggest impact when working with a brand, in this case Batman.
Still, The Dark Knight remains unique among superhero films in that it stands apart from its genre, acting as a sincere larger than life crime epic. It tackles questions of national security, social collapse, and paranoia. It snapshotted the post-9/11 dread better than any film directly about the subject, and it picked at the underlying anxiety that so many other superhero movies sought to act as escapism from. It also achieved this with one of the all-time great film villain performances, courtesy of Heath Ledger. In Ledger’s hands, the Joker becomes an emblem for every lone shooter, nihilist, or terrorist who gives modern society the jitters. And Ledger dressed it up in comic book drag and gave it a rock star swagger that is still as thrilling as it is disquieting. – DC
Twilight (2008) and the Sequels
One we admit is on another border, this time of the Millennial/Gen-Z divide, the fact remains the youngest Millennials were still in high school or under when the first Twilight came out, never mind when the books reached YA phenom status in 2005. And to be sure, they became the sparkling face of a movement, from libraries to multiplexes. With their Gothic, yet quaintly old-fashioned, parable about teenage angst over sex and physical attraction to the wrong sort of guy, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga transformed vampires for a generation from creatures of horror to the sullen boy next door, Edward Cullen.
Robert Pattinson plays that dude with aching broodiness opposite an equally gloomy Kristen Stewart. The blatant teen girl-leaning fantasy of the material in retrospect triggered what can only be described as a cesspool of toxic masculinity among online fandom. That ugly overreaction doesn’t necessarily mean Twilight is good, but there’s something almost charmingly wholesome about its squareness. Consider that before the vampire turns the object of his ardor into the Undead, he insists… they go to her high school prom. – DC
Step Brothers (2008) and the Ferrell/McKay Cycle
In the large swath of popular 2000s American comedies, the ones co-written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay have aged the best. That’s likely because unlike so many of their ilk, they never really wanted you to sympathize with their man-children protagonists, be they 1970s newscasters, Fox News-loving NASCAR dads, or a ghoulish parody of what so many Boomers imagined their adult children to be: freeloaders who will never leave home.
All of McKay/Ferrell’s collaborations are of a piece, lampooning a sense of entitlement and narcissism they saw as running rampant, particularly among white men in the Bush era. The most scathing and funny iteration of this was Step Brothers where Ferrell and John C. Reilly played two 40-year-olds still living with their single parents. When those parents marry, however, they behave like spoiled brats… but with just enough autonomy to be able to drive, leave the house, and wreak true havoc out in the world. It’s a demented portrait of its era that, like Dale and Brennan fighting over a drum set, will always hit you in the sweet spot, no matter how many years pass. – DC
The Social Network (2010)
Unabashedly the first “serious” movie made about Millennials and Millennial culture, The Social Network is director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s misanthropic take on the creation of Facebook. Dismissed by the tech industry at the time as unreliable with the historical record (true) and drenched in doom-prophecizing (also true… but), The Social Network nonetheless proved to be one of the most vital movies of its decade… and prescient in the years that followed with its vision of social media as a technology hardwired to reward loneliness, anger, and the spitefulness of the involuntarily celibate.
It’s also a terrific parable about American capitalism drenched in the paranoia and despair usually associated with Fincher. That nihilism brings out the best in Sorkin’s dialogue, too, cultivating an air of tragedy around its Gen-Y anti-hero, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), as he launches Facebook out of his Harvard dorm room after coming to the idea through ethically dubious means. The film suggests like a 21st century Charles Foster Kane, this (fictionalized) Zuckerberg reshaped the world in his own introverted, unhappy image. Whether accurate or not, it makes for a persuasive snapshot of the 2000s tech upheaval we’re still living through the fallout from. – DC
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
There was a brief moment, say between Death Cab Cutie breaking out and Vampire Weekend appearing on late night TV shows, where hipster culture was considered genuinely cool. Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World arrived at just the tailend of it, catching for posterity what was already then a widespread phenomenon in 2000s pedantry. It also is both scathingly satirical and heartwarmingly sweet about this subculture.
With a dizzying cast of up-and-coming generational talent who would explode in the years that followed—Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Brie Larson, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, Chris Evans, and Alison Pill, to name but a few—Scott Pilgrim takes the universal young person experience of getting over childish and selfish behavior, especially when entering a real “adult” relationship, with a blast of era-specific Millennial pop culture dandruff and debris. With characters just as likely to burst out into song as they are fight sequences inspired by 1990s arcade button mashers and manga comic panels, or falling into dreamy interludes straight out of The Legend of Zelda or Seinfeld, Scott Pilgrim is a definitive kaleidoscopic collage of its age, timeless and minutely of its time. – DC
Get Out (2017)
By 2017, most Millennials were approaching or crossing 30. Interests were changing, and there was a proliferation of new types of stories being made for niche audiences outside of the traditional studio system. Yet sometimes the studios would hop on those trends, particularly in the rise of “elevated horror,” if you accept that term for a reemergence of allegorical and/or socially satirical horror flicks. Arguably the best of this new cycle was Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, an effective horror-comedy that held up a mirror to the American present.
Obviously influenced by Boomer chillers like Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, Peele’s Get Out finds deeply nerve-wracking humor and dread in its vision of a Black man interacting with his white girlfriend’s parents and culture—a culture specific to that moment where some young people were beginning to settle down in. After all, when the movie was written, Obama was president, and smiling, affluent white folks like the parents in the movie basked in their “post-racial” liberalism—her dad would have voted for Obama a third time if he could!
But underneath all the supposed good vibes of the early 2010s is a resentment and obsession over America’s growing diversity that was about to boil over. By the time the movie came out in February 2017, audiences knew Peele wasn’t just whistling “Dixie” in a nice straw hat. He tapped a nerve in American life and gave it a name: the Sunken Place.– DC
Lady Bird (2017)
One could say that most of Greta Gerwig’s output as a writer and director has been in communication with the Millennial experience. Her first collaboration with future partner Noah Baumbach, Frances Ha, is the quintessential indie about the messiness and sense of arrested development associated with many Millennials’ twentysomething years. That movie is probably too niche for this list, but her quasi-prequel to the film, this time also as the director, managed to break out in a bigger way.
Like most A24 releases in the 2010s, Lady Bird is an indie aimed at a Millennial audience, this one explicitly so. Set in 2002—back again behind the shadow of 9/11—Lady Bird is a love letter to the time and place that gave Gerwig her sense of identity. The filmmaker’s doppelgänger, a precocious teen who calls herself Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) despite growing up as Christine, lives in Sacramento with loving parents in a lower middle class background. The daughter tangibly resents it. A movie about coming-of-age in a wholesome place you cannot wait to escape, as well as the dawning realization that your parents are actually human beings, Lady Bird becomes as much about the mother (Laurie Metcalf) as her daughter. It also reflects a generation who might just have begun recognizing the mortality of another. – DC