I think the hate for the film today is people that weren't in college/young adults in the era that film came out don't get it.

Looking at the film through a 2023 mindset makes it look like a terrible movie because the worldview of the younger generation has changed.

Everyone and I mean EVERYONE I went to college with at Florida State I knew loved that movie.

Why?

It was the first movie that spoke to us. That weird transitional generation of people who were born in the analog world and then when we got to middle school dial up internet and email and AOL instant messenger came into our lives.

Our whole world changed in 2 years.

We were also the first generation of kids that were en masse put on drugs for hyperactivity, etc. We were the last generation of latch key kids.

Our parents were absent a lot of the time and we had to figure out how to cope with a world that changed so fast.

It sounds dumb to people born after say 1990 but to those of us born in the mid-80s...the world got fucking weird.

We went from watching Saturday Morning Cartoons to having a Cartoon Network 24/7.

We went from Records and Tapes to CDs to Napster in 10 years.

We went from 8-BIT Nintendo to PS2 in 10 years.

We went from calling your friends on the phone or the night before saying I'll meet you at the telephone pole at 9am in the summertime to sitting on AIM and being the first generation of teenagers with internet drama.

Mentally we were all fucked up because life changed so quickly from the analog world to the everyone is connected world.

Our parents couldn't even begin to cope with the world changing either so when we acted out it was easier to put us on a drug than figure out how to deal with it.

The movie is about this guy trying to not live feeling numb anymore. Just as he makes the decision to get off ALL the drugs he was on, his mom dies. There's that scene in the movie where he talks about the necklace and his mom hugging him and talking about trying to cope. If he was all doped up he would have passively observed it, instead he was actually feeling his feelings.

In Natalie Portman, he feels something about her and he's drawn to her and he spends the whole movie trying to figure out what it is. What it is, is he's attracted to her and falling for her and since he isn't all doped up anymore, he's coming off the chemicals and learning to just feel his feelings again and sort them out.

If you watch his character arc from his numb reaction to that shirt that matched the wallpaper where he just looks numb and dead inside to getting angry and protective over Sam near the end of the movie he's learned to feel his emotions and he's saying things and acting on them.

Him running back to Sam saying I don't know how this is going to work but I want to be with you is his final transformation into a real human moving on with his life. Had he abandoned her in the airport and not gone back to her, he'd be living a numb life just like he would have if he was still on the drugs. By going back to her, he was choosing to live more dangerously and be open to getting hurt and not numbing his emotions.

It's also why the conversation with his dad was so important in the movie. Had he chosen to stay on the drugs, he and his dad would have just been shadows but because he wasn't feeling "numb" anymore, he had the tough conversation with his dad and engaged him for the first time as as adult.

Trying to look at this movie with a 2023 won't make any damn sense.

For those of us who lived through that timeframe..it speaks to us differently.

I haven't watched the movie in a long time but its still on my DVD shelf. As a now late 30-something with a wife and kid it's a reminder to me to not make the same mistakes my parents did and engage my kids way better than my parents did. it doesn't mean my parents didn't love me, it just means they didn't do a good job helping me process my emotions and who I am. I want my kid to be able to cope with life and be productive and not go through a lot of the pain my generation did. She'll go through other types of pain than I did.