The Lego Movie (2014)

Spoilers ahead for Free Guy

Free Guy, Disney’s new movie about a video game NPC who realizes he’s living in a video game, is a treat! Its base is classic Disney — a white heteronormative love story. But its toppings — Ryan Reynolds’ unique brand of adult humor, a commitment to exploring modern day video game culture, and tons of star cameos — make this movie fun to watch! 

Free Guy’s main protagonists are all white, heteronormative characters, per usual. This story could have had so much potential for great representation if even one of the leads had been non-white. Yet again, POC are relegated to supporting roles. Guy’s best friend is Buddy (Lil Rey Howery), a fearful security guard. Howery is hilarious here, playing a very similar character to his role in Get Out. While he is great as comic relief, he also has one of the most touching moments in the movie when he gives a speech to Guy about how, even if they are fake, the moments they share together are real. Buddy should have been given more to do than serve as Guy’s motivator and fall into the black best friend trope. 

Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is another comedic character and the friend to Keys (Joe Keery). Guy and Buddy and Keys and Mouser are meant to be parallels of each other since Keys himself created Guy, so that means we get two sets of white male protagonists and their POC best friends! However, Mouser seems much less like a best friend than Buddy. But Ambudkar does amazing in this role, and it was great to see him so soon after finishing season 2 of Never Have I Ever where he played the cool teacher. He also should have been given more to do than act as Antoine’s lackey and Keys’ friend. We don’t even see too much of him being Keys’ friend anyway, making his line “Keys is my boy,” feel a bit cheap, but the movie unfortunately isn’t interested in giving him much depth beyond that. 

Netflix’s recent hit The Mitchells vs. The Machines tells the story of Katie and her slightly dysfunctional family on a farewell road trip as she leaves for college. There’s some family drama going on between Katie and her dad, but nothing that can’t be solved with the help of a machine apocalypse. 

Katie is a classic Gen-Z kid: she’s attached to her phone all the time, even telling her dad at one point that seeing the world through a screen is “how I experience things.” She watches videos that look similar to TikToks and expresses her creativity through videos uploaded to her channel on YouTube. She wants to pursue film as a career, a goal that’s affirmed once she’s accepted into the college of her dreams. She’s excited to get away from home where she has no friends because of her quirky personality and because her peers simply don’t understand her interests (or her sexuality, as it’s implied.) In contrast, the people she’s met from college online already love her for who she is and share her interests. 

Meanwhile, Rick is like a lot of real life dads: he likes to fix things, he likes nature, he’s practical about everything in life and thinks his kids should be, too. The problem with that thinking is most kids are not carbon copies of their parents. They’re going to be different, which Rick has trouble understanding. So, we reach the main conflict of this movie (beyond the robot apocalypse): the universal struggle between the older, practical generation and the younger, creative generation. And seemingly worsening that divide is modern-day technology, the Internet, and social media.

Katie, like so many people who have dreams of going into the arts, has a parent who doesn’t believe she will succeed. Rick tells her, “Do you really think you can make a living with this stuff?” and later, “Failure hurts, kid. I want you to have a backup plan.” Of course, this is the eternal anxiety that plagues any person pursuing creative endeavors as a career. But Katie never gives into fear. Katie is unapologetically confident in herself and her dreams for her future. It’s refreshing to see a character like Katie never doubt herself. I was worried the premise of this film might center on Katie debating her goal to pursue film, but the real conflict follows Katie and her dad reconciling their differences. 

The main thing that stands between them is technology. Katie can’t part with it but that’s all her dad wants her to do. Screens constantly separate them. When Katie shows her family a video she made the night before leaving for college, all her father can see is a barrier. He doesn’t comprehend that this is how Katie is expressing her love for her family. He doesn’t see the effort she put into it. And Katie doesn’t understand her father’s dislike of technology and art or his love of nature. The two are polar opposites, but as the movie goes on, Katie’s mom points out that the two are very alike. They’re both stubborn, quirky but self-confident, and Rick even loved a form of art once too: he built a cabin for himself to live in, but the rest of his dream didn’t work out. Katie’s mom says he was probably afraid the same thing would happen to Katie.