Movies That Actually Changed The World

Featuring some of the most thrilling aerial dogfights ever captured on film, with director Tony Scott delivering peak Tony Scott and star Tom Cruise delivering peak Tom Cruise, there has never been a cooler movie than Top Gun, and there has never been a cooler action hero than Pete Mitchell, a maverick fighter pilot so awesome that his call sign is literally "Maverick."

Believe it or not, the "need for speed" was not the only master that the makers of Top Gun were serving. The film was made in association with the U.S. Navy. In exchange for providing resources to the filmmakers, the Navy required final script approval, and made numerous changes to the movie before it was released.

Even though the Navy couldn't officially use the film as a recruitment tool, they didn't have to. According to the book Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, after the movie came out, the number of young men who enlisted into the Navy wanting to be aviators went up by 500 percent. And can you blame them? Who wouldn't want to be Maverick?

A sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, is slated for release in 2020, and although not much is known about it, part of it has already been filmed on the deck of the USS Abraham, indicating that the armed forces are once again lending their support. It's probably pretty safe to assume that they'll experience yet another spike in recruitment after the release of this one, too.

In 1993, contracting AIDS was essentially a death sentence. By that time, the disease had killed over 200,000 Americans. Despite that, widespread fear and hatred of homosexuals — the group that the disease was hitting the hardest — meant solving this problem was not particularly high on the list of priorities for most politicians.

It was into this climate that director Jonathan Demme released his heartbreaking courtroom drama Philadelphia. This film tells the story of Andrew Beckett, a successful lawyer who is secretly both a homosexual and also suffering from AIDS. Early on in the film, the partners at his law firm discover both of his secrets, and fire him shortly thereafter. What follows is an intense legal battle as Andrew attempts to sue his former employer for wrongful dismissal. Even though Andrew wins the case in the end, he loses his life shortly after, once the disease finally takes him.

By modern standards, this would be a fairly conventional movie, barely worth commenting on, but it cannot be overstated how unprecedented it was for a major theatrical release at its time. It is often credited as being a major part of de-stigmatizing AIDS, and helping mainstream America to consider the plight of homosexuals and the silent plague that had been consuming them. In his review, Roger Ebert, saying that a film like this was long past due, called it "a righteous first step" and said "with Philadelphia the ice has been broken."

The classic animated film Bambi is a coming-of-age story told through the eyes of an adorable little fawn being raised by his wise and loving mother. This movie looms large in the minds of modern viewers for a variety of reasons. Chief among these reasons is probably because of how much it made them cry when they first saw it. In perhaps the film's most iconic scene, Bambi's mother is shot and killed by an unnamed hunter. This scene is such a memorable moment in film history that AFI named this hunter the 20th greatest villain ever in their list of the 100 greatest film villains of all time.

The film also apparently struck a chord with viewers when it first came out in 1942, because Bambi is often credited as being responsible for bringing anti-hunting sentiments into the mainstream, and significantly decreasing the popularity and acceptability of the sport. One specific example of an incident that many attribute directly to the impact of Bambi came a year later, in 1943, when a group of hunters in Wisconsin pushed for an additional antlerless deer hunting season to control the state's out-of-control deer population at that time. There was enormous public outcry to this proposal, much more than the hunters had experienced in the past when attempting to pass similar measures, and so the push for an additional hunting season was rejected.

An Inconvenient Truth is a truly unique oddity. It's essentially a concert film documenting the presentation of an educational slideshow by former Vice President Al Gore. It was an unlikely candidate for mainstream cinematic success, and yet the film became one of the most successful documentaries of all time.

The "inconvenient truth" at the heart of the film is that human-caused climate change is real, and a significant threat to all life on the planet. Gore's goal in creating the film, in conjunction with director Davis Guggenheim, was to lay out the reality of this situation in no uncertain terms, and to outline the potential solutions to this problem. As Gore himself put it, "We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it."

Fortunately for Gore, Guggenheim, and perhaps all of us, a study by the Nielsen Company and Oxford University found that the film "had a significant influence on those that have seen it — in their awareness of the issues and their stated changes in habits and behaviors." Another paper found that within two months after the film was released, the number of voluntary carbon offsets that were purchased in areas where the documentary was screened increased significantly. There are numerous other ways that the film had an impact, such as directly inspiring a 2007 benefit concert called Live Earth. For the future of all humanity, let's hope that this film, and others like it, continue to have an impact.

The 2015 James Bond film Spectre opens with one of the most memorable action scenes in the entire history of the franchise. It features Bond attempting to stop a terrorist bombing in Mexico City during an enormous Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) parade, complete with gigantic floats, live bands, and hundreds of people dressed as skeletons.

This sequence was planned in association with the Mexican government, who offered Sony tax incentives in exchange for portraying Mexico as a beautiful and exotic travel destination. This succeeded, as travelers from around the world did, in fact, flock to Mexico City the following year to experience this "old Mexican tradition." There was only one problem — the parade depicted in the film didn't actually exist, yet.

Up until 2015, Día de Muertos had been primarily celebrated in Mexico as more of a private family affair. Following the film's release, in order to match the expectations of foreign tourists, the Mexican government created a new ostentatious Day of the Dead parade directly based on the one that appeared in Spectre.

The reaction from the Mexican people was mixed, but many saw it as more of a cheap stunt than a genuinely welcome new tradition. It was Claudio Lomnitz, professor of Mexican studies at Columbia University, who perhaps best expressed the surrealism of the entire endeavor when he said, "There's an element of what we could call 'national-narcissism,' of a national imaginary in love with its own image, reflected in the mirror of Hollywood."

Though many of the films mentioned here have shown us that the power of film can be an enormous instrument for good, there is one that reminds us that it can also be used for evil. The white supremacist hate group known as the KKK formed shortly after the Civil War. The group had a brief moment of prominence in the late 1800s, but by 1915, it was almost entirely gone, existing only regionally in a few isolated locations.

Then the film Then Birth of a Nation came out, which portrayed the Klan as brave heroes, protecting innocent white women from evil dark-skinned villains (who were, in reality, white actors in blackface). Shortly after this, enrollment in the KKK skyrocketed, and it the Klan was reborn as a nationwide movement.

Fortunately, just as one piece of media gave power to the KKK, another one was able to take it away. In 1946, the KKK appeared in the Superman radio show as villains for a 16-episode arc called "Clan of the Fiery Cross." With the help of an activist named Stetson Kennedy, who had infiltrated the KKK, the writers of Superman portrayed the KKK as the hate group they truly were for the first time in a major work of popular American entertainment, destroying much of the mystique that once surrounded and empowered them.