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Harsher in Hindsight/Film: Difference between revisions
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* [[Bollywood]] film ''[[Main Hoon Na]]'' is a double offender: first, it shows a group of terrorists shooting up an Indian television studio. Later in the film, the terrorists take the students and faculty of a school hostage in a gymnasium rigged with bombs. The Beslan School Siege in Chechnya would happen a few months after the film was released, and the terrorist attacks on Mumbai would happen a few years later.
* ''[[Love Actually]]'': [[Liam Neeson]]'s character's storyline is just gut-wrenching as of his wife's death.
** On a lesser note, this [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWK-7RmGLPk PBS Kids ident used from 1999 to 2004] shows various scenes of inspirational moments with well-known celebrities like Levar Burton, [[Jamie Lee Curtis]], and others. Of note is Neeson himself, who is sitting alone with his son looking out a window and joyfully laughing with each other. It becomes a bit more heartbreaking as of the last year.{{when}}
** Also makes at least one scene in ''[[The Dark Knight Saga|Batman Begins]]'' uncomfortable viewing:
{{quote|'''Ducard:''' I wasn't always here in the mountains. I once had a wife...my great love...and she, too, was...''taken'' from me...}}
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*** Neeson played a number of widowers before the death of his wife that is downright disturbing/heartbreaking now.
** Then there's his role in ''[[The Grey]]'' which was released after the incident. Many attribute his especially powerful and emotional performance in this film to the fact that he suffered the same thing in real life.
* In the movie ''[[Jack (film)|Jack]]'', the title character, a ten year old boy who ages
* ''They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'' culminates with [[Jane Fonda]]'s character begging to be shot dead and put her out of her misery. In 1978 Gig Young, who won an Oscar for his role in the same film but never got the career boost he had been hoping for from it, shot and killed his wife before turning the gun on himself.
* ''[[Batman and Robin (film)|Batman and Robin]]'' just got a lot harder to watch now that Michael Gough has died of old age and illness, it used to be the one decent part, but now watching all those bed-ridden, dying Alfred scenes is really too much.
** Not to mention [[w:Robert Swenson|Robert Swenson]], the guy who
* ''[[The Siege (film)|The Siege]]'' is an action thriller from 1998 about terrorist strikes in New York that end up with martial law. Back in 1998, there was a backlash from the Arab community because they thought it made them look like terrorists. [[Captain Obvious|Fast forward to September 11, 2001]].
** In fact, FOX itself marketed the movie as being "Eerily prescient of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath" in the backcopy of the blu-ray DVD edition.
* ''Wrong is Right'' seemed like an over-the-top political satire about the links between war, government, and the media in 1982. Now the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IUbBdcDEo0 number of coincidences] with events in Iraq is staggering.
* The [[Formula One]] documentary film ''[[Senna]]'' plays out as a huge collection of mentions of crashes, Senna being in a crash, Senna talking about crashes and safety issues within [[Formula One]] (Senna's death being the major turning point for safety within [[Formula One]]). There are very few scenes without a nod to the fact he dies on the racetrack. One of the very first scenes is an interview with his family when he began racing saying how they prayed to God their son would never get injured on the racetrack...
* ''[[Demolition Man]]'', while looking up the parole hearings, the name listed before Simon Phoenix is
** Of course it was. ''Demolition Man'' was released in 1993. Scott Peterson was convicted in 2005.
** A later scene has Phoenix looking up the names of the cryoprison inmates. He comes across Jeffrey Dahmer's name and shouts "Jeffrey Dahmer? I
** The same film has a mention of President Schwarzenegger. Although this one probably qualifies as [[Hilarious in Hindsight]], you have to wonder about time
* In ''Paranoiac'', [[Oliver Reed]]'s character has a drinking problem. In ''Curse of the Werewolf'', he works at a winery, and there are several scenes of him getting drunk with his coworker. In ''Captain Clegg'', he smugglers liqueur. Reed had an alcohol problem all his life, and drank himself to death on the set of ''[[Gladiator (film)|Gladiator]]''.
* The anti-nuclear drama ''[[Fail-Safe]]'' was intentionally very serious and gloomy, but the events of 9/11 make the ending worse, in which {{spoiler|a pilot is ordered to drop a nuclear bomb destroying New York City}}. In retrospect it makes 9/11 conspiracy theories look trivial.
* The 1979 Disaster Film flop ''Meteor'' had a spaceship called the ''Challenger'' exploding.
** And the Twin Towers destroyed near the end.
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* The 1991 film ''Grand Canyon'' includes a scene where a white driver, whose car has broken down in the streets of [[Los Angeles]], is "rescued" from a gang of young black teenagers by a black tow-truck driver. Many a journalist drew parallels when the Los Angeles Riots began than a year later with the Reginald Denny Incident. White truck driver (Reginald Denny) was driven to safety by an unarmed black civilian (Bobby Green Jr - himself a truck driver), after being brutally beaten by a group of young black men at the corner of Florence and Normandy.
* ''[[Escape from New York]]'' begins with terrorists hijacking an airplane and flying it into a building in Manhattan near the World Trade Center; later, Snake Plissken lands a glider on the WTC's roof.
** Later, in ''[[Escape From L.A.
* ''[[Pimpernel Smith]]'', a 1941 updating of ''[[The Scarlet Pimpernel (film)|The Scarlet Pimpernel]]'', ends soberly, with its [[Adventurer Archaeologist]] hero facing execution by the Nazis for helping refugees to escape. From a shadow, Leslie Howard delivers the final speech as Smith, before vanishing into the darkness, baffling his captors forever:
{{quote|'''General von Graum:''' Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man.
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* The scenes of [[Grace Kelly]]'s character driving recklessly around southern France in order to freak out Cary Grant in Hitchcock's ''[[To Catch a Thief]]'' take on a different feel once one realizes that they were filmed in the same vicinity as the site of Grace's fatal 1982 car accident.
* A lot of ''[[In the Loop]]'', focusing as it does on the political dishonesty that was the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Especially when combined with the film's penchant for [[Cringe Comedy]]. There's nothing wrong with dark satire, but a particularly striking example from the deleted scenes is Toby asking for directions in [[Washington DC]] from a confused young boy, who proves to be of no help. Toby tells him, "Don't come crying to me when you get called up because I didn't stop this shit!" Toby is a [[Dirty Coward]] and there's nothing heroic about the character or the line. It just makes you wince.
** To be fair that was the intention -- ''In The Loop'' is a comedy but it's also a ''very'' angry film, based on a [[Real Life]] bunch of [[Dirty Coward|Dirty Cowards]] and written by a team of British writers who were ashamed of their own government's involvement in the war.
* This trope was experienced by the guy who played Michael Oher in the film ''[[The Blind Side]]''. He was at risk of being evicted from his home at the time, and in the film, his character's grandmother [[Enforced Method Acting|has been evicted from her home]].
* Any time that [[The Land Before Time|Ducky]] or [[All Dogs Go to Heaven|Anne Marie]] is in danger. Both were voiced by Judith Barsi. [[Tear Jerker|Judith Barsi was murdered by her father]].
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* [[Roman Polanski]]'s film ''Repulsion'', about a woman who has passionate fantasies of being raped every night seems a lot darker after what would happen a few years later.
** Another Polanski example is ''[[Chinatown]]''. Noah Cross {{spoiler|raped his daughter}} and gives <ref> :''Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING.''</ref> when confronted.
** ''[[Rosemary's
* The 1996 film ''[[Executive Decision]]'' deals with a Middle Eastern terrorist group who, after pulling off a bombing in London, hijack a plane with which they plan to attack Washington DC. "Ouch" doesn't start to describe how much harsher the movie is today.
* In the Swedish movie ''Indrivaren'' of the [[Kurt Wallander|Wallander]] franchise, the character Patrik gets killed towards the end. The fact that the actor playing Patrik, Emil Forselius, committed suicide before the movie even premiered makes the scene in the morgue with Patrik's dead body particularly difficult to watch.
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* Yet another "New York City blowing up" one is ''The Peacemaker'', in which [[Nicole Kidman]] and [[George Clooney]] have to find a terrorist who is carrying a nuke in his backpack and plans to blow up the United Nations building. In fact, the terrorist is there as a delegate, replacing a dead representative from his country.
* In ''[[Back to The Future Part II]]'', a copy of ''USA Today'' has this in the top right hand corner: "Washington prepares for Queen Diana's visit". Granted, she would not have been Queen, but ow.
** Not ''queen regnant'', but still a queen. Of course, this
*** It also
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLRb0oVfojw&feature=related An innocuous editing dissolve] in the 1992 film ''[[Unlawful Entry]]'' suddenly became very sinister.
* King Vidor's silent classic ''[[The Crowd]]'' involves a man whose life descends into joblessness and alcoholism, climaxing in his near-suicide. The lead actor in the film, James Murray, fell into joblessness and alcoholism himself during the Depression, and in 1936 died after falling from a pier into New York's Hudson River and drowning.
* ''The Virginity Hit'' is a comedy about a guy whose friends secretly tape him and his girlfriend making out and the [[Hilarity Ensues|ensuing hilarity]] that follows after said video is released on [[YouTube]]. In [[Real Life]], [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704116004575522410465437660.html a guy gets caught on webcam] making out with another guy and after it's shown on the web he ''[[Driven to Suicide|jumps off a bridge -- the fourth gay teen to kill himself in a month]]''. While the movie itself hasn't come out yet, its commercial that played every other break has disappeared.
* In the [[Bruce Lee Clone|Bruceploitation]] film ''The Clones of Bruce Lee'', one of the Bruce clones is investigating a director who uses his work to cover his gold smuggling. The director gets suspicious and eventually decides to eliminate Bruce by staging a weapons malfunction during filming... which is exactly the way Bruce's son Brandon died while filming ''[[The Crow]]''.
** Not only that, but the villains in the finished version of ''[[Game of Death]]'' used the exact same trick to try and kill Billy Lo. Eek.
* The 1997 HBO made-for-TV movie
* Keep in mind when watching ''[[Street Fighter (film)|Street Fighter]]'' that in the final scene, [[Jean-Claude Van Damme]] is beating the crap out of [[Raul Julia|somebody who is dying of cancer]].
** Doubly so when you look at [[Crazy Prepared]] on the film page.
* In the first ''[[Urban Legend (film)|Urban Legend]]'' movie, the killer turns out to be {{spoiler|Brenda, played by Rebecca Gayheart. Three years later in 2001, Gayheart accidentally killed 9-year-old Jorge Cruz, Jr. when she struck him with her car. To make things harsher, the film actually does have a scene where she commits vehicular homicide}}.
*
** And of course, there's [[Revenge of the Sith|the movie where]] Portman plays a character who [[Death by Childbirth|dies in childbirth]].<ref>Like above, Portman herself survived the pregnancy.</ref>
* In ''[[Inception]]'', Pete Postlethwaite has two scenes as Maurice Fischer, a tycoon character who spends his entire screen time in a hospital bed, and eventually dies. Postlethwaite died six months after the movie's theater release, and almost a month after it was released on DVD and Blu-ray.
** Even worse, in ''[[The Town]]'' he plays the villain, and has a [[Karmic Death]] in which Ben Affleck shoots him in the nuts. Postlethwaite died from ''testicular cancer.''
* In ''[[Toys (film)|Toys]]'' (1992), the [[Big Bad]] is an American general who wants to create violent
** In [[Real Life]] drone pilots do train on video game-esque simulators and prior experience playing games is said to help with the training. Still, this movie was made years before the [[Murder Simulator]] term became
* Simon Scuddamore, the actor who portrayed the mentally unstable and heavily bullied Marty in ''[[Slaughter High]]'', committed suicide shortly after the film was released.
* ''[[Hereafter]]'' features the Boxing Day tsunami wiping out everything, and on the 11th of March 2011 a 8.9 earthquake triggered a tsunami that wiped out the town of Sendai in Japan. The movie's producers eventually decided to donate the film's box office money to tsunami relief.
* ''[[Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural]]'' starred Cheryl Smith as an adolescent with an absent father coming to terms with her budding sexuality, making the transformation from being the target of predatory attention to herself becoming an aggressor. In real life, Smith's father had abandoned the family long before, and she was reputed to have spent part of her teenage years working in Sunset Strip massage parlors.
* Victor Salva, director of the [[Monster Clown]] film ''Clownhouse'', was later convicted of having molested the film's underage male star. After serving prison time, Salva went on to direct ''[[Jeepers Creepers]]'', which featured a monster who appears to target teenage boys. The monster is at one point seen identifying a potential victim by rifling through his laundry and ''[[Fridge Horror|sniffing his underwear]]''.
* The ''[[Chuck Norris]]'' film Invasion U.S.A. revolves around terrorists invading the US. Needless to say it's a tad uncomfortable to watch after 9/11.
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* ''[[V for Vendetta]]'': The scene where the first open act of rebellion by the citizens of Britain against the Norsefire Regime (and in the case of the graphic novel, the first step towards total anarchy in Britain) was when the people killed a Norsefire officer in retribution for killing a little girl for spraypainting V onto a Norsefire propaganda poster. This becomes significantly harsher when it comes to light the [[wikipedia:2011 England riots|August 2011 London riots]] over a police shooting.
* In ''[[Max Keeble's Big Move]]'', Max ends up going to Jenna's milkshake party instead of going to the going away party his friends Megan and Robe prepared for him, which resulted in his friends becoming angered at him. Something similar happens in the subplot in the CSI episode Unleashed, where the Prom King Nominee dates Maria Dioro, a girl suffering from grieving for her dad dying as well as her mom being distant with her, instead of the Prom Queen nominee, causing the latter to spitefully torture her by making a viral video of her allegedly calling herself a whore in cheerleading tryouts, making a website where her face is put on a donkey where it says "I'm A Stupid Bitch", as well as making various hateful posts towards her, which among other factors broke her spirit and mind, thus resorting to her committing suicide while pregnant. In case you're wondering how these are in any way related, both Jenna and Maria Diorio are played by the same actress (Brooke Anne Smith, more specifically).
* The film ''[[Bamboozled]]'' depicts a world where blackface is brought into the modern age and is generally accepted by white audiences. Eight years later, ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'', despite controversy and criticism, cast Fred Armisen (who is German, Japanese, and Venezuelan) as [[Barack Obama]] (who is half-black and half-white). What's worse is that Jordan Peele (from ''[[Mad TV]]'' and ''Key and Peele'') and Donald Glover (from ''Community'') originally auditioned to be [[Barack Obama]]. And to add insult to injury, the newest{{when}} black cast member the show has -- Jay Pharoah -- has Barack Obama as one of his many popular impressions as seen on his [[YouTube]] videos, and Lorne Michaels chose ''not'' to switch Armisen out in favor of Pharoah. The fact that actor [[Tom Hanks]] not only was present at, but even one of the people participating in a blackface act doesn't help things either.
* ''[[Look Both Ways (film)|Look Both Ways]]'', directed by Sarah Watt, stars her husband William McInnes as a man who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Six years later, Sarah Watt died of cancer.
* ''Xtro II: The Second Encounter'' is a [[So Bad It's Good]] Canadian ripoff of ''[[Alien]]''. At one point, a soldier (played by [[The X-Files|Nicholas]] [[Hey, It's That Guy!|Lea]]) mentions that he "has enough C4 to blow the World Trade Center." Needless to say, it's a line that can make you cringe now.
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* When it first came out in 1995, ''[[Heat]]'' was criticized as being wildly unrealistic for the climactic sequence in which a squad of cops and a team of bank robbers shoot it out with automatic weapons across several blocks of downtown Los Angeles. Then came the [[wikipedia:North Hollywood shootout|North Hollywood shootout]] two years later...
* In [[The Santa Clause (film series)|The Santa Clause]] 2, when Santa/Scott Calvin learns that Charlie Calvin was now on the naughty list, he initially thinks that the naughty/nice elf was referring to [[Charlie Sheen]], and remarks that he thought he straightened out. Flash forward to 2011, and all of the stuff [[Charlie Sheen]] did relating to his drug related problems and...well, his transforming into a real-life version of [[Two and A Half Men|Charlie Harper]], and it becomes a lot harsher about how much Sheen had really "straightened out", not to mention that Charlie Calvin's naughty behavior in that movie, in comparison, was actually far closer to the nice list.
* In the 1972 film ''Pete 'n' Tillie'', [[The Carol Burnett Show|Carol Burnett]]'s character's son passes away from an unspecified terminal illness. This is very sad in itself, but it becomes [[Tear Jerker|absolutely heart-wrenching]] when you remember that some
* The 1992 comedy horror ''Evil Toons'' starts with David Carradine's character hanging himself.
* The 1990s movie ''[[The Siege]]'' is still only reluctantly put on TV these days. It doesn't have so much to do with the acting so much as the themes of a terrorist assault on America by Islamic terrorists, necessitating the incarceration of Arabic nationalities and gross invasions of public liberties.
* In ''[[Tron]]'', [[The Dragon|Sark]] starts [[Evil Gloating]] during the final one-on-one battle with the title character, laughing off his efforts with ''"You should have joined me. We'd have made a great team!"'' Now, try watching that after you've seen [[Tron: Legacy|the sequel]] knowing that "Rinzler" served the same function for Clu 2.0 as Sark did for Master Control.
** Oh, hell - ''the entire first movie'' falls here after you see the sequel. The cheerful smartass of a protagonist ends up a broken, ruined man trapped by his own creation, which makes his comment about Clu 1.0 being the "
* [[Whitney Houston]] produced and acted in a remake of ''Sparkle'' (not to be confused with [[Mariah Carey]]'s ''Glitter''), about the toll substance abuse takes on performers. It's implied Houston's death by falling asleep in her tub and drowning was either as a direct result or as a side effect of her drug use.
* In ''[[The Right Stuff]]'', the lines "You know what makes this bird go up? Funding makes this bird go up.", as well as "No bucks, no Buck Rogers.", are much harder-hitting now that NASA is at a standstill after the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.
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* ''[[The Bourne Series| The Bourne Ultimatum]]'' had a character exposed to the public for having classified documents. Fast forward to 2013 where Edward Snowden released information about the NSA spy program.
* The 2014 film, '''''Sex Tape''''', focuses on a married couple who films a sex-tape only for it to get leaked to the cloud service for those with a similar device to see. Weeks later [http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237160 icloud service] used by many celebrities got hacked into and many pictures from many smartphones, some lewd, were released.
* Back when ''[[Revenge of the Sith]]'' was released, Padmé's death of a broken heart in the wake of Anakin's fall to the dark side was considered ''[[Narm|Narmtastic]]'' by many [[Reality Is Unrealistic|despite Broken Heart Syndrome being a recognized phenomena in real life.]] It became a lot less funny in 2016, when Debbie Reynolds died under similar circumstances a day after her daughter Carrie Fisher passed away. The fact that this happened to the mothers of Princess Leia and the actress who played her did not go unnoticed by fans.
{{reflist}}
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