You don’t have to be a cinephile to know that there are tons of objectively good movies that everyone collectively agrees are a great watch. Think Interstellar, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dune, and Lord of the Rings — films abundant in cinematic genius. From their screenplay to their set designs, every aspect of their production can be broken down into reasons for why they are quality films.
But what may be even more special than these movies, whose reasons for being enjoyable are technical and analytical, are the movies that are good for reasons that simply can’t be explained.Â
These are movies that are good for the way they make you feel rather than for the way they are written, filmed, and composed. They somehow harness a quality that breathes air into your lungs in a way that other motion pictures fail to do, leaving you sitting in awe and emotion as their end credits scroll by.Â
Maybe you can already think of movies that have had that impact on you. And when you do, a realization comes to light: superb movie quality isn’t the only thing that makes a movie good.Â
Stellar storylines and direction may make a film great, but the inexplicable, transcendent feelings evoked within viewers can make another film magical.Â
Take James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, for instance. The sequel to his legendary 2009 film was both long-awaited and highly anticipated.Â
What’s made Cameron’s work in these movies so unique is his ability to create a world that immediately transports his audience into the story he’s created.Â
The Avatar movies immerse you into its landscapes and scenery so profoundly that viewers forget they’re simply sitting in a large movie theatre. The few hours of experiencing Cameron’s planet Pandora just leaves them wanting more — viewers leave the theatre with a desire to actually live with the characters.Â
After watching the film, audiences immediately took to social media to post about their longing to live in such a world because of the beauty and bliss they saw on screen.
Despite this, the Avatar’s sequel didn’t seem to perform up to the standards of its predecessor. While some took to social media to highlight the feelings it fostered, others couldn’t get past the actual writing and storyline, labelling the film as boring, basic and uncreative.Â
Achieving 76% rotten tomatoes, Avatar: The Way of Water’s rating failed to reach a higher score due to its technical critiques — things that deep emotions couldn’t trump.Â
One Rotten Tomatoes critic, Swara Salih, writing for The Nerds of Color, gave the movie a “C-” and said, “Overall, Avatar: The Way of Water is a colossal disappointment on a story and character level, saved only by its stunning visuals (at least when they’re not too garish).”
A handful of Studio Ghibli films share similar abilities as Avatar: The Way of Water when it comes to making audiences feel in inexplicable ways.Â
Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio founded by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, is known for incredibly detailed and beautiful illustrations in their movies, which include My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away.Â
Ghibli films are notorious for evoking immense amounts of emotion within their audience. Whether it’s nostalgia, wonder, homesickness, or belonging, there’s a magic in these films that just can’t be explained.
The mystical state of these movies is so unique that the “Studio Ghibli effect” has become its own term, used to describe the childlike wonder of these films that creates such a fantasy amongst audiences.Â
One thing about these movies, however, is that many viewers tend to finish them more confused than when they started. They tend to have very ambiguous or open-ended storylines that, without fully analyzing, can come off as plotless or one-dimensional. That being said, the magic of Ghibli never seems to run out of the power to draw viewers into its stories time and time again.
While a definitive reason behind why viewers feel such heartfelt things by watching such films is hard to pinpoint, our unintentional desire for escapism provides a plausible explanation.Â
Escapism, defined by Merriam-Webster as a “habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine,” escapism is a common factor in what makes a movie enjoyable.Â
It’s said that the underlying presence of fantastical worlds and their ability to bring about resonating themes of reality can give way to the escapism that occurs between a movie and its viewer.
Something about the world and society a story occurs in, even if the story doesn’t make sense or is hard to digest, can give way to an immersive and positive watching experience that ignores everything wrong and remembers everything right, which, in this case, is the unexpected, inexplicable emotions they harness.Â
When it comes to films such as these, there seems to be an unspoken condition that if a movie with subpar qualities — be it the dialogue, acting, characters or plot — can somehow unintentionally evoke the strongest, most heartfelt emotions within its audience, the latter can surpass the complaints about its poor qualities and unexpectedly become a prized movie of its viewers.