Why I Still Believe in Movies

It was 10am on a Tuesday.

I was sitting in a cinema that smelled faintly of carpet cleaner and yesterday's popcorn, surrounded almost entirely by retirees who had absolutely nowhere else to be. Neither did I, but for different reasons. They'd earned their slow Tuesdays. Mine arrived via a redundancy package and a creeping sense that I needed to do something with myself before my brain fully dissolved into the algorithm.

Cheap Tuesday. $13.50 AUD . Just me and a room full of people old enough to remember when going to the movies without colour was the norm.

I hadn't planned it as a profound experience. I just wanted to see Project Hail Mary before someone spoiled it for me online.

What I didn't expect was to walk out two and a half hours later feeling like something had been quietly plugged back in.

The Algorithm Did This To Me

Here's something I've been reluctant to admit.

I watch a lot of content. We all do. Short videos, recommended clips, autoplay episodes, fifteen minutes of something before I remember I was supposed to be doing something else. The algorithm knows me embarrassingly well at this point, it knows what I'll click, what I'll finish, what I'll share. It has optimized my leisure time into a perfectly curated loop of things I already like, delivered in bite-sized pieces I barely have to commit to.

And somewhere in that loop, without really noticing it happen, I lost the habit of surrendering to something.

Because that's what a movie actually asks of you. Not just your attention, your surrender. Two hours. No skipping. No checking phones. No exit ramp if it gets slow in the middle. Just you, the dark, and whatever's on the screen.

I'd been avoiding that commitment for months. Not consciously. Just quietly, habitually, choosing the easier option every time.

Then a Tuesday morning with nothing in my calendar changed that.

What the Film Did

I'm not here to review Project Hail Mary. Go see it, that's all I'll say, but I do want to tell you about one specific thing it did to me.

There's a sequence in the film where the main character is collecting atmospheric samples from another planet. Visually, it's the kind of thing that makes you remember why screens this big were invented. Not spectacle for spectacle's sake. Just the genuine, disorienting, breathtaking feeling of being somewhere else entirely. I held my breath the entire time.

And another scene where I was reminded of a Harry Styles song I’d nearly forgotten, slotted in like an Bowie Life on Mars like vibe, a reminder of the hope of humanity and how fragile we are.

I was not in Sydney anymore. I was not thinking about my redundancy or my to-do list or what I was going to have for lunch. I was just there, completely, in the way that only a great film can do.

But what stayed with me longer than any single scene was the friendship at the heart of the story. Two beings from completely different worlds, with no shared language and no logical reason to trust each other, building something real across an impossible distance.

I cried. The retirees around me cried. We were all in it together, quietly, in the dark.

I'd forgotten how much I love that feeling.

The Films That Made Me Believe

Movies have been doing this to me my whole life. Cracking something open that I didn't know needed opening.

Donnie Darko got me somewhere in my late teens when I was already the kind of person who spent too much time in his own head. A film about time, fate, and a kid who couldn't quite fit the world around him. I didn't fully understand it the first time. I'm not sure I fully understand it now. But it made me feel something specific and strange that I'd never felt before, the sense that a story could hold ideas too big to explain and still be completely, emotionally true and resonate with me so deeply. It was so weird and wonderful. I loved it so much.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind broke me quietly and thoroughly. The idea that you could love someone so deeply that even a procedure designed to erase them couldn't finish the job. That the good memories and the painful ones are the same memories. I watched it in my twenties and it rewired something about how I understood love, grief and the specific cruelty of wanting to forget someone you once chose completely. And the realisation of the sweet being not so sweet without the sour and the protagonist fights his on mind to hold onto those memories. Its a phenomonal movie…

The Dark Knight I saw in IMAX and I have never fully recovered. Not just because of Ledger’s Joker, though obviously, Ledger, but because it was the first time I understood that a comic book movie could be genuinely, uncomfortably about something. About how civilisation holds together by a thread. About what happens when someone decides to pull it just to see what unravels. I walked out feeling unsettled in the best possible way. That and my favourite superhero of all time somehow became real and tangible. Others tried to replicate but that whole trilogy stood on its own. But when i left that cinema, I hoenstly can’t remember the last time i left being like “that, was the best movie I’ve seen that lived up to the hype!”

And then there's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was probably too young the first time I saw it. I didn't have the patience for it. I came back to it later and it rearranged my brain. A film that trusts you to sit in silence and figure out what you're feeling. No explanations. No hand-holding. Just the enormity of space and the quiet, terrifying question of what we actually are. Not to mention those final moments as Dave enters the monolith. A visceral representation of what it might be like to transverse time and space

None of those moments could have happened on my phone. Not really. Not with notifications coming in and the brightness down and one eye on something else. They required the thing a cinema demands. Your complete, undivided, surrendered presence.

What I Think We're Losing

I'm not going to be precious about this. I'm not going to tell you streaming is evil or that short-form content is rotting our brains. I make YouTube videos. I live on the internet. I get it. I am potentially the brainrot you probably might be watching!

But I do think we've quietly devalued the act of giving something two hours of our full attention. We've optimised it out of our habits because it feels inefficient. Because there's always something shorter, something easier, something that doesn't ask as much. While these streaming services are wonderful, we’ve lost that magic of the cinema experience while new shows and movies get released what feels like daily.

And in doing that, I think we've cut ourselves off from a particular kind of experience that nothing else quite replicates. The communal surrender. The shared dark. The agreement between a room full of strangers to let the same story do something to all of them at once.

The retirees at my 10am Tuesday screening weren't there by accident. They remembered something that the rest of us have been slowly forgetting.

Go To The Movies

Not because cinema is dying. Not as some act of cultural preservation.

Just because sometimes you need to sit in the dark with strangers and let something larger than your own head fill the room for a while.

Life is genuinely quite loud right now, for me, for most people I know. There's a lot of noise and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of content designed to hold your attention without ever quite satisfying it.

I know these days those prices hurt. But sometimes, you get lucky, as you watch a piece of cinema, that makes you believe again.

The movie did something the algorithm hasn't managed to do in months. It made me feel something specific, and large, and real.

$13.50. Cheap Tuesday. Ten in the morning.

Best time and money I've spent in a long time….

Project Hail Mary is in cinemas now. Go. Don't wait for the stream.