While certain qualities of how well a movie is structured or written can’t be denied, whether a movie is “good” or “bad” is an entirely subjective opinion and is based off of how you are relating to it’s events in your subconscious. Women tend to like love stories more because female brains are hardwired with an overwhelming desire to be loved, accepted and desired while guys tend to gravitate toward stories that satisfy their primal instinct to conquer, dominate and control. These, of course, are complete opposite ends of a spectrum that most of us are somewhere in between.

Movies are reflections of life, and as you are watching them your mind is constantly figuring out if it relates the order of what’s happening on screen to what it’s experienced in the past. How many times have you been watching a movie and suddenly shouted out “That could NEVER happen!”? Your brain has recognized an event that completely goes against what it can relate to.

Life is absolute chaos. It’s a mess of successes, disappointments, emotions, confusion and events that bleed together in a seemingly endless and shapeless splatterboard that requires us to organize in our heads, always searching for “true meanings” and “lessons learned”, whereas movies organize the chaos for us. They provide a similar version of what we experience in a neat little package with a beginning, middle and end that we can understand, follow and sort out. In real life, the camera does not stop rolling when the guy finally gets the girl and marries her… He cheats on her 6 years later and leaves her a single parent with 3 children and an overwhelming mortgage payment, fighting for child support in court.

There’s not much down time. The important times that progress the story are all we see. We can see every important event in a family over 30 years in 2 hours. We get to see the dork be a dork for the first 30 minutes and then the cool guy with his dream girl for the next 90, and then it’s over. We don’t have to sit through 4 years of his transformation period to see what results from it. Movies capture our imagination for different reasons, but we all want to see someone win or lose. And the reasons why are always more personal than we realize. Whether you root for the good guy or the bad guy, you’re hoping for an outcome, and it’s going to be delivered to you in a neat presentation.