Which movies are much darker when you rewatch them as an adult?

Starship troopers.

I saw it when it came out. I was young and the action was awesome.

Watching at an adult... The fascist themes are so obvious, I wonder how young me missed them.

Whats even more amazing is that adults today are still missing the obvious.
It’s satire
to be fair starship troopers is overrated as fuck.

it just looks like a straight up fascist film with a thin veneer of irony, instead of satire

The Dark Crystal is basically a Henson muppet movie about genocide.

Hook. In a way it still holds up, but today Ruffios death hits differently. I used to see him as the school bully who got mine of redeemed by sacrifice.

Now I just see a uncertain orphan, who does his best to lead a group and who is killed rather needlessly (and who is then kind of forgotten about soon after)

Also there's a bit of lost innocence of my own faced with adulting life and the diminishing possibilities of fantasy.

Damn. I gotta rewatch Hook now. Haven’t seen it since I was probably a pre-teen, but I saw it so many times on VHS that I believe I’ll remember most of it. I definitely want to experience it again framed as an adult.
todos

Today?
- Ah, yes. Corrected the autocorrect

The lion king.

Idk i think that scene still fucked kid me up a little lol
- No it's the whole movie.
  
  It is the story of an oppressed people, in their desperation they follow a con artist who is only out for himself.
  
  Their uprising and short lived victory, is marked by incompetence and grift.
  
  After being in power for a while, the old regime returns. They kill the leader and ruthlessly crush the now demoralised people.
  
  In the end the old monarchy rules again, the oppressed people are scattered, this culture and way of life vilified, even moreso than in the past.

cars 2. the entire plot revolves around a genetically inferior underclass working in the shadows to kill off the "normals" using additives in the food they eat, capturing and torturing people just to test their poisons.

El Dorado. Couple dudes find the city of gold and get mistaken for their main deities, which quickly puts them in conflict with the local religious leader who up until that point and even for a few days after had been terrorizing his people with human sacrifices in their name, stoking and leveraging that fear to maintain authority over the city as the "speaker for the gods". The two "gods" are liars and crooks, and like the religious leader are also using their newfound religious authority for personal gain, but they don't want to hurt anybody, and Miguel in particular had really fallen in love with the city and it's people and culture. That puts the "gods" in a really interesting moral dilemma where they needed to choose between rebuking the zealous religious leader who keeps trying to perform human sacrifices and rule in their name, and "lying low" for the best chance of getting out of the city alive themselves with a shit-ton of gold. They go with the former, and the people are stoked to see the religious leader they feared knocked down a peg by his own gods, including the chill, secular-coded chief (who is aware that the "gods" are full of shit, but likes them anyway). Of course that's not the end of the movie, but there's a whole lot of interesting commentary on the relationship between religion, terror, and authority that I didn't really catch until I was in my late teens.

Really good choice. There is also the interesting fact that nature does bend for them and the whirlpool for donations actually spits the religious zealot leader out a side path as if rejected by his own gods for using their name and power for control instead of to protect the citizens which is the point of the hidden city in the first place.

There is a lot of complex relationships in that movie that are more incredible to witness when you can look at them them through a more lived lens.

That nineties film about a prostitute sucking dick in the harbour. She has the biggest sexiest mouth. Then some rich guy has car trouble and she helps him but like weasles herself into him giving her lots of money in the form of expensive gifts and even proposing to her.

The name is like Sexy Girl or something and people said it was like soo romantic and it was a big hit back then. Pretty woman.

Not a rewatch, but I recently watched Frozen (2013). I'd heard the songs already (who hasn't?), but knew nothing of the plot. Boy, the themes of depression, anxiety, and PTSD were a lot more intense than I was expecting from a family-friendly Disney animated film.

Spoiler

After the accident, the trolls tell Elsa that "fear will be her enemy"... and then they scare her to the point that she withdraws from society and even her own family for over a decade out of fear of hurting them. The trolls also wipe Anna's memory, so she has no idea why Elsa is suddenly ignoring her. It's actually quite miraculous that the sisters turned out as well-adjusted as they did.

Haha I think about the well-adjusted part all the time. Definitely hand-waviness on the part of Disney for that one!
- Definitely hand-waviness on the part of Disney for that one!
  
  Spoiler
  
  Well, the queen does go AWOL mere hours after her coronation, and the next-in-line almost marries away the kingdom, so... they weren't entirely well-adjusted :)

I feel like there are movies where you just get more of it when older but I'm trying to think of a movie that when viewed through a lense of an adult instead of a kid makes it a sadder story.

A Goofy Movie.

Top of the list. You have 2 main characters to follow and it's absolutely different based on your age.

Also Breakfast club.

You have 2 main characters to follow and it’s absolutely different based on your age.

Very similar experience with Cars 3. Children identify with the new up-and-comer race car while grownups identify with a Lightning McQueen who must accept his glory days are past and embrace the next generation.

Shoutout for the race announcer who drops a microcosm of the whole film in a single line:

McQueen’s fading! Fading fast!
- This is the movie after the one where Mater becomes an international spy that pisses on a stage in public?
  
  Man the writing for those movies really skip a generation cause the first one was good too about respecting your time and place in history but adapting it to not just be forgotten and using the lessons learned to better those that follow.

Willy Wonka. Not too hard to see as a kid, but it was funny too so that masked some of it. Plus the latest theories that try to connect it to Snowpiercer. Granted the latter was likely designed around that idea and it doesn't come from the first, but if you accept them as connected, that's a dark world.

And of course Wizard of Oz. As a kid I saw it one way, read some of the Ozma books and they weren't too weird. But then I read the real Oz books, and that's dark.

Willy Wonka ... Plus the latest theories that try to connect it to Snowpiercer

Wat?
- There's plenty of Youtube videos on it, no need for me to try and rehash what's been done better by others.
Willy Wonka

Gene Wilder, Johnny Depp, or Timothée Chalamet?
- Gene. I haven't seen the other two, although I've heard negatives. Is there something that either of them (actors or movie) bring to the character?

The Wind in the Willows (the live action pseudo monty python version)

Lilo and Stitch.

Used to be "Haha, funny aliens!" to me.

Care to elaborate on Mrs Doubtfire? Not sure I've ever watched it as an adult, and don't recall it being dark.

Not OP and I think they are a bit wrong to call it being dark but it is shockingly more grounded an ending than the slapstick would imply the ending would be.

Tap for spoiler

Williams character gets caught pretending to be an old British hip hop granny, and the judge at the divorce custody hearings is rightfully disgusted at the idea of it and grants full custody to the mother and requests a psych eval.
However, the mother realizes that her kids need the more fun aspects of their father in their life and William's character realizes that he needs to be more careful with what he does, as he is expected to be a role model even if it is ok to be silly.

It ends on the note that neither the mother or father were right for each and being back together is not possible with their different lives but that they are connected by a shared love of their children and being together and honest with what they can and can't do for each other will make them all better. And they share custody every day after school.
- Thanks!
  
  Also the way Robin Williams treats the man his ex is dating

Drop Dead Fred. Pheobe Cates character is going through a psychotic break. She assaults people, trashes her mom's house, and sinks her friends' houseboat. She's a danger to everyone around her and should have been institutionalized. It's a horror movie pretending to he a silly comedy for kids.

The Sixth Day, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's please-take-me-seriously projects, is possibly the wrongest it is possible to be about whether clones are people. Still a fun movie. Just ass-backwards in its motivation. I'm not sure how much of its moral grey area was intended by the script or the direction. The anti-clone "good guys" are pretty terrorist-coded. Arnie's just caught up in the middle of their guerrilla fight against a generic corporate bad guy. Who solved death. How terrible.

1990s Christian moral panic against cloning was fucking weird.

Breakfast at Tiffany's. The first revelation was that the romantic leads were pretty much BOTH prostitutes. And then that horrendous turn by Mickey Rooney as a Japanese man!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_at_Tiffany's_(film)

Also the musical Gigi. More prostitution, this time with a mother grooming her daughter to enter the profession, while her client Maurice Chevalier croons "Thank heavens for little girls."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigi_(1958_film)

I saw both these films as a child and had no clue.