10 movie characters from 2001 that could never exist today
Although it was a year of real-life tragedy, 2001 was an unusual time for film.
2001 marked a year that cinephiles had been expecting for decades, as it had been famously prophesied by Stanley Kubrick in his science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. While the tragedy on September 11th indicated that Hollywood had lost its innocence, the industry had rapidly changed throughout the entire year to accommodate the new mindsets of the 21st century.
It was an exciting year filled with many films that would go on to be remembered as all-time classics; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring kicked off the greatest trilogy of all time, Ocean’s Eleven was the rare remake better than its original, Mulholland Drive was the masterpiece that David Lynch had seemingly been working his entire year towards, and Black Hawk Down was as gritty of a modern war film as had ever been made.
In some ways, the films of 2001 aren’t that dissimilar to what is popular today. This was the year that saw the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and the original Shrek, and currently, there’s a Harry Potter television show set for release this Christmas and a Shrek 5 slated to debut not that long after.
However, there have also been many monumental changes within the industry in the last 25 years, including the economic collapse, the streaming boom, the rise of prestige television, the #MeToo era, and the birth of social media influencers. Suffice to say, what flew in 2001 would be looked upon much differently today.
10 movie characters from 2001 that wouldn’t be allowed today:
Jim Carrey as Peter Appleton – ‘The Majestic’ (Frank Darabont, 2001)
It is easy to forget that, after a legendary run of comedies in the ‘90s, Jim Carrey decided to take himself seriously, making it very clear that he wanted an Oscar. While he received acclaim for his performances in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, Carrey made his most obvious piece of Oscar bait yet with The Majestic, a sentimental drama from Frank Darabont.
Darabont had proven to be a genius when adapting the works of Stephen King, including The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and was working with a script for The Majestic that told a ridiculous story about a blacklisted screenwriter popping up in a small town in the ‘50s. Now that actors like Timothée Chalamet and Bradley Cooper are mercilessly mocked for wanting Oscars, it seems unlikely that Carrey would ever give a baity performance like this today.
Tom Cruise as David Aames – ‘Vanilla Sky’ (Cameron Crowe, 2001)
Tom Cruise might now be best known as being the definitive action star of his generation, but throughout the ‘90s and early 21st century, he was known as an actor who went out of his way to work with every great director. After working with Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and John Woo in quick succession, it wasn’t a surprise when Cruise decided to work with Cameron Crowe on Vanilla Sky, a remake of the Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes.
The issue with Vanilla Sky is that the original film had a specific context for its Spanish audience, and Crowe attempted to replicate it with bizarre homages to American popular culture. It’s unlikely that an English-language remake of an international arthouse film would ever be made today, and it certainly wouldn’t be something that Cruise would choose when picking out roles.
Ryan Gosling as Danny Balint – ‘The Believer’ (Henry Bean, 2001)
Ryan Gosling had to radically transform himself in order to shed his reputation of being a ‘Disney kid’, and chose to take on the darkest role possible so that he could be taken seriously as an actor. The Believer was a film that was so disturbing that it made his mother break down in tears, which sees Gosling play a troubled teenager who gets caught up in a neo-Nazi group.
It’s a brilliant film about the hypocrisy of intolerance, revealing the character of Danny Balint to be a tragic figure who turned to hatred because he wasn’t given a proper support system. However, modern audiences seem to have a hard time understanding that depiction is not the same as endorsement, and any film that seemed to suggest someone with such hateful thoughts might have some interiority would probably not get made, and especially not with a potential movie star attached.
John Turturro as Monkeybone – ‘Monkeybone’ (Henry Selick, 2001)
John Turturro is a brilliant actor who has done amazing work with the Coen brothers, so he can’t really be blamed for the disaster that Monkeybone ended up being. The film from The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick was a bizarre, PG-13 fantasy comedy that had both childish humour and absurdly disturbing and sexual elements. Brendan Fraser plays a cartoonist who is transported to a subconscious universe where he is forced to work alongside Monkeybone, the ridiculous character that he created for an animated series.
Turturro voices Monkeybone as one of the most lewd, obnoxious, and unpredictable animated characters of all time; he’s not even intended to be endearing in the film itself, as Stu constantly gets annoyed at what his own creation has turned into. It’s not a character that appeals to anyone, and it’s even surprising that Monkeybone existed in 2001.
David Spade as Joe Dirt – ‘Joe Dirt’ (Dennie Gordon, 2001)
Saturday Night Live was still a vehicle for virtually any cast member to launch themselves as a movie star back in 2001, even if today it’s only a few select actors from the show able to make it on the big screen. David Spade had been so popular on SNL that he had his own segment, and made Joe Dirt his attempt at a solo star vehicle after appearing in a few films with the late Chris Farley.
The story of Joe Dirt is wild and makes no sense; Joe is a janitor from the south who goes on a radio show to tell his life story, and makes all sorts of unusual and offensive comments as he attempts to find his family (eventually realising that they had abandoned him). It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Spade didn’t get many starring roles right after.
Jude Law as Gigolo Joe – ‘AI Artificial Intelligence’ (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
AI Artificial Intelligence is among the most underrated films of Steven Spielberg’s career, and certainly the most misunderstood. It tells the unbearably sad story of the robotic boy David, played by Haley Joel Osment, who searches for love from his family, despite being disregarded because he isn’t real. The story is depressing enough in its own right, but any semblance that it had of a family film disappears upon the introduction of Gigolo Joe, a ‘pleasure droid’ played by Jude Law.
Although Joe is the heart of the movie because he is among the first characters to offer compassion to David without reservations, it’s safe to say that a robotic prostitute would not be making an appearance in a family film that was marketed as being “from the director of ET the Extra-Terrestrial” if it came out today.
Mark Wahlberg as Captain Leo Davidson – ‘Planet of the Apes’ (Tim Burton, 2001)
Mark Wahlberg began to find himself in the late ‘90s when he worked with directors who knew how to use him, such as David O Russell and Paul Thomas Anderson. Wahlberg can’t be blamed for wanting to work with Tim Burton, who hadn’t made a bad film up until this point in time, but his performance in Planet of the Apes was disastrous in all the wrong ways.
Not only was Wahlberg far too young to play a character that was essentially the stand-in for Charlton Heston’s role in the original, but he was completely unbelievable as an astronaut, and the strange hint of a romance with a female ape (Helena Bonham Carter) made it even weirder. After Andy Serkis proved what he could do with motion capture, the Planet of the Apes franchise learned that they would never have to rely on humans as the main characters ever again.
Rowan Atkinson as Enrico Pollini – ‘Rat Race’ (Jerry Zucker, 2001)
Inspired by the classic It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Rat Race is one of the oddest comedies of the 21st century because every single character in the film is reprehensible, ridiculous, or absurdly stupid to an unbelievable degree.
Rowan Atkinson may have already been one of the most popular international comedy stars in the world at the time, but it’s hard to imagine him getting away with a character like Enrico Pollini today, who is a simple-minded Italian man with fits of narcolepsy and gets wrongfully accused of being both a child predator and a domestic terrorist. Released on August 17th, Rat Race was essentially the last mainstream studio comedy to debut before 9/11, and can thus be seen as the end of a very specific era where any sort of stereotypes would be considered hilarious.
Joaquin Phoenix as Ray Elwood – ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ (Gregor Jordan, 2001)
Joaquin Phoenix received so much acclaim for his incredible turn as the villainous Emperor Commodus in Gladiator that studios were desperate to get him his own star vehicle as soon as possible. Buffalo Soldiers was a dark comedy in which Phoenix plays Ray Elwood, a temperamental, rebellious recruit of the United States military who signs up simply to party, take drugs, and spark all sorts of problems.
While it was designed to be a satire of America’s military-industrial complex, Buffalo Soldiers was shelved after 9/11 sparked a new wave of nationalism, making all studios fearful of releasing anything that could be seen as being unpatriotic. Although the film was eventually dumped into theatres years later, it was only out of obligation, as an actor of Phoenix’s fame would have never been given such a provocative and potentially divisive role at any other time.
Paul Bettany as Charles Herman – ‘A Beautiful Mind’ (Ron Howard, 2001)
Ron Howard finally won the Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ for A Beautiful Mind, a biopic that told the extraordinary true story of the mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe, and his longstanding battle with schizophrenia. Paul Bettany co-stars as Charles Herman, a roommate of Nash’s who becomes his best friend, but it’s revealed in a shocking twist that he doesn’t actually exist and is part of the visual and auditory hallucinations schizophrenics have, wherein they imagine people.
It’s an effective storytelling device that allows the viewers to understand the shock that Nash feels when his conception of reality begins to break down. However, the film has been criticised ever since for being manipulative in exploring a sensitive illness, and would likely have had to remove its thriller elements for the sake of not offending advocacy groups had Howard made it the same way in today’s climate.
