If you haven’t got one yet, I’d recommend that your 2025 resolution should be to watch more films in your free time. The media and entertainment space has changed markedly over the last decade. This article is about films, but to underscore why they matter, let’s compare them to their visual opposite – TikToks. I cannot remember a single short-form video I have ever watched on social media. I can remember films, though. They are distinctive through their unique aesthetics, titles, visuals, characters, and stories. They have something to tell you about the human experience. In short, they mean something. What they say matters in a way that a cat video on TikTok (for all its undoubted qualities) does not.
Storytelling and our perception of the world
Gossip is fundamental to human survival. Yuval Noah Harari was not just validating coffee catchup sessions about last night’s Bridge drama when he made this claim in his bestselling book “Sapiens”. Instead, he was referring to the power of the stories we tell each other to shape our worldviews and mediate how we understand our environment. He argues that the casual conversational abilities of the human species – allowing us to form bonds of trust and gain insight into experiences beyond our own – are crucially important in enabling us to thrive and work in organised groups. As such, the content of the stories we share cannot be understated.
In a hyperconnected, media-driven internet world, everything from news to TikTok or daytime TV shapes how we think, and not always for the better. Driven by capitalist imperatives of growth through attention and clicks, it is not the version of a story that is closest to the truth that garners the most interest – which is usually the mildest and least exciting, but rather the most extreme one.
Film’s formative role
A film takes us through a whole world or experience that we have not been faced with ourselves, all over the course of roughly just two hours. As such, its goal is to draw the viewer into the story and narrative of the protagonists, helping them understand how and why their characters act the way they do. Considering Harari’s statements, this power is immense.
It seems to me that we all remember the Disney movies we watched growing up and can recount the content and characters in excellent detail, despite how long it probably has been since we last watched them. Looking back, the messages of these adventures focused on themes like friendship, integrity, curiosity, or the value of being yourself – all widely advisable ideals. There is equal responsibility for film producers to understand the gravity of their stories and the influence they wield. Furthermore, the recent popularity of Vikings on Netflix highlights how even the long-gone past can be brought to life in a convincing and gripping way to which we can relate today. Through both history and human storytelling, there is no doubt that these examples outline events or interactions that have shaped our world today.
Fan-character engagement
Whilst the gist of a story at large may provide the overarching narrative of the plot, the individual characters arguably have even more power to inspire. When everyone is the main character of their own story, gaining a window into a different world can be incredibly valuable. Moreover, film protagonists are often deeply connected to certain traits or characteristics. Pixar’s Inside Out quite literally highlights how manifest emotions interact with one another and all the internal turmoil that accompanies this. Although possibly less obvious, this is also visible in franchises like The Marvel Cinematic Universe (“Avengers”), where each personality is known and heralded for their beliefs and abilities.
Indeed, the example of The MCU goes even further, following a series of challenges for each protagonist who each have films outlining their origin and motivations independently of their combined efforts. The adoration of their fanbase can be seen with the popularity of Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame grossing roughly $2.8 billion, and The MCU being the highest-grossing film franchise of all time as of January 2025. This speaks to the fan engagement with their heroes’ stories and the personal manner in which they overcome obstacles to help others.
But why does this especially matter now?
As mentioned earlier, media is becoming increasingly divisive, with sensationalist and extreme content accumulating more clicks and thus revenue for its disseminators. The average time we spend on each TikTok we watch is just 3.33 seconds. This means that messaging must be loud, captivating, and in-your-face to be effective – in Germany, the far-right party AfD is the country’s most active political party on the app. This may explain their success, particularly in gaining young people’s votes. The recent success of Germany’s far-left party “Die Linke” in Sunday’s election was also driven by young voters and the party’s social media presence. In both cases, the parties and their messages are towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum which underlines social media’s tendency for absolutism in content.
Following a character’s story all the way through, as only longer-form content allows us to do, creates a level of compassion and understanding that is directly opposed to the attention-grabbing extremism of groups like the AfD. The emotional fluctuations felt by watching a series of these videos are unsustainable, unstable, and “brainrotting.” While arguably a bigger time commitment, you will overall get more out of the focus on a 2-hour film’s storyline than the repeated sugar hit of a TikTok doomscroll.
So why is this a manifesto in defence of films rather than any other long-form media? This medium occupies a temporal middle ground between a book and a TikTok – it is more accessible, often cheaper, and the role of the director’s interpretation adds a layer of nuanced filming perspective. Ultimately, both are valuable long-term pastimes in an increasingly divided world, both politically and socially.
So the next time you get out your phone to unwind, all I’d say is: be a touch more intentional with what you do, because there are real-life consequences to any innocuous-seeming scroll.