Movie Morality -- How 5 Film Dilemmas Could Have Been Avoided

Contrary to popular belief, Hollywood sometimes tries to do more than find creative new ways to torture us with the "comedy" of Dane Cook. Often that means finding different reasons to show us Jessica Biel in nothing but panties (which is awesome), but sometimes it actually tries to make us think. And with that in mind, here's a look at some moral dilemmas at the core of five movies, and how the whole thing could have been avoided.

"Indecent Proposal"

The Dilemma
Would you let Robert Redford have sex with your wife for $1 million?

How It Was Handled
You have Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore, so already there are major issues afoot. Worse, they put all their money on a roulette wheel in Vegas in an attempt to win big and finance a dream, meaning Woody and Demi may be abusing solvents.

They go broke and, out of nowhere, charming and rich Robert Redford offers up cash to sleep with Demi. After a night of pondering the deal, the couple accepts and we're left to assume Demi and the rumpled Redford boink on a yacht. All's well that ends well! Except Woody gets all paranoid, the relationship falls apart, divorce looms and all hope is lost. Except then a happy ending is tacked on.

How We Would Have Handled It
From the get-go, the couple went about this all wrong. This was a business arrangement, it was a cash transaction. Hookers do this all the time and no one bats an eye (except police). So all the baggage afterward indicates someone who can't differentiate business from pleasure.

Woody should have accompanied his wife to that yacht and armchair quarterbacked the entire event with an egg timer and a Polaroid camera. If he's giving play-by-plays and watching the whole scenario unfold, he has nothing to be paranoid about, and Redford would have been so unsettled by having Woody Harrelson watch him have sex he never would have bothered the couple again.

"Click"

The Dilemma
Would you take and use a remote control from a satanic Christopher Walken that can alter your entire life?

How It Was Handled
Adam Sandler unquestioningly accepts the awesome and mildly comical power of a remote control that applies TV physics to his everyday world, allowing him to fast-forward through parts of his life that bore him and excel at his job.

This power spirals out of control as his life slips away from him in fast-forward spurts, leaving him clueless about his own past, detached from his family and eventually bloated, lonely and on death's door.

How We Would Have Handled It
Never, ever take a gift from Christopher Walken. Not just movie Christopher Walken, real-life Christopher Walken. You don't have to know who he is (whether an awesome character actor or a zany Mephistopheles-like inventor), you just need to look at him and listen to him awkwardly force out a couple of disjointed sentences to know that he's up to something, especially if the gift he has is a physics-defying remote control.

"Wishmaster"

The Dilemma
Will you make three wishes from a djinn, even though he couldn't look more evil if he tried and after you make that first wish it becomes abundantly clear this is going to end poorly?

How It Was Handled
Across four separate films, each somehow worse than the one before, an ancient djinn tries to dupe people into making three wishes so that he can unleash the others of his kind to wreak havoc on Earth and destroy mankind. Or something like that. While he needs the person who summoned him to make three wishes, he happily grants a single wish to anyone else he comes across. Every single wish ends in something horrible.

By the end of the movies, just before that last wish is used, someone figures out a way to stop the madness, which must have really sucked for the djinn by the fourth movie because he really should have seen it coming at that point.

How We Would Have Handled It
The djinn was originally played by Andrew Divoff, arguably one of the only actors more off-putting than Christopher Walken. If he was offering the fulfillment of wishes, memories of childhood stranger-danger would kick in and send us running or the hills.

"Being John Malkovich"

The Dilemma
If you discover a doorway that hurtles you inside actor John Malkovich, would you eschew any of the logical questions posed by this and instead use your newfound situation to control Malkovich toward your own personal ends and at the cost of his individuality?

How It Was Handled
Shmucky John Cusack finds he can be inside Malkovich for 15 minutes at a stretch, so he teams up with his crush-worthy co-worker who somewhat loathes him, and they make the actor's head into a theme park with $200 admission. Hijinks ensue that include transgender romance with Cameron Diaz and Cusack squatting almost permanently inside Malkovich's noggin. It ends with a lesbian relationship and a possessed baby.

How We Would Have Handled It
What is it about unsettling actors and moral dilemmas? Malkovich may be all kinds of awesome, but it's hard to believe the inside of his head is anything short of bizarre and unwelcoming. And becoming the less-sinister equivalent of the foul-mouthed, head-spinning demon from "The Exorcist" is kind of a really crappy thing to aspire to. At our most loathsome we might have taken Malkovich's bankroll out for a night at the strip club, but that's it.

"The Matrix"

The Dilemma
Should you attempt to shatter the reality of the entire human race, who live more or less happy, normal lives inside a program called the Matrix, oblivious to the fact that, in the real world, they're power sources in a post-apocalyptic craphole of a future that has pretty much no upside?

How It Was Handled
In awesome fetish leather and vinyl gear, Keanu Reeves and his team of too-cool hacker friends plot missions to slowly break down the defenses of the machines and free humanity from the evil clutches of a bunch of robot squids and Elrond from Rivendell. Only Cypher, portrayed as a villain, dares to point out the obvious: The Matrix is way better than the real world. Why is fake reality worse than real reality when real reality involves living in a hole and eating scum surrounded by people who all need to bathe?

How We Would Have Handled It
Having superpowers in a virtual world means the last thing you want to do is upset the status quo. Why try to free the rest of humanity into an infrastructure that couldn't even begin to handle it? What the heck were all those people going to do if they were all suddenly released into Zion anyway? Open a Starbucks?

The correct choice of action would have been to live out the good life in the Matrix as a flying emo hero and suck up the adoration of fans while only occasionally unplugging to return to the lame world of reality. Surely a deal could have been struck with the machines such that they leave "real" humans alone in exchange for the people in Zion all just getting to be super-awesome in the Matrix.

Let us know if you agree in the comments.