2025’s Best Rom-Com Features A Sly Sci-Fi Easter Egg

This article contains spoilers For “materialist”.

The romantic comedy is a subgroup with lifelong, passionate fans, but snobs have also routinely rejected that it is a bit more than Pablum. This has happened to almost every genre (or subgroup) at once or another. Over the years, Western countries were once regarded as a sole feed for mass fans, but when its popularity lasted long enough (the genre was changing and becoming more adult), and snobs shifted to the demolition of monster films or science fiction films or slaptick comedies, and so on. Basically, every genre has had to withstand a transit rite as it moves towards cultural respect. In 2025, it seems that ROM-COM will eventually make a journey, especially as the subgroup continues to grow in popularity and everywhere.

Writer/director Celine Song’s “Materialists” is the next step in the evolution of rom-com because it is deliberately a romantic comedy that contains all the subgroup trap and tropics while avoiding the usual face. Song, who exploded to the meeting place “The past lives” in 2023Sets a woman of a prototype ROM-COM output career in a love triangle between a rich inspector and her poor, and explores it with equal depths, honesty and tenderness. Mixing the sub -group surface elements with more cordial aspects of dialogue and characterization extends to all other artistic choices of the film.

It contains a rather surprising way the song decides to book a story. “Materialists” open and close with scenes set at an unspecified period of time at a dawn of mankind, and have a couple of early people because they expressly express their affection. Although this choice refers to a diagnosed comedy movie or two, its closest (and sharpest) edition is no one other than Stanley Kubrick’s Sci-Fi opus, “2001: Space Odyssey”. It’s a sci-fi Easter egg that no one will ever see to come, and it is a hell of a skillful choice for the song.

“Previous life” showed that the song was interested in the subjects of love and relationships deeper than just basic information or fairy tale romance. “Materialists” double this prejudice; It is a movie where the characters not only dance around each other’s feelings just about the plot, but constantly posted who they are, what they want and why. Basically, Song also has a cake and eating it, which includes a movie that includes the joy of fulfilling love, wealth, gender and success, while studying what all these things mean, whether for his characters, self, culture or as a whole. In other words, “materialists” is not a light -hearted movie, but one that looks for more clues about what means being a person.

It sets it correctly with Kubrick’s “2001”, with a movie that combines the search for out -of -earth life with human evolution and relationship with infinity. Known, Kubrick’s film begins with a long sequence set “The Dawn of Manin”, where Actors in costumes and special effects makeup game monkey -like elements Those who learn the cause and critical thinking, thus putting them on the path to the development of people. “Materialists” start with early people, already intelligent and evolving culture, because they show love bond with each other when the male gives the woman a bouquet of flowers he has just chosen for him. At the moment, it is intended to show the long history of courtesy and how it has always been built around material matters, but it has actually touched real affection at the heart of it.

To make the connection even clearer, Song uses the same editing trick that Kubrick used famously “2001”: The Smash Jump Cut. Under “2001” Proto-Human throws the bone into the air that the camera follows as it rises, a new tool changes Core -based spacecraft in the blink of an eye When the movie jumps into a period in a distant future. “Materialists” also do this by cutting an early human habitat in modern New York, what the more things have changed, the more they have remained the same.

The choice of song begins with “materialists” with early people and their relationship is most intentionally a “2001” playing, but the moment also refers to the Mel Brooks comedy. History of Brooks World, Part 1 “ Naturally, starts with people’s dawn during the Stone Age. The film uses this part of history to install (of course, in an absurdistic comic way) how people used the first marriages during this time, both in heterosexual and in homosexual. It also explores how human culture could generally have developed, with art (and the following criticism), funeral, music and comedy, everything is literally described in a basic way. Although the film is Brooks’ parody of epic film (ie “Ten Commandments”, “Ben Hur” and so on), it includes a subtextual theme to explore how people are always interested in the same basic problems, wishes and needs.

In this way, “materialists” hit a similar theme, and while the song in the song is much more serious than Brooks (and much less serious than Kubrick), the film states about its interest in exploring human behavior and developing all of our much more humble beginning. Even by leaving the film’s philosophical basics, it is a treat to see a rom-com that does not just want to be nostalgic to other rom-com fans, but rather to participate in film history in general. For my money, “materialists” is a great movie, a full stop, and these choices help make it like that.

“Materialists” are now in theaters.