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this is a cool analysis! And I agree, GB is about nothing. He mentions why it's successful: because the characters are unique and created to play off each other. The movie feels like REAL people because we're not watching a "movie" about characters go through a story. We're watching a movie about something that feels natural.

I can name like a million movies about nothing lol. Pulp fiction? Jackie brown? What is the central theme of airplane? GB is just an incredibly original idea with incredibly good writing and incredibly good actors. That's why it built a massive franchise without anything else in the franchise being anywhere close to successful, because the original thing created a vast universe by itself.

I haven't seen those movies but yeah

Ok I saw Pulp Fiction. I didn't think it was about nothing.

Jules' character has character development. The ending monologue is proof enough of that. The monologue itself can be taken as kind of a theme but in my opinion it just ties into the larger theme of the movie which is about death. Specifically people choosing to be involved in such dangerous things that invite death to them.

Jules and Vincent are the obvious ones since Jules drops out of the business and lives and we know Vincent dies. Vincent even gets reminded of this several times. Like after Jules tells him he's gonna quit, they have the run-in at the diner and then the date with Mia Wallace where she almost dies of overdose. Both of these should have served as reminders to him about his own mortality and the fleetingness of life but they go unheeded.

This all ties in to Butch as well. Like when he says it didn't really feel different at all to take someone's life. In that case, partially because he didn't even know it at the time. And later on he ends up the one to kill Vincent, the one who had many warnings to quit this life beforehand (piecing the story together, it's clear that he has already had his conversation with Jules and his "reminders" by this point). It's poetic in a way. And then later he chooses to kill Maynard with the Katana to save Marsellus. Obviously these two things are connected.

Anyway these are just my thoughts on first viewing. I think the story definitely had a strong theme. The thing about Ghostbusters not having a theme was because the characters don't grow or have arcs. They're the same from beginning to end. The characters in Pulp Fiction do have character development and make tough decisions that challenge them.

I would say despite how naturalistic the dialogue was, it wasn't just "real people in real situations" with no theme. There are elements of character development and dramatic principle.

Even Ghostbusters, as pointed out though, has shades of themes. They just don't really synthesize enough of the plot for the story to truly be about them. Any story that has a human element (which is: all of them, even if it doesn't contain literal humans) will have themes just because themes are literally just a statement about human experience.

This isn't a knock on the film though because having a theme or not having the theme or being realistic or not realistic doesn't make something better or worse. Each film has its own verisimilitude and what makes it good or bad is how true it is to that, not to anything else.

Ok, I'll just be the guy from that vid and say actually, that's not the message of pulp fiction. I don't think it's about death at all. Vincent is half the main character and has no arc at all. He's the same guy.

I don't think characters having arcs equals the movie saying something or "being about something". I don't think characters not having arcs equals the movie being about nothing. I think ghostbusters being about nothing is because the movie doesn't have anything to say. I don't think pulp fiction has anything to say either.

Same with reservoir dogs. It's just a movie.