This article contains spoilers for "materialists".

The romantic comedy is a lifelier subgenre, passionate fans, but is still routinely dismissed from the snobs like a little more than Pablum. This happened with almost every genre (or subgogen) at one time or another, of course. For years, the West has ever been considered ordinary fodder for pulp fans, but as soon as its popularity has long enough (in connection with the genre it has become more diverse and grown), which has changed, and the sneakers have moved to decorating films from monsters, or science-fiction films, or fantastic films. In essence, every genre had to withstand the passage ritual as he moved to cultural respect. In 2025, he feels like a Roma-com, finally making that journey, especially since the subgenre continues to grow in popularity and omnipresence.

Writer/director Celine Song's "Materialists" is the next step in the evolution of the Roma Com, as it is very deliberately a romantic comedy showing all the traps and tropes of the subgenerer while avoiding its usual aspect. Song, who burst to the scene with "Past Lives" in 2023Sets a prototype premise of the Roma-Com-woman in a career is caught in a trianglebed triangle between a wealthy suitor and its poor ex-and-and-and-of This mixing of multiple elements of the surface level of the subgenerer with multiple cordial aspects of dialogue and characterization extends to every other artistic choice in the film.

It includes a pretty surprising way the song chooses to book the story. The "materialists" are opened and closed with the scenes set up in an unspecified period of time around the dawn of mankind, which has several wounds, because they express their e -outu to each other without words. While this choice coats refer to a past comedy film or two, its closest (and most blurry) ancestor is none other than Stanley Kubrick's scientific opus, "2001: Space Odyssey". It is a scientific film Easter egg that no one would see how it comes, and that is the choice of Helluva's savvy by the song.

"Past Lives" proved that the song is interested in the themes of Loveubeum and the links In a deeper way than just the basic pleasures or the romance of fairy tales. The "materialists" doubles this predisposition; It is a film in which characters do not dance just about each other's feelings only for conspiracy, but are constantly preparing for who they are, they want and why. In essence, Song has her cake and eats her also, making a film that contains the joys of the desire of Loveube, wealth, sex and success, while exploring what all these things mean, whether it is for her characters, herself, culture or species as a whole. In other words, "materialists" are not a frivolous movie, but one that requires more indications of what it means to be human.

This sets this in accordance with Kubrick's "2001", which disrupts the search for alien life with its own evolution and the relationship of mankind with infinity. Known, Kubrick's film begins with a long sequence set at "Dawn of Man", in which Actors in suits and special effects makeup play creatures in the form of monkey who study cause and critical thinking, making them on the road to develop in humans. The "materialists" starts with a pair of wounds, already intelligent and develop culturally, as they demonstrate a loveoob connection with each other when the male gives a female pack of flowers she chose for her. The moment is intended as a demonstration of a long history of courtship and as always built around material things, but still actually referred to a true ocation to its core.

To make the connection even clearer, Song uses the same trick to edit Kubrick famously in "2001": reducing Smash's jump. In "2001", the proto-man throws a bone into the air that the camera follows as the new discovered tool turns into a spacecraft with a nuclear weapon that fitted in the blink of an eye As the film jumps over a time in the distant future. The "materialists" do this, also cutting from the early human dwelling in today's New York implication that the more things changed, the more they remained the same.

Choosing the song to start "materialists" with the early people and their developmental relationship is the most significant "2001" call, but the moment also obliges Mel Brooks. "History of Brooks World, Part 1" " It begins, naturally, with the dawn of human beings during the stone time. The film uses this part of history to set it up (in absurd comic fashion, of course) how people brought the first marriages at this time, as heterosexual and homosexual. It also investigates how human culture could develop in general, with art (and subsequent criticism), funerals, music and comedy all shown in virtually primitive fashion. Although the film is a parody of Brooks of the epic film (ie "The Ten Commandments", "Ben Hur" and so on), it contains a subtextual theme of researching how human beings have always been preoccupied with the same basic problems, desires and needs.

In this way, the "materialists" are hit on a similar theme, and while Song's film is very desperate than Brooks (and much less significant than Kubrick), the film still announces its interest in examining the breadth of human behavior and whether we have evolved all of our lower beginnings. Even to put the philosophical foundations of the film aside, the treatment is to see a Roma-coming that does not only require it to be nostalgic for the fans of other Roma Com, but is trying to engage in Chinese history in general. For my money, the "materialists" are a great movie, a full station and these choices are what helps to do so.

The "materialists" are now in cinemas.