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Not long ago, I started introducing my kids to some of my favorite movies.
It’s one of those milestones every movie-loving parent looks forward to. You spend years quoting lines they don’t understand, telling them, “Just wait until you’re old enough,” and imagining the day they’ll finally experience the movies that helped shape you.
This past year, I checked two big ones off the list: “Back to the Future” and “Jaws.”
Both movies are among my all-time favorites. I’ve seen each more times than I can count, so I expected a healthy dose of nostalgia.
What I didn’t expect was to discover I wasn’t watching the same movies anymore — but my kids certainly were.
They could not stop talking about the giant shark that made them think twice about swimming at the beach. They thought Marty McFly hitching a ride behind a Jeep on his skateboard was one of the coolest things they’d ever seen. The DeLorean? Instant classic.
They saw the adventure, but I saw something entirely different. Somewhere over the years, my relationship with these movies had quietly changed.
The movies themselves hadn’t changed, but I had.
The hero changes
Watching “Back to the Future” as a kid, I was all in on Marty McFly. He’s funny, confident and somehow cool enough to skate through traffic on his way to school. Time travel was the point. The DeLorean was the dream.
Watching it as an adult, I found myself paying more attention to George and Lorraine.
As teenagers, they’re awkward, selfish and sometimes downright hypocritical compared to the parents Marty knows in 1985. It’s funny because it’s true. Adults weren’t always adults. They were insecure teenagers trying to figure life out, just like the rest of us.
It’s a detail that barely registered when I was 12. Now it feels like one of the movie’s most interesting ideas.
The same thing happened with “Jaws.”
As a kid, the movie was about surviving a shark attack. As an adult, I realized Chief Brody isn’t hunting the shark because he wants glory; he’s trying to protect his family.
He worries about whether moving to Amity Island was the right decision. He feels the weight of every choice he makes. Yes, he’s the police chief trying to keep a community safe; but underneath all of that, he is a husband and father desperate to make sure his wife and children are OK.
I don’t know how I missed that all those years. Then again, maybe I couldn’t have understood it.
Summers look different now
Then there’s the realization that “summer” means something different when you’re an adult than it did when you were a kid. That hit me again while watching “The Sandlot.”
As a kid, it was about baseball. It was about Benny, the Beast, pool tricks, and trying to recover a signed Babe Ruth baseball from the scariest dog who ever lived.
Watching it now, I noticed something else.
Scotty Smalls’ mom isn’t trying to turn him into a baseball player. She just wants her son to be happy. She wants him to find friends. She wants him to belong.
The neighborhood dads tossing baseballs in the yard, the parents calling kids home for dinner, the adults who barely have any screen time at all — they’re quietly creating the kind of childhood those boys will remember forever.
When I was young, those adults barely existed. Now, I can’t help but notice them.
Some movies wait for us
Not every movie changes because we grow up and become parents. Sometimes life simply catches up to the story. Here are a few examples:
“Field of Dreams”: When you’re 12 years old, this movie is about baseball, ghosts, and an adventure in an Iowa cornfield. When you’ve lost a parent, it’s about one more conversation, one more game of catch, one more chance to say the things you wish you’d said.
“The Incredibles”: As a kid, this animated spectacle is all superpowers, explosions, and Dash running on water. As an adult, it’s a husband wondering if he’s lost himself, a marriage trying to survive the ordinary, and parents doing everything they can to protect their kids while pretending they have all the answers.
“The Princess Bride”: As a preteen kid, this classic is sword fights, giants, pirates, and “Rodents Of Unusual Size.” As an adult, it’s a grandfather passing something on, a father reading to a sick child, a reminder that stories become part of families long before they become favorites. You realize the love story isn’t just Buttercup and Westley.
“Big”: As a kid, this movie feels like a fantasy: What if I could grow up tomorrow? As an adult, it’s almost a cautionary tale: Don’t rush it. Childhood is shorter than you think. The things we’re so eager to leave behind often become the things we miss the most.
Great stories grow with us
Maybe that’s what separates a good movie from a great one. Great stories don’t simply entertain us once; they keep revealing new layers as our own lives change. The questions evolve.
As kids, we’re drawn to adventure. As teenagers, we dream about freedom. As adults, we start noticing sacrifice, responsibility, marriage, parenthood, and all the quiet moments that hold families together.
The screenplay never changed, but our perspective did.
After our movie nights, my kids were still talking about sharks and skateboards. I found myself thinking about fathers.
Neither of us was wrong.
The post The movies we grow into: Films that are just as good for adults as they are for kids appeared first on East Idaho News.
