First movie experience to get you hooked on film

I can imagine why. The action alone was enough to capture the attention of a little kid, which you were at the time, but the conflict works on so many levels. You have the father and son fighting one another, then you have Luke's internal conflict. He had apparently failed in his quest to redeem his father. Then Vader goaded him into losing his temper, which allowed Luke to win the physical fight while putting him on the brink of falling to the Dark Side of the Force.

 

I knew Star Wars was going to dominate the conversation when I saw the thread title, but for me also, there's just no other answer. I was 8 or 9 at the time it came out, and I don't think we ever saw a movie/franchise became an absolute phenomenon like that beforehand.
You can talk about the lines around the theater complex, the chatter everyday on the schoolyard, all my classmates coming to school with Star Wars T-shirts, but the thing that made me realize it was something special? My parents had us all (them, my sister and I) go to the theater to see it together at night (on a school night, even). We never did that; if my sister and I and/or friends wanted to see a movie, the folks would drop us off and pick us up a couple hours later.
That first viewing for me was a lot like OOP's. I had scenes I loved, but I really didn't follow the story all that well, and didn't have a good idea what exactly happened other than the good guys won. I didn't see it again until about six years later, when the local theater showed it in re-release, and it was more satisfying because I grasped the story much better. However, that first viewing was an eye-opener because I had never heard people audibly cheering in the theater before, and never before heard of people going back to see it again and again to where it was a status thing ("You've only seen it three times? Pfft! I've seen it five times.")

 

It was the first movie to introduce viewers to a whole different world, drawing people in. Also the first movie to really capitalize on merchandising to further emotionally bond fans to the franchise.

 

Airplane.

I was 10 when I saw it at our local movie theater with my mom and my brother. They had a special for about 5 years where the cost of a matinee was the last two digits of the year, so it was 80 cents for each of us during the summer of 1980. Thought it was so funny, stupid and unlike the Abbott and Costello movies which I watched each weekend on Channel 11, so smart.

 

Patton.

My folks took me when I was little.

In the middle of the movie, I said “He cusses just like you, Dad!”

Mom wasn’t amused.

Dad was.

 

We lived overseas when I was a kid and would get access to the embassy's movie projector. I think that was my 'wow' moment, the clacking of the film as it reached the end of the reel. I was young so I remember some of the scarier moments. A holiday attack in 'MacArther.' A plane crash on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific in 'Midway.' The killer whale in Orca. A viewing of the Amityville Horror.

When we got stateside, I remember ET appeared on the theater billboard for what seemed like a year. Maybe it was.

 

My folks took me in tow to a ton of movies when I was a kid, hardly any of which I got. And we lived in a market where we got movies half a year later than anyone else. You had to drive a hour to the Big Smoke to see first-run shows.

So thinking about it, I'm guessing the first movie I really dug was Blade Runner. And while it's now horribly dated, a lot of what it predicted came true, such as a primitive Photoshop and race relations.

 

2001. There was a ton of publicity that I saw - articles in Life, Popular Science, Nat Geo, etc. about the film, what it was about, how things were done technically. I was about 12 when I saw it. I was already a SF reader so I got a lot of concepts from the jump, and seeing things like the stewardess on the moon shuttle wearing velcro slippers so she could deliver drinks while weightless was very cool. I was a big space kid, so those parts of the film regarding space stations and the like were right in my sweet spot.

The ending was every bit as incomprehensible at 12 as it remains today, but that's ok. It is what it remains today, a flawed but interesting film take on the future.

My first awareness of film as a cultural phenomena that included me was Star Wars. It came out when I was 21. I had seen movies that were huge in popular culture by then, The Exorcist, Jaws, American Grafitti, etc, but none of them reached me in the way that Star Wars did. I got it from the jump. Again, I was a S/F reader, and while obviously I knew nothing of the various races and planets, etc. the broad concepts were familiar and I had never seen that sort of thing done so well on film. It was far better done than Star Trek, which I had watched across the various time slots that it was stuck in when it came out. I was never a gonzo fan of either, but I watched and enjoyed the various franchises of both.

I still have a button from Star Wars. Before it came out, I was checking out at my local mall record store, and there was a basket of buttons by the register. It was a deep blue field with stars scattered across it, and the words "May the Force be with you". No one had a clue what it meant.

 

There were a lot of movies that had me engrossed as a kid — ET, Star Wars, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and Willow; lord, we watched Willow so many times — but the movie that first gave me the sense of awe where it completely erases your inner monologue and you’re just stuck in it, that was Jurassic Park. I was 12, and there was nothing cooler than that scene with the brontosaurus when sitting in the second row.

 

Has there been a totally forgettable movie seen by so many people of a certain age as Willow?
I swear that was one of the only two movies (along with Short Circuit) our school had in its "break glass in case of a substitute teacher" case. Must have seen those movies, or 45-minute chunks of them, a hundred times in three years of middle school. I hated that fucker's annoying acorn-throwing ass and his entire midget family.

 

There was a guy dressed in full storm trooper outfit at our Saturday Market today (even had the voice modulator) instead of cheese for the picture we said "These are not the drones we're looking for."

 

Droids. Not drones.