The Adjustment Bureau/YMMV
- Broken Aesop: The main message of the movie seems to be Screw Destiny, as the main character fights to defy "The Plan" and be with the girl he loves. Yet, we find out that the only reason he's so obsessed with this girl is because they were originally meant to be together in the first place, before the plan changed. Also, David can only effectively fight the plan by recieving help from an Adjustment Burea Agent on the inside.
- Hollywood History: We're told that letting humanity off the leash led to the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages. The fact that parts of the world outside Europe were doing just fine, or no worse than usual, during that period is ignored. Then again, this might be intentional; David calls attention to Thompson's selective focus when he treats the present like it's all good (to which he can only counter with "could be worse," basically), so Thompson may be deliberately emphasizing the negative.
- Paranoia Fuel: The idea that your whole life's direction, down to what whether or not you're late for work, could be controlled by a group of cosmic beings, especially since anyone wearing a hat could be one of them.
- The collapse went into the dark ages, which lead to the rise of power of the Catholic Church, which if it hadn't had happened may have went to a wholely different set of actions besides the Crusades. This is just one example. The rest of the world may have been "fine", but that doesn't mean there wasn't a large ripple effect. Think of "too big to fail" on a major scale.
- White and Grey Morality: Given the Paranoia Fuel premise, the Plan that the bureaucrats carry out leads humanity in a generally positive direction. It becomes less a conflict of good vs. evil and more a debate on to what degree Humans Are Flawed, and how hard we're willing to work to make the Plan unnecessary.
- Unfortunate Implications: In the ending, the Bureau is not gone - they just deigned to make an exception for David and Elise, and this is their happy ending. Granted, total free will would cause world wide disaster, and the moral of the story is that free will is something you earn -- but are the two of them honestly going to keep on living life as usual, in a world where they know all their friends and family are following a very precise script since they haven't "earned" the right to do otherwise?
- The plan is not that detailed. They admit early on they cannot possibly track everyone. They are only making him lonely and miserable, because that makes him a great POTUS. Otherwise they would not care about him.