Donnie Darko, released in 2001, turns 15 this year. The film only released to only $1,270,522 dollars in the box office according to boxofficemojo.com, but it has since become a cult classic. The film stars young Jake Gyllenhaal and Maggie Gyllenhaal as brother and sister, Donnie Darko and Elizabeth Darko, respectively, and it also has veteran actors like Patrick Swayze and Drew Barrymore.

When Donnie is told by a talking rabbit, Frank, that the world will end in 28 days, he and his girlfriend, Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone), must figure out a way to stop it. Meanwhile, many themes are expressed by writer-director Richard Kelly, including fate, fear, and mental illness.

I first saw the film two years ago and was instantly in love with it. I just stared at the screen as the camera rolled by, perplexed by what had happened. I was enthralled by the themes, the plot twists; it fulfilled such a hunger I had at that point of my moviegoing life .

Then, earlier this month, I went back to watch it, and...it's complicated--like the movie itself. Before I go in depth, I should talk about what's really happened to the movie since it's released.

This was Richard Kelly's debut film, and, what seems to be, his only good one. Kelly has only directed two more films, Southland Tales and The Box, and they've received 36% and 45%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes. And, if you look at the selling points of Donnie Darko itself, the dense but heavy-handed themes have been shamed. For example, American Beauty, a film with some similarities to Darko, won the Best Picture Oscar for 1999, but has since lost what love it once had. Instead, people have gone to love more ambiguous, understated social statements. David Lynch's 2001 Mulholland Drive, a film with those qualities, was just called the best film of the 21st Century so far, according to a BBC poll voted by critics. As per the Oscar's, the Academy is going for more straightforward real-life retellings like Argo, 12 Years A Slave, and Spotlight.

And I really can't blame them. What I was once perplexed by with Donnie Darko, I then was bored and sometimes even embarrassed by. There are just so many outright messages it gets tiring. The "cellar door" scene, though impeccably acted, does nothing more than to just be set up for the climactic scene where Donnie and Gretchen enter a cellar door. The dialogue is awful and times, too. Although not expressed specifically by Donnie, the line "what's the point of life if you don't have a dick" would not be tolerated in 2016.

This time, I saw the Director's cut, which seemed to just awkwardly put up the starts of chapters of Roberta Sparrow's book The Philosophy of Time Travel along with obscure images like waves crashing against the shore. The juxtaposition is jarring but not in a good way, reminiscent of the nonsensical insert shots in Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation.

Then we get to what seems to be the centerpiece theme in this film which is that of fear. Jim Cunningham (Swayze) is a self-help spokesperson who was made famous by his video "Controlling Fear", an awkward compilation reminiscent of other VHS tapes with bad transitions and the occasional boom mic cameo. There's actually a full version of "Controlling Fear" below:

Gym classes start teaching how to control fear with exercises for the class to do. One exercise is for a student to read a scenario and label in under the category "fear" or "love."

The other students do accordingly so, but Donnie protests when asked. "Life isn't that simple," he says. And this was the moment when I thought this movie isn't all that bad, and I might have only had that thought in 2016. We have a candidate who bases his platform on the fear of the American people. He wants to build walls and bomb whatever he doesn't know. However, as Donnie said, "life isn't that simple." To go off of that, there are no simple answers to things like this.

And to be released in January 2001, just a few months before 9/11, it's crazy to think how much fear has dominated our pysche. Even crazier is how the movie is about the anticipation of the end of the world, and, in a way, it did in real life. In the Nostalgia Critic's review of American Beauty, he goes on to conclude that the film is good to see now because it shows a dense, realistic snapshot of the much different time of 1999; we could see it for how it was back then. If anything Donnie Darko is like that, less from a nuclear family perspective as much as a societal perspective. 9/11 might have changed out country, but Donnie Darko shows us that it was only a matter of time before we got there.