movies

El Dorado. Couple dudes find the city of gold and get mistaken for their main deities, which quickly puts them in conflict with the local religious leader who up until that point and even for a few days after had been terrorizing his people with human sacrifices in their name, stoking and leveraging that fear to maintain authority over the city as the "speaker for the gods". The two "gods" are liars and crooks, and like the religious leader are also using their newfound religious authority for personal gain, but they don't want to hurt anybody, and Miguel in particular had really fallen in love with the city and it's people and culture. That puts the "gods" in a really interesting moral dilemma where they needed to choose between rebuking the zealous religious leader who keeps trying to perform human sacrifices and rule in their name, and "lying low" for the best chance of getting out of the city alive themselves with a shit-ton of gold. They go with the former, and the people are stoked to see the religious leader they feared knocked down a peg by his own gods, including the chill, secular-coded chief (who is aware that the "gods" are full of shit, but likes them anyway). Of course that's not the end of the movie, but there's a whole lot of interesting commentary on the relationship between religion, terror, and authority that I didn't really catch until I was in my late teens.