Disappointment has to be a relatively common feeling for a moviegoer who primarily watches new releases. The best evidence I’ve got for this is in comparing reviews by professional critics and reviews of movies in the Facebook groups I lurk in. It’s not a perfect comparison, but the pros and the hoi polloi share a lot of very similar feelings. Disappointment is not one you see a lot of from the pros, and while some of that must come from this being their work and not their leisure time at stake, my guess is that more of it has to be familiarity with the material. They have a better sense of the personnel making a picture, and so disappointment tends to be limited for directors or actors they’re used to liking.

I’m not a professional, but I’m much more interested in the movies that have existed than the ones that are newly existing, and there’s enough material on those older movies that I rarely walk away disappointed from a movie. More often I get a feeling of real surprise at how much better, or how much more varied, a movie was than how it was first explained. The most disappointing movie of my life I came to a little bit after the original buzz, long enough that I even read some reviews of the movie as it was coming out. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t. I was young, I was optimistic, and I wanted so desperately for Snakes on a Plane to be the weirdest thing I’d ever seen.

For the Zoomers who might come across this, the year 2006 was a tricky year for pop culture. The Internet clearly had some sway over what people were engaged with, but the word “meme” was not in the vernacular. Snakes on a Plane was a meme back when we could only call it “viral,” but that wasn’t sufficient to describe the group manifestation that was going on about Snakes on a Plane, which was often abbreviated as SoaP, which is also funny. One passes on viral material, puts it in the email, shows it to a friend while leaning over a desktop together. Snakes on a Plane demanded more than that. For people of your generation, think of how intently wished it was that Maroon 5 would play “Sweet Victory” at the Super Bowl. Also think of the disappointment when there were only a couple bars of justification at the end. That’s Snakes on a Plane, a mediocre Saturday afternoon cable thriller with nowhere near enough snakes and no sense of ambition to its dumbest and dizziest zenith.

Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris. Millennials will always have this one line from the movie, a line that the Internet basically got added to the film. The draw is the “motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane,” although just as appealing to so many people is the cleaned up version in which Jackson announces that he has had it with these “monkey fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane.” The payoff, as I’ve hinted, is the “had it.” One of the great verbal statements of frustration, and almost always about something domestic and personal. I have had it with you and your siblings bickering with each other. I have had it with your emotional inaccessibility. Here, the personal is also airborne and legless. I have had it…with these motherfucking snakes. On this motherfucking plane. For about five seconds, the meme triumphed, and Snakes on a Plane was just as transcendentally dopey as everyone on MySpace hoped it would be.