If I wanted to understand a culture via their movies, I would not reach out exclusively for their serious dramas, historical pieces, and solemn biopics. I would certainly rope stuff like Star Wars in.

The way I see it, there was a fascinating trend in action movies throughout my life, when the hero went from plain good 100% hero (say, a late 80s hero), to a grizzled guy that's ultimately got his heart in the right place (Wolverine types, Die Hard types), to fairly despicable people that "go out like men" doing epic stuff (Walter White), to completely messed up manipulative people that are triumphant and that's it (House of Cards dude).

People find this kind of analysis very non-rigorous, but I often feel like the fact that these were successively popular with American audiences matches pretty well the changing self-image of America-the-nation. From pretense of full-righteousness to cynical "realism" and taking pride in "somebody has to do it" to "at least we're on top".

So, I think extremely deep reads of fairly shallow but resonant fiction are often very worthwhile.

edit: Of course, someone will point out that these are popular with different demographics and whatnot, that my cohort aged, etc.- I'm not going to turn this into a rigorous statistical analysis. It's just musings.