I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t intend to stop the virus being released. They give Bruce Willis a whole speech on the subject. (And I can only suspect they didn’t want to because they’d lose their power.)
But what they wanted was a sample of the virus to test, and that’s what she was there for.
That’s not so much ambiguous as it is a cliffhanger.
On the DVD commentary, the producer says they had plans for a sequel:The mafia swoops in with helicopters
Yeah, that was my take on it. She’s back to make double-certain a sample of the original virus is procured. Then she can get it to the scientists in the future who can defeat it and move everyone out from the underground.
Really? I genuinely thought that it was just another super happy Speilberg ending, a la AI (ok, maybe not super happy). The ending of Minority Report was one of my biggest problems with what I thought was an otherwise OK movie. I guess I just wasnt paying attention.
And you believed them when they said that? :rolleyes: 
Why? These are people who keep people in cages. Whose entire power base is due to the fact the virus was released. And who knew that the virus originated in Goines lab – they have a newspaper clipping on the wall about Goines, indicating they knew something about it – yet they neglected to tell this to Cole. Why?
What exactly did they do to earn any trust on anything they said?
However, I do agree that the ambiguity of the ending is a strength of the film. And if you ignore everything that was shown about the scientists, I suppose you could squeeze a happy ending out of it.
See this for further comments.
I’m not sure if this one is “annoyingly ambiguous” or just plain “annoying”, but…back in November there was a horrorfest held around the country to show off movies by After Dark Films that wouldn’t otherwise get a theatrical release. One of the movies displayed was Penny Dreadful, which had a really promising premise, but…aw, hell, since it’s so recent, I’d better spoilerbox it even though y’all will probably never see it:
[spoiler]At the end, Penny finally eludes the psycho, who gets hit by a truck and is lying on the highway. The driver of the truck walks back to the psycho’s body, which we all expect will leap to life and do more killin’, contrary to all logic and reason, because that’s the way these movies work.
Well, sure enough, the truck driver bends over the body, the psycho leaps back into violent life again, and…at that very instant, the movie ends.
What the hell? That’s not an ending. That’s just stopping! You can’t end your movie by just turning the camera off and walking away! A real story demands some sort of resolution! So very lame…[/spoiler]
She’s not going to stop him, she’s going to get samples of the virus that can be used to develop antibodies back in her own time, which was the point of the whole mission. It’s strongly implied she means to seduce him to get the samples. But they never meant to try to change the past.
Already covered. Never mind.
The movie itself might be too obscure for its final scene to be recognized, but I’ll throw it out just in case: The ending of Local Hero is definitely up for interpretation.
Didn’t see the movie but judging from the way you describe the end, it seems they’re just setting up a sequel.
I hated the end of crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It’s very Chinese, the way she
leaps off the cliff and you don’t know is she’s dying or ascending. It’s very Zen
But I like real endings to my movies.
Of course, Lady and the Tiger is the quintessential example of this.
John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing. This version is closer to John Campbell’s original story, but goes beyond the short story. The story ends with the Thing subdued and the Earthmen in control of its technology. The movie version goes past this point, makes the situation hopeless (the Earthmen can’t survive for long, but can arrange so that The Thing dies), and leaves it ambiguous if The Thing gets killed or not. I don’t see the advantage.
I think that there are a number of “slice of life” movies like this. The movies pick up the threads of the main characters’ lives at some relevant moment, carry them through the ensuing story, and then drop them as that situation resolves itself. The ambiguity is that the rest of their lives are still going on after this episode, and all of the broader life issues are still in play and will be affected by the situation that was the subject of the movie. It is the opposite of a “happily ever after” (or sadly ever after, or dead ever after) ending.
I enjoy the ambiguity of these movies, because it reflects the reality that the life doesn’t neatly resolve itself into neat packages, and the protaganists will still go on living with the consequences of their actions.
The end of The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber – I was annoyed at first but I got over it by making up my own, more definite, ending. (Everyone survived and lived happily ever after.)
I’ve heard more complaints about the ending of this book than any other. Probably a good sign – people were invested in the characters and cared what happened to them. Great book.
I thought it was a great way to end the film, instead of a simple blasting of the alien to pieces, we’re left wondering. Even if IIRC the video game makes it clear who is killed and if he’s human Similarly I liked the ending to “Escape from New York,” we’re not too sure what way Snake has left the world, only that he doesn’t give a shit, there are a lot of people he couldn’t care less about and he’d survive any nightmarish post-apocalyptic scenario.
Star Trek Nemesis had an ambiguous ending, after all that, we Trekkies/Trekkers weren’t sure if there’d ever be another Trek film 
I can see disagreeing on whether the scientists in 12 Monkeys are really on the up and up, but are there really people that argue what words are in the last line?
WTF is “I’m an insurance” supposed to mean that’s significantly different than “I’m in insurance”, which is common English, and would be understood to mean that insurance is one’s work?
I dunno. To me, “I’m an insurance” would imply that the speaker was in a particular location for a specific reason - “I’m in insurance”, on the other hand, is just a general self-description to say that the speaker is an insurance agent.
A couple of possible interpretations based on the woman saying “I’m in insurance.”
One possibility is that Cole really was insane. All of the scenes from the “future” were just hallucinations he experienced. There is evidence in the movie to support this - the speech the other patient gave about experiencing “divergent realities”, the fact that Cole’s flashbacks changed during the course of the movie, the way that his friend from the future only appeared to him when he was alone. The theory was that he was unconsciously incorporating people and events around him into his mental delusions. The final scene was supposed to tip us off to this by showing us that the woman that we had seen as a scientist from the future was actually just an insurance agent who happened to be passing through the airport when Cole was there.
Another possibility is that the time travel story was real. And the woman was an insurance agent as her statement implied. The background of the plague told us that only one person in a million had survived - the odds are against there having been any world class scientists among the survivors. The “scientists” that we saw might be the best ones left in their world but they’re the equivalent of a high school chemistry teacher or a plastic surgeon … or an insurance agent who was a biology major back in college. The final scene here was supposed to tip us off that the whole idea for Cole’s mission had been pointless - even if he had succeeded in getting the sample as planned, there was no chance left of developing any cure.
Pushkin, video games don’t count toward the fiklmmaker’s intent. I think the original story’s definite ending far superior to the am,biguous one, where you just don’t know if the Thing’s dead or not.
The DVD version of “The Descent” seems pretty ambiguous to me. We just talked about it in another thread, but I thought that it’s unclear whether. . .
She’s still in the cave dreaming she escaped in the truck or she’s in the truck dreaming she’s back in the cave.
That was my understanding as well. Bruce Willis’s actual mission was to get a sample of the original virus so they could create a cure in the future (if I remember correctly and I’m not conflating it with La jetee). His mission succeeded because he was able to lead the scientists to the source.
The only ambiguity I see with the ending is that we don’t know if the scientist were successful in gettiong a samplee back to the future or creating a cure. The line “Im in/an insurance” is irrelevent.
That makes no sense to me. They have scientists who are able to develop technology to send someone back in time, but no one who can work in virology? I would expect, during an outbreak, the scientists at the CDC would be the most likely to survive given they would have the most access to biohazard controls.
Um, sorry, this is turning into a hijack reailing the thread. Uh… I nominate the French film L’Enfer for ambiguous (the one from the 1990s, not the recent one).