Hepatites
Oy… they don’t have a standing military AT ALL since 1948! Just border police and a coast guard. So it’s not just DEM, it’s the wrong Deus!
For those who’ve seen the moive “Angel Heart”, would you consider the ending a “Diabolicus Ex Machina”? Or was it a valid plot device, that there was no way to know if it was really supernatural or if the guy was just psychotic?
I dislike DEM when it’s blatant. I don’t mind a few unlikely circumstances to get a story moving, but amazing coincidences irritate the hell out of me. The X-Files movie has a billion of them, but I’ll only name the one that takes place in the first five minutes…
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As the FBI search one building for a bomb, Mulder is wandering around the building across the street. Okay, maybe he has good instincts, but then he goes down to the basement and tries to buy a soda from the very vending machine that has the bomb?! PUH-LEEZE! And most people who drop coins in a vending machine and don’t get anything are pissed off; they don’t immediately conclude that there are high explosives involved (and no, I don’t have a fucking cite).
Usual Suspects isn’t even close to having a DEM because…
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All the flashback events described by Kevin Spacey’s character were just made up. Everything between the initial arrest that brings the five characters together and the burning of the ship was just fancifully created by Spacey using the bulletin board as source material. Only the “Kobayashi” character is “real” because we see him driving the car that picks up Spacey, and that’s not even his real name because Spacey read “Kobayashi” off the bottom of the coffee cup.
The single worst case of “we’re running out of time and we’re over budget so let’s slap on an ending” that I can think of is Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974). I won’t even try to describe the ending becuase it’s so jaw-droppingly out-of-left-field. It left me agog and saying “What the hell was that?” as the credits rolled.
I think the ending was a legitmate twist as it had been strongly hinted at throughout, much like Sixth Sense. Twist endings are not a DEM unless there was no lead up to it or reason it should happen other than it resolves the plot.
I think the ending of Fight Club (the Film) boardered on it because it came way out of left feild. There was no possible way to know because the film cheated (Still love it though) oops forgot about the first and second rule of Fight Club.
SPOILERS
Angel Heart
Louis Cypher? Any bigger giveaway than that. The only other way they could have made it more obvious was naming him IMA Devil.
Sixth Sense:
viewing The scenes where Bruce Willis seems to interact after the initial viewing show that the view only assumed it and there was no interaction really.
Fight Club: The biggest cheats are the sex scenes when we see it from teh point of view of Ed Norton, when in reality he’s upstairs. Not possible, a cheat.
An episode of the old Amazing Stories TV series comes to mind: “The Mission” http://www.fscwv.edu/users/rheffner/b17/mmmission.html
It was, as the above credit shows, written and directed by Steven Spielberg. As I recall it was originally run without commercials, or perhaps just with no breaks in the last half hour (it was a full hour episode), so as not to disrupt the tension of the climactic predicament –
An American B-17 crew prepares for its 24th “ticket home” mission over Germany. We get to know the various crew members in the by now cliche’ “Memphis Belle” tradition, including the ball (belly) turret gunner, who is a talented amateur cartoonist/caricaturist.
Over Germany (after the last commercial), a disintigrating German fighter collides with their plane, badly damaging it, such that the landing gear can no longer extend, and trapping the ball turret gunner in a turret that can no longer be retracted (I think there were at least a few real-life casualties from similar situations in WWII).
The crew struggle to come up with a plan to save their comrade, before damage and dwindling fuel force them to belly-land at their airbase, with fatal consequences for the ball gunner. A plan to unpack a parachute and feed it to him through the debris fails at the last minute when the chute snags and tears. Everyone gravely settles into their landing stations and awaits the inevitable.
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At the last moment, the captain is convinced to try the landing gear one last time. The crew watches in disbelief as a set of big, silly-looking, yellow balloon-tired cartoon landing gear deploy, and the plane lands safely. the ball gunner is removed, catatonic, from his post, and is found to have drawn a cartoon of the plane with the exaggerated landing gear. When he is brought to his senses, the gear vanish, and the plane drops to the ground, crushing the empty turret.
On original viewing, the episode produced an interesting mix of emotions. The obvious “what a ridiculous, hokey, cheat” response was really drowned out by the tremendous feeling of relief after such a long, gripping, emotional buildup. The atmosphere of dread that Spielberg and the cast built up was so intense, and the relief so welcome, that I was effectively “not in a mood to ask questions” when I was let off the hook. That was, I gather, part of the theme of the episode – that one shouldn’t look a miracle in the mouth, so to speak. On the other hand, it perhaps should have raised warning flags regarding the excesses of sentimentality into which Spielberg sank in the late '80’s - early '90s. Even so, I consider it an extraordinarily effective film, and a pretty good example of this thread’s topic.
For a counterpoint, in the realm of humorous Deus Ex Machina, there’s always the running “Only a Miracle can save us now!” gag from Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I ;j
If I recall correctly, didn’t all of the Amazing Stories stories have some supernatural element? That would seem to excuse a DEM… If we’re left wondering “How are they going to find a physically possible solution to save their buddy”, and they landed with cartoon gear, then that would be deus ex machina, but if we’re merely wondering just what supernatural solution would come up (as we should be, watching Amazing Stories), then cartoon wheels are a logical resolution.
I’ve just been arguing that the film A.I. relies upon an intentional DEM of monumentally humorous proportions. Now cross-linked.
I’d let Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom off because all the way through I was yelling “Get out of there and find what’shisname’s army!” and then he did.
They did indeed generally have some “Amazing!”/supernatural plot element, but that element was also typically part of the plot throughout. Not only was there no foreshadowing of this resolution, but the events that preceeded it were sufficiently gripping as to make it easy to forget the context of the series.
“Supernatural” does not necessarily equal “Deus Ex Machina”, just as naturalistic plot developments can be Deus Ex Machina depending on how they are employed. The key is foreshadowing and logical progression, as well as context. While cartoon landing gear were not themselves out-of-place on Amazing Stories, the fact that they showed up without foreshadowing made them Deus Ex Machina. While this Deus Ex Machina “worked” on sheer intensity, in a way that might arguably have been diminished by foreshadowing, as a rule I think a truly well-written surprise ending will be anchored in the story in such a way that the initial jolt of the surprise is followed by a sense of “oh, yeaaaaah… of course!”