Maybe not quite as bad as some of these, but AI. The company’s goal was to create a robot that was capable of love. What they didn’t realize was that the robots they already had were capable of love, but that David wasn’t. And then they redesign all of their robot lines based on David. And then, in the far future, when the descendants of those unloving robots recover David and he decides to destroy his mother’s soul just so he can spend one more afternoon with her, they all just go along with it.
Another artificial intelligence type movie that has always stayed with me is Eva (2011).
It’s a beautifully shot Spanish movie set in the not to distant future. The ending crushed me.
Soylent Run to Escape From Westworld: The Dome.
My fave.
Speaking of artificial intelligence movies –The Matrix Revolutions (and the original Matrix trilogy) ends with the human city of Zion being spared and any human that wants to leave The Matrix being allowed to.
Uplifting right? Not really because:
First, the real world is dismal wasteland( and there’s no hope of rebuilding because the sky is still blacked out so the Earth cannot recover.
And second, any humans freed from the Matrix will go through physical and psychological trauma (as shown in the first film) in exchange for their freedom to live in Zion, which is an underground cave where humans live in poverty and it’s implied resources are limited.
This. Never again in a million years.
Heaven Can Wait (1978) If you think about it too much. The insane activist who hooks up with NFL quarterbacks at the drop of a hat. The LA Rams losing THREE quarterbacks before the Super Bowl ends.
The dissolution of Joe’s consciousness, and how will it feel when he dies in 2025 and snaps back to himself.
The butterfly effect of the backup QB living when he was fated to die during the Superbowl and the effect of that on the rest of the world.
A bunch of nazis die? That is a happy ending. And a great film.
Yep, unless it is the alternate ending?
Pennies from Heaven (1981 film) that Steve Martin film that could depress a hyena.
It is important to note that IRL, young kids do NOT go all “Lord of the Flies” and that the film was fiction. (I know, but people think otherwise)
There is a picture online from the 1940’s that shows a little Japanese boy holding his brother’s dead body on his back while he waits in line to incinerate him.
I think of it when I see that movie. I know this doesn’t happen in the movie, but they are intertwined.
Won’t link to the picture here, but easily findable.
Edit: It’s called: The Boy Standing by the Crematory and has a Wikipedia entry.
Thank you for the condescension. Are you under the impression that a film can’t be depressing if it’s fiction? Or that events like this could not ever happen in real life?
Ghost Stories (2017)I am going to hide the ending on this one because I think it’s really good and hope those that haven’t heard of it will give it look.
A paranormal investigator is challenged by his hero - a fellow investigator- to debunk three cases that he himself is unable to solve. We go along with him as he investigates.
it turns out he is in the hospital, on a ventilator and suffering locked in syndrome after a failed suicide attempt… The characters in the three cases are actually people at the hospital.
Yes, it’s a “it was all in the character’s mind” ending but in this case it’s just sad AF
I also had seen it only once when I was very young and this is about all I recalled. I asked about this a few years ago and some kind doper ID’ed the movie for me. My library system actually has a copy of the DVD, which I checked out and watched. The ending is as you stated, except the boy is walking to a local logging camp where he was hoping to get a job. A classic tear-jerker.
It’s good to note that there are plenty of fictional cases, from both before and after Lord of the Flies, where a colony of stranded kids don’t go feral and downright homicidal. The 1957 novel The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne was one such, and it inspired Wiliam Golding to write LotF because he thought its rosy outcome was so unlikely.
Jules Verne’s Deux ans de vacances (“Two Years’ Vacation”) from 1888 tells a story of a group of pre-teen and early teen boys who get stranded without adults on an island for two years. They are able to survive through their own efforts and defeat a group of mutineers.
Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky tells the story of a group of high school students taking a survival class who are marooned on a distant planet. They band together to survive and form a government. Heinlein’s group, unlike the others, is co-ed. The book came out a year after LotF, and some people think it’s a response to Golding’s grim vision.
Nice ones.
Aniara (2018) , a swedish sci-fi film about a spaceship containing a few thousand passengers on a three-week voyage from Earth to Mars.
After getting knocked off course, headed out to deep space and unable to recover, the final scene is 24 years later, with only a handful of people left surviving in almost complete darkness, huddled together in a trance-like state, as the ship continues to drift into empty space.
Hmm, very much like Avenue 5 on HBO, but that is more of a black comedy.
Ooh, Aniara is such a dark movie and I kind of loved it. Yes, a very dismal ending.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Some people regard it as fluff, but I was seriously distressed by the ending. It didn’t help that I watched it in a classroom full of middle school students, several of whom were trying not to cry.
The reveal is indeed at the end. It caught my wife and I by surprise. We were in a furiuous mood for about three days – no joke. Hated the world.
(For those who don’t know, it’s a documentary, but not of a very famous incident).
Your post convinced me to watch Aniara, and I have to say, I enjoyed it, even though it had its share of scientific flaws and lacked strong character arcs. It’s almost like the antithesis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Where 2001 is filled with hope, transcendence, and the potential for human evolution, Aniara paints a far more bleak and existential portrait of humanity—adrift in the vastness of space, weighed down by its own limitations with no way out.
Evolution vs. Stagnation:
2001 is fundamentally about evolution—humanity’s constant progression, nudged along by an enigmatic force. It suggests that there’s always room for growth, that we are part of some grand cosmic design. The Star Child, for me, represents consciousness reaching a point where it’s no longer bound by the physical, by time or space. It reminds me of quantum entanglement, where things are connected across unimaginable distances. It’s like the ultimate evolution—our minds existing in a way we can’t yet understand.
On the other hand, Aniara takes us in the opposite direction—towards stagnation and inevitable decay. The passengers aboard the ship gradually slip into nihilism, lost in an endless void. They cling to a virtual reality machine, replaying memories of Earth, but as they do, they become more detached from reality. There’s no progress, no forward momentum, only a slow regression as they cling to the past, mentally unraveling. Unlike in 2001, there’s no transcendent force or higher purpose here, just the slow march of entropy and the overwhelming futility of life floating endlessly in the void.
I’d love to have seen a Kubrick/Clarke treatment of Aniara. That would be frightening indeed!
I actually grabbed my wife about 15 minutes before the reveal happens and exclaimed, “Oh no…she’s gonna…” and I accurately predicted what would be the case.
I would not chosen that movie to watch with my wife had I known how it ended.
It was beyond sad. I think it out-sads Graveyard of the Fireflies.