The ending was meant as a tribute of hope to McCarthy’s newborn son. The most common criticism I’m seen of both the movie and the book is that the ending is unrealistically positive. The ending is objectively the most positive part of the story.
Dismalest movie overall? Absolutely in the running. Dismalest ending? You’re being obtuse.
Moderating:
This is Cafe society. Comment on the content, not the commentator.
Nevermind, I can’t do spoilers apparently.
Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill were so good, they made me mad
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Planet of the Apes yet. Surely one of the most famous downer endings of all time. Sadly I knew about it before seeing it for the first time.
Being a big Bond fan I will also nominate On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The downer really does come out of nowhere. I can’t remember ever not knowing the ending, although that must have been the case when I was young, but I watched it with my partner fairly recently as part of a full run through the Bond series and she had no idea that Bond even got married, let alone saw his wife murdered on their wedding day
I never understood the “twist” of the original PotA. I mean, he was on a planet with humans, horses, and apes, and everyone spoke English. Of course he was on Earth in the future. Where else could he have been?
Well, that’s a letdown. Here I was, all set to break through Enceladus’ ice and have a chat with some scuba-diving Enceladians, ride a sea horse, and maybe even hang out with an aqua-ape or two. 
I forgive the whole “since the audience only understands English, that’s what everyone speaks” convention. Sometimes working out an explanation just slows down the narrative. So, we just ignore it.
The novel that started it all definitely had a more coherent logic. It’s definitely a different planet, and the twist occurs when they return to Earth, with yet another twist that bookends the novel.
Because I am a saint among men, I will spoiler the details from a 60+ year-old book.
The novel is framed by a space-traveling couple who discover a message of warning, floating in space I think. The rest of the novel is the narrative in the warning. The travelers who left the warning describe how they made it to a lush planet orbiting Betelgeuse where they find—yikes!—that this world is populated by intelligent, civilized apes who enslave the resident dummy humans. Humans had ages ago ruled the planet, but through intellectual laziness and simian advancement, the roles are reversed.
Lots of adventure ensues, until they escape on a ship back to Earth, where an ape greets them after they touch down. Earth has suffered the same switcheroo! Time dilation has given Earth plenty of time to ape-ify.
The novel ends with the couple who found the warning dismissing it as nonsense. They are chimpanzees! And the idea of intelligent humans is absurd to them.
Oh! And the apes on the faraway planet spoke simian, not English, and our travelers had to learn the language.
And of course the remake movie done in 2001 incoherently mangled the novel’s twist ending.
I watched that a number of years ago, and found myself crying my eyes out at the end. It probablt didn’t help that this was shortly after my wife died.
Oh come on now, it is Hollywood. No one is allowed to be happily married. One of the two must die, and we know it aint Bond.
The movie ending makes more sense once you realize that Rod Serling wrote the original script. Serling frequently had scientifically ludicrous things happen the episodes of The Twilight Zone that he wrote or adapted – asteroids with earth-like gravity (and atmospheres), space travelers not realizing where they are. Aliens speaking perfect English with no one bringing this fact up.
I don’t think Serling wrote the ending as filmed, with the Statue of Liberty and all, but I do think “the twist” was that they were back on Earth.
Of course, it doesn’t make a lick of sense – spaceships don’t get turned around during long voyages. If the Apes peak Engish, that’s a big clue. The constellations ought to look a lot like w’re used to (even with the passage of a lot of time). Plats would be Earth plants (especially the food crops!), etc.etc.etc. ad nauseum.
Actually, a much more interesting parallel, as I’ve mentioned before, is L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller’s novel Genus Homo – a group of humans are put to sleep in a vehicle and awake in the far future (but definitely on earth), where they find that intelligent apes have taken over. As in the original movies (but not Pierre Boulle’s book), the chimps are the brains, gorillas are the muscle, and other types fill other roles. At first, unable to understand English (take THAT! , PotA), they assume the humans are animals and put them in a zoo. There are a lot of satiric jabs at then-current society.
Worth a read, if you can find a copy
Thanks for the tip. I’ll give it a read.
The main problem with all the Apes films is that there just isnt enough Apes to do that. There is only like 300K Gorillas left, for example. Also the three species do not really get along.
It was dismal only if you were a human. From an ape’s perspective, things were pretty good. However, the ending of its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, was truly dismal for everyone and everything.
Which puts me in mind of The Stone God Awakens by Philip José Farmer. After the protagonist was accidently time-frozen by a physics experiment, the stasis finally wears off tens of millions of years in the future, where multiple sentient species descended from current animals live in a radically altered ecosystem. The somewhat downer ending is that the protagonist,
having hoped to liberate what he took for humanity’s descendants discovers that they are in fact a parallel evolution from monkeys, and that he is and will be the last of the now-extinct Old Race humans.
In Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler gives a great performance as a sleazy business man frantically trying to get out of the hole he’s dug himself into and, incredibly, manages to navigate out of his personal and business problems but he can’t manage to just stop running his mouth to the wrong people at the wrong time.
There aren’t enough apes now, because of humans destroying their habitats. Without technologically advanced humans in the picture, there would be vastly more ape habitats, and apes. Then, upon getting technologically advanced themselves, the apes’ numbers would explode, just like ours did.
Same goes for the getting along: the present situation in no way mirrors the technologically advanced situation.
The conceit from the original Apes films (specifically Conquest…) was that cats and dogs were wiped out by an extraterrestrial disease brought back by astronauts. Humans then turned to the great apes as replacement pets, then eventually cheap labor as a new authoritarian police state arose and they were deliberately bred in large numbers.
Which is utter nonsense in several respects, but technically does answer the numbers problem.
There’s no food left. Nothing can grow. Any one that sees a happy ending in there that the son lives isn’t paying attention. Like in Soylent Green, everyone still alive will be dead in a year, two tops.
As noted, shows were full of people landing in earth like worlds and somehow not knowing where they were. Doesn’t make it right. But while it can be forgiven in a TZ episode, it shouldn’t in a Major Motion Picture.
I thought Taylor made a comment that the PotAs had overcast skies while they were there, and he couldn’t see the stars. Or am I remembering wrong?