What do you guys think of movies that have an ending that isn’t really an ending, especially where no sequel is imminent? Is it a clever way to leave an ending up to the audience’s imagination, or is it a half-assed way to wrap things up?
Some of the big recent offenders in empty endings have pretty much just used it as a set-up for the next movie in the franchise–I’m thinking of Matrix Reloaded and Star Wars 2. When both of those films ended, I was like, “what do you MEAN the movie’s over?” But of course, they wanted to bring you back for Revolutions and Episode 3.
But then you have, say, Starship Troopers. That ending feels like it’s setting you up for something big, but it’s not.I mean yeah, they captured that brain bug or whatever, but at that point, you still have to figure the score is like Humans 1, Bugs 100, right? To truly settle the score, the humans need to win the gigantic battle that is apparently looming, as the ending footage would have us believe.It wasn’t until seeing the movie a couple times that I got over feeling “cheated” by the ending, because it took time to realize that knowing the result of what the ending was setting up isn’t the point of the movie.
I think an example of one that DID work was Back to the Future. The “To be continued…” wasn’t added until the VHS release, so the sequels weren’t originally planned. But I think enough of the action was resolved and we were told enough about the main characters to be able to imagine on our own what hijinks could happen after the credits roll.
Got any other examples? I think this can be discussed without mentioning enough of the plots that spoiler boxes would be required, but please use them if they are necessary. I hope that I was vague enough in my non-boxed text.
I don’t think it’s very fair to compare the first part of Back to the Future trilogy with the second part of a trilogy like The Matrix. If you’ll notice, in all three trilogies, BTTF, Matrix, and the original Star Wars trilogy, the first installment stands on its own, then part 2 ends with a cliffhanger for part 3. Lord of the Rings was planned out ahead of time, so you don’t get resolutions at the end of either of the first two movies.
In all of those cases, it’s not just about getting more money out of you in a sequel; they actually have more story to tell. However, I can see where you’re coming from with Starship Troopers; they solved the proximate conflict but not the ultimate conflict, without having an idea of where to go next. Some more examples I can think of are Contact, Lost in Space, and The Arrival. I understand a lot of horror films end with the bad guy getting away, too.
I guess it can be frustrating, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad choice. Sometimes the story is set against something bigger, and it doesn’t make sense to solve the bigger problem. World War II is still going on at the end of The Sound of Music and Casablanca and Raiders of the Lost Ark. (I realize that these aren’t the kind of things you’re talking about, but I’m just making a point with them.)
Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Blair Witch Project
(Bullshit endings all---justifying a bogus ending with an "it's a mystery" resolution is inept and lazy storytelling)
Do I really have to use spoiler boxes if the movies are 10 years old or more? Oh well, you’ve been warned. SPOILERS BELOW.
Evil Dead II, which is ironically a remake of Evil Dead, only much campier and a different ending. Ash gets transported back to the 12th(?) century, kills a demon/deaddite and finds that medieval villagers are being terrorized by these things. Roll credits. I don’t know if they had Army of Darkness planned or not at this time as it didn’t come out until 6 years later, but I kept thinking “Wait! That’s the end of the movie?!?”
To expand on jr8’s theme of unseen battles, Rocky II ended like this when Apollo Creed and Rocky are in the gym and decide to see if they can find out who’ll really win a bout between them. Freeze frame right before the first punches are thrown.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Okay it’s supposed to be absurd, but I first saw this movie when I was 12 or 13 and when I saw King Arthur & Company arrested for killing the narrator I thought it was taking yet another silly plot direction. Imagine my surprise after the commercials were over and a different movie started! The first exposure to MP is always the hardest.
A shameless plug for my fave horror movie, The Thing. I loved how it ended: even though the “good guys” killed the “bad guys”, they were left in the middle of the Antarctic with no power and an incoming blizzard. Plus, one or both of them may have been infected by the Thing so neither survivor trusted the other. Very despairing and lots of fanfic has been written about what happened afterwards.
Strongly disagree. This story was all about the telling of the story, evoling a mood, not “what happened”. Doing it deliberately is not lazy, however much you dislike the technique.
In any case when the movie was made, no-one knew what the author’s intended ending was. It’s only recently they discovered the previously unpublished sequel.
As for the OP: The original The Italian Job has a literal cliff-hanger ending, forced by the studio in case they wanted to do a sequel.
Though the recent video game based on it has been touted as the “official sequel.” What we find out about the two movie characters, and whether their heroics mattered, is, of course, not terribly upbeat…
I loved the Carpenter version of The Thing – except for the end. Most of the movie is surprisingly faithful to the John W. Campbell short story both Thing’s are based on, “Who Goes There?”, but Campbell’s story ends with them finding the ship after offing the last Thing. Campbell generally didn’t like despair for despair’s sake, and at the end of the story the Earthmen get a bonus in the form of a working spacedrive after their ordeal with The Thing. The Lancaster script for the new Thing just kept on going, and it wasn’t clear to me at the end what the point was supposed to be.
It’s actually in Rocky III (Apollo and Rocky aren’t buddies at the end of Rocky II), and the outcome of the fight really has nothing to add to the story. It just shows that they’re pals now. Would you have preferred another long, drawn-out fight after the villain is beaten and the plot resolved?
It took me about three viewings to sort the plot line out, and the ending…
it’s been so long I can’t even remember the guy’s name… was it Sam?
But at the end of the “Information Retrieval” session, when Michael Palin says, “I think he got away” and then the camera pulls back from (Sam?) sitting on the chair among the clouds, smiling blissfully, and you know he’s “escaped” into his fantasy world, , the first time I saw it, I was deeply dissatisfied.
The second and third times I saw the film, and has a better grip on what was going on, I realized what the ending was really about, then I was OK with it, but I still wonder if there was any hope for the guy.
Definitely Freddy Vs. Jason. It really pissed me off that they left it with such an open ending. They left it so open so they could easily make another crappy sequel to the Freddy and Jason series which already has what 20 or so movies already. It’s rediculous.
[nitpick]It is not a remake, it picks up where the first left off, but due to a different studio owning the rights to the first film (or something like that), they had to re-shoot parts of what happened in the original to re-cap the story. Since only his GF figures in the 2nd one, they didn’t bother reshooting the other scenes with the other friends. I believe Bruce Campbell (Ash) addresses this at his website http://www.brucecampbell.com
[/nitpick]
And I’d like to toss out Primary Colors, which ends just like the book.
I forget the names, but the candidate is asking the guy to stay with them, and then… that’s it. The End.
Actually, I’d rather they didn’t start the fight in the first place then. The first 2 movies (thanks for the correction, I WAGged) pretty much established what they could do to each other in the ring.
Bruce says in his book, If Chins Could Kill (which I highly recommend to BC fans), that after the suprise success of the first Evil Dead Raimi and he decided to redo the movie they had orginially envisioned now that they were infused with some cash and credibility. Remake or re-shoot, it was basically the same plot for about 2/3 of the movie.
At the end of the movie, Max and Ms. Cross slow-dance to the Hands singing Ooh La La. Margaret Yang and Max are “officially” boyfriend and girlfriend. Then the curtain falls.
I thought the ending was fairly obvious in most respects.
The kids die. They were being killed at the end, like the freak(Rustin Par) in the woods butchered the little childern by taking them down to the basement, making one stand in the corner with his back to the murderer while he slaughtered the childern. Obviously someone was doing the same thing in the basement of the house.
There’s no such thing as an ending in life, so any attempt to really end a story is going to NECESSARILY be artificial.
The best endings are those that don’t try to get around that, with a falsely reassuring, Dickensian tying up of all loose ends (which works for Dickens, by the way, because he gave his stories a strong sense of absurdity and ACKNOWLEDGED artificiality)–the best endings are the one that acknowledge that, after you leave the theater, the story you’ve just seen a small part of will go on without you.
John Sayles’ Limbo has one of the best endings ever, and Dancer in the Dark, which is ABOUT the artificial reality of movies, ends with the most complete and final ending imaginable, pointing out its absurdity.
