I don’t know if happy is the word for the ending, but it’s a good ending, a very positive ending.
He doesn’t get the girl, but he understands why she didn’t show up to leave Paris with him. He’s been a lost soul ever since, having never gotten over her seeming betrayal of him. Now that he knows what really happened, he has closure on that, and can move forward.
And he doesn’t get executed, or killed on the spot for that matter, for gunning down Major Strasser so that Laszlo and Ilsa can escape. He makes a hero’s sacrifice - and then doesn’t have to sacrifice himself after all. Bonus!
In Heartbreak Kid (which I’d be perfectly happy to have not seen), you’ve got a resolution, more or less, in their having gotten married. They’re still two superficial idiots, but they’ve got at least a short stretch of happiness ahead. (And probably at most, too.)
In The Graduate, there’s not even the pretense of a resolution. Ben’s rescued Elaine from what would have surely been a horrible marriage, but now, per Tom Petty, “the future was wide open” - and they haven’t the faintest clue what to do next. They probably don’t even have any idea of where they should get off the bus or what they’re going to do next when they get off it, let alone whether they have any future together. They’re allied against the people trying to push them down paths they don’t want, but that’s as far as it really goes, and they have no direction of their own.
Yes, but in the original version, the final shot of Lennie(at his wedding) parallels that of Ben and Elaine in The Graduate. Lennie is definitely not satisfied with how events turned out; he has a “what have I done?” look on his face.
The silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is about a man who first cheats on his wife, then tries unsuccessfully to murder her. Later he tries to kill the Other Woman for putting him up to it. In the end he decides to let them both live, and appears not to be in any danger of being arrested on two counts of attempted murder. This is played as a happy ending. Of course the wife is still stuck with a man who almost murdered her and another person. I can’t see that being a happy outcome.
This probably doesn’t count, but WTF?? with the ending of Kelly’s Hero’s?
Sure, they got the gold, but how the hell are they going to get it off the Continent? And Oddball, driving around in a Tiger Tank? He’s gonna get ‘friendly-fired’. Those Germans aren’t gonna last too long, either. And what about that one Loud-mouthed angry guy who gets screwed out of his share? Do you really think he’d keep quiet about this? He’d ruin it everybody just out of spite.
One of many stupid things I think about. An, hell. I guess it wasn’t a Documentary, or anything.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ends with Joel and Clementine learning they both had the other erased from their minds, but deciding that they were destined to be together and it must be true love. Except all the reasons they didn’t work together the first time still exist, and it will be a matter of weeks before they are driving each other crazy again.
This one is a gray area, because I think the director purposely showed that it was not a happy ending with the looped scene at the end, but a lot of people still saw it as “love conquers all.”
I know it’s really supposed to be a happy ending, but the end (like so many things about it) of Silent Running really annoys me.
So Bruce Dern – a plant-loving caretaker, fer cryin’ out loud – finally figures out that the plants are dying because they’re not getting enough sunlight, this far out from the sun (duh!). He blows up the Valley Forge, along with himself and the damaged Drone, leaving the last surviving Drone to care for the plants. Presumably, the Earth people searching for them will think everything perished in the explosion, and won’t go looking for the remaining dome.
Only – what’s the power source for those lights he put up in the dome? Won’t that run out soon? (It can’t be coming from solar panels – if you had that much light energy, you wouldn’t need the lamps!) For that matter, where’s the energy for the Drone coming from? And won’t it get awfully cold in the dome without much solar energy to heat it?
Any way I look at it, unless there’s a Magic Power Source in that dome (like a Nuclear Reactor or something), it’s gonna get dark and cold in there soon, and all those plants will die.
we’ll mercifully pass over howcum the dome has Magical Gravity. Or what the hell everyone left on Earth is breathing in the absence of plants to recycle the carbon dioxide.
Another science fiction film: Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells himself
At the end of the film, the idealistic young couple goes off in their space capsule, fired by the space Gun. Raymond Massey gives a syirring speech about how they’re fulfilling the Destiny of Man, exploring the cosmos.
Except…
They got no way to turn around and come home. Even if they don’t plan on doing that, unless they have a Magic Power source and a huge stock of supplies and oxygen, they’re going to get cold and dark and suffocate like Silent Running’s plants when their power gives out and the septic tank gets full.
It bothers me, too, that Wells, who used “anti-gravity” to get to the moon in his novel First Men in the Moon rather than have his crew smashed into jelly by the acceleration of Jules Verne’s Space Cannon (in From the Earth to the Moon) nevertheless used Verne’s unworkable solution in his own movie. People who live in Cavorite spaceships should throw stones.
The most quasi-happy ending in SF movies has to be The Incredible Shrinking Man. Basically, he keeps on shrinking, and the film ends with his voice-over giving an impassioned speech about how “there’s no zero in god’s universe”, and his becoming one with the cosmos, or something. But I still got the feeling that he ended up being eaten by a paramecium, eventually, or something.
School of Rock, the weird agile fat guy who was kicked out of own band impersonates a teacher and then realizes his class has musical talent. So instead of teaching them according to the lesson plan, he spends all class period secretly teaching them how to rock, enlists some of the kids as lookouts, and tells the class not to tell their parents (big red flag there.) Then to top it all off he takes them all on an unsanctioned trip to the Battle of the Bands, where the parents see their kids rock on stage and are somehow impressed by it and everything is forgiven. So instead of the job-stealing kidnapping weird guy going to jail, he is able to start a “School of Rock” music school and tutor their kids after school and all is well.
I don’t agree it was ever meant to be a happy ending. It’s one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen.
It is a “warning” ending - don’t let things get this bad. Every ecosystem pod was destroyed but the one. None of the cold-hearted humans on earth will ever see a forest again. And the saddest part is, they don’t care!
But I will say that I’m fine with whatever gives them artificial gravity gives the pod power to last indefinitely. It’s obviously a post-scarcity society that created the plant project, so cheap power is readily available. (They put nuclear weapons in civilian hands!)
This is not the “near future”, not 2061 or something - this is several hundred if not thousands of years in the future. So Earth’s air is (probably) taken care of by machines. The entire planet is paved in plastic and concrete. And they like it.
A subtle point that I’m not sure is actually implied is, I do not believe “they” ever intended to reforest the planet. Keeping the domes was just a sop to the people like Lowell. As time wore on, people would forget what it was like to have plants.It was always the plan to destroy them.
Yes, it is a sad, sad movie. It’s the ultimate ecological movie. Protect the planet now.
So basically, “The Leftovers”, but much worse (that was only like 3% disappeared).
Yeah, it’s Space Magic. If they were bringing people back, it probably just spawns them in at the most convenient spot to where they disappeared (or where the story needs them). They wouldn’t just appear in deep space where Earth was 5 years prior.
Children of Men. Whatever happened to stop suddenly all pregnancies is not natural. I assume every scientist with a passing interest in human biology was working 24/7 on finding a solution and nothing came off it.
That’s not going to be solved with one measly birth. That’s nothing. That’s just an statistical one-in-a-trillion thing. It’s very unlikely that either the kid or the mother are some sort of key to find a “cure”. It’s more likely that Clive Owen just went through all that to send a woman and a baby into dissection for no reason.
Pretty Woman. Vivien was right when she said that there would always be some guy like Stuckey coming on to her. Edward’s female friends and family would also have never accepted her. He’d been divorced twice and cheated on at least one of them and his mistress was literally moving her stuff out their apartment when he met Vivien - he might well have cheated again, any time Vivien said no.
Divorce within two years, probably with a baby involved.
When I first watched the original Mad Max film I was stupid enough to think Max, after a lot of provocation, won by hunting down and executing all the bad guys. Yay for Max!
Even I caught on by the second viewing:
His best (and only) friend, Goose, is burnt to a crisp. Probably in agony. Certain to soon die. Murdered.
His beloved wife and kid and even his mother in law, his whole family basically, all dead. Murdered.
He is no longer a policeman where previously he was a devoted and respected (by his colleagues) policeman.
Previously, as a policeman, he upheld the law with absolute impartiality and would stop any vigilante activity. Even by his best mate Goose. By the end he has become the vigilante himself.
As a policeman he was serving and protecting society. By the end of the film (as is made clear in the sequels) he has failed and that civilised society is over.
By the end he has lost absolutely everything (including his own values and standards) and while he has murdered some bad guys, the sequels make clear there’s an unlimited supply of other bad guys still out there.
