Did you ever get to the end of a movie and realize that the central problem of the movie hasn’t really been solved? I don’t mean an obvious sequel set up like the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The number one example for this is Avatar. Jake and the other scientist gone native have got to know that they may have won the battle but the humans will be back in force. They’ll be nuked from space cuz that’s the only way to be sure.
Another movie that didn’t solve the central problem was Jupiter Ascending. Unless Jupiter partakes in bathing in the essence of human, she’s gonna die and when she does her still living siblings get Earth. She only put off the harvest until the end of her life.
The one that comes to mind for me is Elysium. As I mentioned in the other thread, the central conflict was caused by massive overpopulation. The movie ends with dozens of magical medical machines being unleashed on Earth, which guarantees that the overpopulation problem is only going to get worse.
That said, I don’t think the core or overarching problem has to be solved. It’s enough that the main character’s story (their part of it) is told.
I was depressed by the peace treaty signed between the Pilgrims and the Indians in Disney’s animated Pocahontas. Everybody’s friends…but we know how it turns out.
I can’t stand some Disney’s movies for this reason ! I heard they made one movie and had a herd of deer run off a cliff to their death ! I can believe this , Walt Disney was not the nice man we were lead to believe.
This doesn’t make sense. The “problem” of the movie was solved. The immediate threat was averted and Jake’s character goes on to be what he was meant to be.
The fact that the humans will be back in full force (and presumably can’t nuke them from orbit for one reason or another) is text book sequel set up. Three of them to be precise.
A Raisin in the Sun. The main story line is a Black family about to move into a white neighborhood. The neighborhood association sends someone to pay them off, but they tell him to kiss off and leave to go to their new home.
Only the neighborhood association is still around and isn’t going to just fold. The Black family is still in for trouble.
The Full Monty was a terrific movie. But I doubt the guys cleared enough from their one show to alleviate the problems of their chronic unemployment. They pulled in, what, a few hundred (maybe a couple thousand) pounds each? Unless they took it on the road, they’re probably headed back to the job service in short order.
In Girl Shy, Harold Lloyd steals all manner of conveyances in order to recklessly race across town to break up his beloved’s wedding. He busts in on the ceremony just as the preacher was about about to pronounce them man and wife. Come to find out, the bridegroom was already married, so all Harold really had to do was prevent the consummation. The marriage would have been invalid anyway.
Dark City
So John has killed all of the creepy aliens, remade the city to have some sunlight at last, and they can all live happily ever after. Except…It’s basically just a city floating in space. I guess the aliens just used their machine and conjured up whatever air, food or goods people needed. There certainly aren’t vast acres of farmland, oil wells, trees, or anything else you’d need. So, how are they going to survive? Is he going to be able to magic up every single thing they need all by himself constantly for the rest of his life? Even if he does, what’s going to happen when he dies? There’s no indication that John was immortal or anything, and no other humans have been shown to have the alien powers. Also, everyone’s memories have been erased, no one has any idea who they really are, and since they all get swapped around constantly and have their memories erased and switched around, no one has any real knowledge or skills. What the hell are they going to do? They’re all screwed, and in fact are worse off than they were before John “saved” them.
E.T.
Ok, I’ve posted about this before…But seriously, that kid could have advanced science thousands of years, established interstellar communication with an alien race, and just generally made life thousands of times better for everyone on the planet, if he had just, you know, called the fucking cops at the beginning. The scientists and researchers could have talked to E.T. while he was healthy and well instead of being poisoned by that damn candy. By now (35 years later) we’d all have flying robot cars, houses on Mars, and be colonizing other systems. Instead we’re sending robot cars to Mars and are no closer to hovercraft than we were in 1981. I want to see the sequel, where Elliot (along with his brother and sister) gets tried for treason and crimes against humanity and is executed, preferably by being thrown into a pit filled with highly poisionous creatures with slow acting but painful and fatal venom.
The Europeans in the movie Pocahontas aren’t Pilgrims, for crying out loud. This isn’t Plymouth Rock, but Jamestown. And Pocahontas married an English guy (John Rolfe, not captain John Smith) and sailed off to England with him, and was treated as a celebrity there. And then she died.
I saw it as being more about the guys getting their mojo back than about the money. They did it for the money, but it also pulled them out of their funks. So the problem may indeed have been mitigated.
There are a few “poor people succeed in one-off moneymaking feat” movies that have this flaw. Of course in some it is a plot point ie the very fact they ultimately go nowhere is part of the pathos (if I recall correctly The Commitments has this feature).
Not “can’t,” “won’t.” Considering that it has literally never happened before, people shouldn’t be so ready to assume that humanity nuking the natives who fought off the invaders repeatedly destroying their sacred sites is the only possible result.
Even if people believe Thorn that SG is PEEEPLE!, and even if the word gets out, what does that accomplish? The oceans are dead. There isn’t any more food. All you’re gonna get is riots. And a famine that will likely kill off 50-75% of the population. It’s inevitable. And nothing accomplished in the movie will alter that.
It may not be exactly what OP is looking for, but Basic, a military mystery/thriller with John Travolta and Samuel Jackson, comes to mind for me. I enjoy mysteries even when I make no attempt to solve the mystery; an elegant denouement leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction.
But the denouement of Basic could only annoy – it proved that earlier scenes were nonsense, especially scenes where two conspirators were acting their pretend roles even though they were alone. I see that critics agreed with me:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Roger Ebert gave it one star out of four and wrote that it was “not a film that could be understood”, and that “If I were to see it again and again, I might be able to extract an underlying logic from it, but the problem is, when a movie’s not worth seeing twice, it had better get the job done the first time through”. Leonard Maltin … wrote that the film “keeps adding layers of confusion so that it becomes less interesting as it goes along! The final “twist” seems to negate the entire story, like a bad shaggy-dog joke.”
[/QUOTE]
Well, really the overpopulation problem won’t be getting any worse. It’s just the people who have hidden themselves up on Elysium will have to face it head on now.
But I don’t think the makers really thought to hard about what the ending was really saying. I think a good comparison is In Time. That movie has its “hero’s ending”, but it hints that things mightn’t actually work out in the long run. Elysium was more or less “the evil people have been beaten, everything is going to be alright”.
At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy still has the problem of dealing with Miss Gulch. I suppose she could throw a bucket of water on the old lady, or just drop a house on her.
And her siblings will keep on murdering entire planets full of humans in the meantime, something neither she nor Dogboy seem to have any interest in solving.
I don’t agree with all the harsh criticism the erratic but often enjoyable Snowpiercer (2013) got, but really, I don’t think they thought out the ending at all. Soooo- the cold doesn’t kill people immediately? That doesn’t mean you haven’t just condemned at least a good portion of what’s left of mankind to a fate worse than just eating bug paste in some grubby barracks.