Your proposed plot twist certainly is interesting but I think I will stick with the original story. Introducing tragedy into the equation would work against its epic tone. The idea of such stories is to introduce a hero and generate an empathic feeling towards him by the spectators. As the adventure progresses the sympathy towards him grows and the audience ceases to be passive and gets involved in the story.
They start living the adventures through the hero’ s eyes, they join him in his journeys and experience his perils as if they were truly their own and, after surviving all the struggles, they rejoice in “ecstatic joy” when, at the climax of the narration, the hero comes full circle an accomplishes his task. Thus, a tragic ending would not only be deceitful but anticlimactic.
Remember this is fiction we are talking about, we are not trying to convey the inner workings of society in a veridical, precise way; we are not here to present a sociological thesis or provide a realistic scenario that depicts the chaotic nature (dark side?) of society. Those elements could very well be included in the narrative but they should not govern it. Instead, the idealistic themes should be the ones providing the guidelines around which the plot revolves.
Why? Because the real objective of such stories is to provide a brief, yet scintillating, escape from the inertia and boredom of the real world. I assure you that this objective is better served if the illusion is complete, that is, if by the time the closing credits roll on the hero has defeated the evil villain, the lovers have conquered all obstacles and reached the pinnacle of their passion and the lawyer has suffered an ideological metamorphosis and decided to serve justice instead of his egotistical instincts (nah! That last one is stretching it too much :D).
In any case, movies reside in the realm of fantasy and as such they should be fun. If we want to experience dullness and frustration, we can easily encounter them in real life. Of course more relevant subjects should and need to be treaded by movies. That is fine and dandy, as long as the expectations raised by the motion picture don’t betray the audience; the finale should be truthful to the overall tone conveyed by the movie, whether it is romantic, tragic or thesis-oriented. If it isn’t, that only indicates a lack of coherence and cohesiveness between the way the story is narrated and the form in which the action is deployed.
Case in point: Message in a bottle and City of angels; their anticlimactic, audience-misleading finales being the fundamental reasons why both movies SUCKED big time.
May The Force be with all of you!
