My apologies if there is another thread, but “The Endless” is a difficult movie title to search for. Anybody else watch it? I just did because I recently started a job at a movie rental store and employees can preview movies that won’t be available to the public until Tuesday. IDK if/when Redbox will have it, and it didn’t get a wide release, (apparently only about 10 weeks ago), so maybe very few have seen it.
It’s way too early to post spoilers, but IDK if I could, anyway. While I mostly understand what was going on, I still don’t understand the ending.
This movie got 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. This MAY be a bit of an “Emperor has no clothes” kind of situation, or maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.
Wikipedia normally gives the whole plot, spoilers and all, but for this movie they basically just put what’s on the back of the box. The Endless (film) - Wikipedia
So, much like after watching Donnie Darko, I come to the SDMB to figure out what I just watched. Let’s put spoilers in spoiler boxes, please, even though that will be most everything.
Interestingly one my regular podcasts that I listen to just did an interview with the filmmakers. It made me curious to try to seek out it and their other movies.
I’ve seen the previews for this and it was on my list for this year; thanks for the thread bump. Because of you, they just sold a copy on Blu-Ray AND I might go back for Spring if this doesn’t suck.
It’s a big building with shelves of movies that you can rent for 1 or more nights. You browse all of the available movies (like, in real life, by walking around and looking at actual boxes), pay to rent the movies that you like, take them home and put a physical disk into your DVD/Blu-ray/4K player, watch the movie, then take the disk back out and return it to the store so that someone else can rent it.
Movie rental stores started evolving in the 80’s and flourished for a few decades. After the N-F Extinction event, the biggest (know as ‘Blockbusters’) were wiped out, but some of the smaller ones survived thanks to a lack of competition from the larger ones. Family Video may never fly, but they are currently surviving as a place for people who want more selection than RedBox and don’t want to pay the prices that On-Demand costs.
I saw it in the theater, and enjoyed it, but it did seem like they had some cool ideas and cool visuals and worked back on how to explain it all. I thought it was well done, especially for a low budget movie. Since it’s been a while since I’ve seen it I’m not sure if I could explain it fully, I don’t know if I even could have after leaving the theater, but if you have questions I could try to make guesses.
Update now that I finished it. It was actually excellent, especially the second half. I would definitely recommend seeking out this movie from the same directors.
I’ve seen the Endless and I’m going to double spoiler-box a few thoughts.
First of all, it’s a sequel to Resolution, the movie the same director made in 2012. If you have not seen Resolution, see it first. Seriously, this movie teases around it for awhile, but about 75% through, we learn that this is a direct sequel to Resolution. Seeing Resolution is almost essential in my opinion. At first, it looks like a minor sequel or spinoff. It ends up carrying on the story from Resolution directly. Kind of neat and surprising. If you don’t see Resolution, everything with Mike and Chris will seem like a weird subplot that has no point.
Yes, this is the best movie the guys have made. Their strength in all three of their movies is their portrayal of strong relationships. This movie is no different. The brothers(played by the directors, by the way) are interesting and it helps the movie.
I liked this movie a lot and recommend it. It was actually the funniest movie they’ve made, too. The guy stuck on a loop killing himself was hilarious.
The ending. I’ll go one spoiler-box deeper for this since I have a question about it.
So they made it out, right? I mean, was there anything in the final shots to indicate that they were still stuck in a loop? I thought it ended as happy as we can get. The guys got out and drove off safely. Some birds flew by their van, but I didn’t see anything to indicate anything but that they got away.
Mahaloth, I don’t think it’s a spoiler at all to say that it’s a sequel to Resolution. I’ve never heard of it, but I’ll see if we have it.
Regarding the ending:
[spoiler] IIRC (I only watched it the one time, then had to return it to the store) They drove a while, then one asked about gas. The other said that they had been on empty for a long time. This is what made me think that something was wrong. This seems to mean that…
they did not make it out. But, since they are outside of the loop of the camp/commune, they shouldn’t be able to get back into that loop. So they shouldn’t be happy about this. I thought that this would mean that they were trapped inside a different, presumably bigger, loop.
One said “we’re on empty” and the other said, “No, empty means zero gas. You’ve never been empty unless your car had literally no gas at all.”
This was a joke because they had a few conversations like this in the movie. One of them uses a word and the other points out that it is not literally correct.
I thought that they had been driving on empty for way too long for it to be a natural thing. However, as I said, it wouldn’t make sense for them to be happy about being stuck in a different loop than the camp.