I’m trying to think of a movie (I assume) where the hero works hard to find some item, and at the end, when he finally does it - the antagonist (who was also looking for it) swoops in and takes it from him.
I know that Raiders of the Lost Ark has that trope, but my feeling is there another movie where it’s even more explicit. Just can’t remember which one.
(I’ve tried looking in TV Tropes, but couldn’t find anything there.)
Any ideas?
Does the TV Tropes entry for MacGuffin Delivery Service cover it?
Yeah - that looks like it!
But in the end they learned that friendship is the true treasure.
The funny thing about the enjoyable ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ is that things would work out exactly the same* if Indiana Jones didn’t make any effort!
*well apart from bringing the Ark back to storage after it killed all the Nazis.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, perhaps?
How about the original Ocean’s Eleven? Not taken away by an antagonist though, unless you consider irony the antagonist (or maybe more bad planning than irony)
Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The antagonist would be the earth, or perhaps fate.
You could argue this was the case in Titanic. All that fuss about retrieving the diamond, but unbeknownst to the crew it came on board with the old lady who dropped it overboard.
Actually, it wouldn’t. If Indy hadn’t prevented them from putting the Ark on that plane, they wouldn’t have taken it by sub to the island. They’d have flown it straight to Berlin and opened it there.
Probably with Hitler watching.
It’s also used in the opening sequence of The Last Crusade (he gets it back eventually).
Without Indy, the Nazis would have kidnapped Marion and probably have tortured and killed her. Rescuing her is one useful thing he did.
Did the Nazis find Marion in Nepal on their own, or did Indie lead them to her? He rescued her once they showed up, but it’s not clear how they found her. Afterward she was mainly in trouble because she was with Indie.
What about Lord of the Rings, where Gollum snatches the ring at the end - or does that not count as hero working hard to retrieve item?
Irony was just a middleman. It was really taken away by the Motion Picture Production Code.
Similar thing with the fancy secret weapons that Q always gives to Bond: in the end, they never actually stop the bad guys. (At least in the Bond movies I’ve seen.)
Some of them definitely took out bad guys. A pen bomb activated by the clicker blew up a bad chick. That did boil down to luck thought. And the cars have almost always been hyper effective at killing bad guys. Some gadgets saved James in more of a defensive way (e.g. laser watch).
Sure, the gadgets knock off some of the villain’s henchmen, but they aren’t what ultimately allows Bond to stop the villain, except in minor, indirect ways. In some cases, he employs several of the gadgets in a chase scene–whereby they neutralize a few of the faceless subordinates pursuing him–but Bond still gets caught at the end of the sequence, and taken into the villain’s custody. IOW, the gadgets don’t make or break the narrative. They more are just for gratuitous spectacle.
The subtext is that it can’t be Q’s technology that ultimately accomplishes the mission, but rather Bond’s innate “super spy” abilities. Otherwise, anyone could do it. (And I’m referring to the older films. It may be different in the newer ones.)