Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band : At the end, Billy Preston magically undoes everything that happened in the movie, while singing Get Back.
It’s worse than that; Bond gets both of the Masterson sisters, plus an untold number of soldiers at Fort Knox needlessly killed. Indy just wipes out a bunch of cartoon Nazis that were going to die anyway. But neither is an example of a “reset button” plot, just stories in which the protagonist does nothing ultimately worthwhile.
Stranger
I’m still pissed about the ending of Sphere. Crichton is such a talentless hack.
I was going to list this one too.
You made it to the end? I turned off the movie at about the 80 minute mark. No loss, I take it?
Stranger
Never seen the movie, just read the book. If anything, getting to the end of the book was probably worse than sitting through a 2-hour movie.
Speaking of Crichton, how about The Andromeda Strain? Oh, it’s no longer a threat because it mutated. Give me a break.
I was stuck in an airport and till then had heard only good things about Crichton, so I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t really have anything better to do, so I stuck with the damn book to the end. I should have been warned by the fact that it read exactly like a TV movie of the week, but he actually introduced a couple of cool ideas…except then he realized that he had no idea what to do next and just said “ahh, fuck it.”
Cut Scorsese some slack on this. He just depicted the incident as it happened in real life (scroll down to “84. Rosenthal survives a car bomb (1982)”).
Well, Bond persuades Pussy Galore to change sides. The Fort Knox soldiers aren’t really poisoned, they are just pretending to die to lure Goldfinger into an ambush.
Raiders may not be a reset button, but it is a cop out.
Any story in a comic book where the writer(s) took the trouble to kill off a major character only to have him/her resurrected later. I exclude Superman’s death because no sane person expected him to stay dead.
If only that movie could have been undone! Sadly not the case. It happened. It’s even on DVD. 
Comic books are horrible about this. Onslaught. The Infinity Gauntlet. Secret Wars.
Sitcoms are notorious for it, too. It’s a cardinal rule that everything has to be back to normal by the end of every episode. One major exception was Roseanne, wherein her lottery win was stretched out for a whole season IIRC, until it turned out to be a . . . yup, dream.
Even worse, the movie completely changed the ending of the story. In Frank Baum’s books, Oz is a real place, and Dorothy’s adventures are not a dream.
Well, Indy could have ended it if he wanted to, prevented the Nazis from getting the Ark. He just decided not to.
FFX-2 You spend the entire game trying to bring back Tidus only to find out that the guy you thought was him in a video wasn’t really him at all. But at the end, as long as you finished enough of the game, he walked out of the water to greet everyone anyway.
The Matador had a really promising plot twist brewing, and then pissed it away.
I don’t know if my entry really belongs here because (1) It’s a TV movie, and (2) the cop-out/reset doesn’t happen until a later TV movie in the franchise. Here goes anyway, because it really hacked me off…
After the TV series ended (I think), there was this one Little House on the Prarie TV movie dealing with Albert’s addiction to morphine. (I think the kid’s name was Albert anyway) Well, natch, he beats the thing, and at the end, Laura’s voice over says something like “…when Albert returned as Doctor Ingalls.”
OK, year or so later, there’s another Little House movie dealing with Albert’s having a seemingly fatal affliction. Well, through the whole movie, I kept saying, “Naw, he ain’t gonna die, because he’s not yet a doctor! And Laura clearly said he returned to the town one day as a doctor!”
It’s old, but here comes a spoiler warning…
Guess what happens at the end of this movie?
…
Albert friggin DIES!
WTF? I have just been screwed over by Laura Ingalls Wilder? The little witch LIED to me?
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
I read all the Little House books and I don’t remember an Albert. So the whole thing was a lie.
If we’re including ‘It was only a dream’ conclusions, I would like to submit Boxing Helena. The movie had a pretty edgy premise with an utterly unlikable protagonist and a victim who pitifully ends up falling for him.
Not that it was a good movie or even would have been a good movie with a slightly different ending, but at least the director could have had the balls (yes, I know the director was a woman) to follow through with the premise of the movie.
I’m totally with you on that, but even worse about the cop-out- the director was the daughter of David Freakin’ Lynch! He’d have revelled in that relationship!
Yeah, redemption means nothing. It’s like that Jesus guy…he died anyways! What was the point???
-Joe