- 2 years ago
Anyone can be a Jedi - especially if you're a Palpatine, right?
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00:00 Now even the least preachy and messagey of movies will ultimately be about something,
00:05 no matter how much of an escapist thrill ride that they might otherwise be.
00:08 And the vast majority of films make their central themes incredibly obvious, such that
00:13 the audience can easily appreciate the point of view and connect emotionally with it.
00:17 But sometimes films don't quite get the balance right, and what might seem like an
00:21 acceptable enough message ends up getting jumbled, mangled, and straight up contradicted
00:26 by the film's end.
00:27 And that's what we're here to talk about today.
00:29 Inspired by this fantastic recent Reddit thread, these 10 movies all touted fairly obvious
00:34 simple messages for general audiences, but totally betrayed them by the film's climax.
00:39 So let's take a look at them as I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10
00:43 movie messages completely undermined by their ending.
00:46 10.
00:47 It's Important to Trust People - Raya and the Last Dragon
00:51 So this film's central theme is all about trust, that the world will only get better
00:55 if you're able to cooperate with the people around you.
00:58 But Sisu straight up tells our cynical protagonist that she can't expect others to trust her
01:03 if she herself cannot trust others.
01:05 And yet, her open distrust is completely understandable given that her friend from another tribe,
01:10 Namari, literally betrays her in an attempt to help her own clan steal the focal magic
01:15 gem.
01:16 More to the point, Namari betrays her a second time later on in the film, resulting in Sisu's
01:21 death.
01:22 So to say that the world is a mess because of mutual distrust doesn't quite wash considering
01:26 what she's experienced with her supposed friend.
01:28 And the ending even straight up criticizes our hero for her distrust apparently playing
01:32 a part in Sisu's death before she and Namari finally make peace with one another.
01:37 Yeah, sometimes it's completely reasonable not to trust somebody, and in the case of
01:42 Namari, nobody could be blamed for giving her the side eye.
01:45 Inadvertently, the message that some kids might take away from this movie is, "Let
01:48 people walk all over you time and time again."
01:51 Yeah, great.
01:52 9.
01:53 The Death Penalty is Bad – The Life of David Gale
01:56 David Gale, played here by Kevin Spacey, is an activist against the death penalty who
02:01 ends up on death row himself after being accused of murdering a fellow activist, whose name
02:05 was Constance.
02:06 It's eventually revealed that Constance was terminally ill and conspired with other
02:10 activists to arrange her assisted suicide in order to frame Gale, all in an attempt
02:15 to have an innocent man executed and discredit capital punishment in the most ultimate way
02:19 possible.
02:20 Journalist Bitsy Bloom attempts to get this information to the authorities, but Gale is
02:24 executed before she can.
02:26 But the big kicker comes at the very end, when a tape reveals that Gale himself also
02:31 took part in the frame job, willingly laying down his life in order to turn the tide of
02:35 public opinion on the death penalty.
02:38 The problem is that this extra twist completely muddies the central thesis of how easy it
02:43 is for somebody to get framed for murder and be wrongly executed.
02:46 Yes, if you're literally setting yourself up to die and stacking the deck against a
02:51 fair capital punishment system, as much as it can be considered fair, then of course
02:55 you'll end up dead.
02:56 It's a rigged game that completely undermines the overall message.
03:00 8.
03:01 Corporations Ruin Creativity - Free Guy
03:04 Free Guy certainly isn't a 'message' movie, but it is nevertheless saying something
03:08 about how artists have their efforts completely chopped and changed by cynical, money-grabbing
03:12 interests of corporations.
03:14 Namely the concept game that Millie and Keys developed, Life itself, had its source code
03:19 stolen by Ruthless Video Games' CEO Antoine, who used it to build the hugely successful
03:24 MMORPG Free City.
03:26 Yet at film's end, the day is only saved because Guy gets a little help from the fine
03:30 folks at Disney, Epic Games and Valve.
03:33 While fighting the unfinished, muscled brute known as Dude, Guy uses Captain America's
03:38 shield, the Hulk's arm, a lightsaber, Fortnite's llama pickaxe, Half-Life's gravity gun and
03:43 Portal's portal gun.
03:44 These weapons collectively allow Guy to subdue Dude and reach the source code, in turn leading
03:49 to the downfall of the villain.
03:51 For a film that spends so much of its runtime critiquing the soulless nature of 'corporate
03:54 art', it's depressingly ironic that the final action salvo is itself a series of sponsored
04:00 plugs.
04:01 7.
04:02 Normal People Would Suck at Being Superheroes
04:05 The big hilarious hook of Kick-Ass is that it's an irreverent, expectation-defying superhero
04:09 movie which shows just how terrible the average person, let alone average teenage boy, would
04:14 be at playing superhero.
04:15 You see our Dave here is a comic book fan who decides to become a vigilante superhero
04:19 assuming the alter ego Kick-Ass.
04:22 Much of the film focuses on how hilariously pathetic he is, summarily getting his ass
04:26 kicked and ultimately having to be bailed out by two real superheroes, Big Daddy and
04:30 Hit Girl.
04:31 Dave even considers quitting the crime-fighting life for good, but ultimately decides to help
04:35 take down crime boss Frank D'Amico.
04:37 Yet the film's finale sees Kick-Ass don a fricking jetpack with miniguns to wipe out
04:42 Frank's men, before blowing Frank up with a bazooka.
04:45 Kick-Ass then flies away to safety with his jetpack and even gets the girl, Katie.
04:50 This is quite different to Mark Millar and John Romita Jr's original comic, which offers
04:55 a far more cynical, caustic version of this story, where Dave doesn't become a genuinely
04:59 awesome superhero and Katie brutally rejects him for lying about being gay.
05:04 Instead, the movie becomes a bit too much like the very thing that it's satirizing,
05:08 while delivering a pretty conventional superhero origin story at the end of the day.
05:12 6.
05:13 The criminal justice system needs burning down - Law-abiding citizen
05:17 You won't find a movie ending more infuriating than Law-abiding citizen.
05:22 The film follows Clyde Shelton, a man whose wife and daughter are murdered during a home
05:26 invasion, and when the legal system refuses to grant him justice, he takes matters into
05:30 his own brutal hands.
05:31 But Shelton doesn't stop at killing those directly responsible, though.
05:35 His wider scheme also involves targeting those within America's criminal justice system
05:39 who he feels continue to enable and benefit from it.
05:42 At film's end, he attempts to make the ultimate demonstration of this by blowing up City Hall
05:47 with a bomb, but cynical lawyer Nick Rice turns the tables by moving the bomb to Shelton's
05:52 own jail cell, resulting in his death.
05:54 It's a rather sour ending because most of the audience is firmly on Shelton's side,
05:58 despite his extreme and excessive methods.
06:01 Seeing the vigilante killed by a detestable instrument of the law, who goes outside of
06:05 the law to do so and then returns to lawyering within an unjust system, is bafflingly framed
06:10 as a happy ending, despite most audience members seeing it as frustrating and tragic.
06:15 5.
06:16 Hope and teamwork will save the world - Tomorrowland
06:20 Brad Bird's Tomorrowland is consumed with the notion that hope and teamwork will build
06:24 a better future for humanity, and the film's primary antagonist, David Nix, is a man who
06:28 categorically has lost all hope.
06:31 David wants to inspire humanity to do better by using the Tachyon machine to show them
06:35 images of an impending apocalypse, but when people responded with indifference and basically
06:40 accepted it, David also gave up and similarly accepted his impending catastrophe.
06:45 The final clash sees the heroes Frank and Casey attempting to destroy the Tachyon machine
06:49 while David tries to stop them, but rather than merely subdue David, they end up killing
06:53 him by pinning him underneath some rubble and destroying the machine, which crushes
06:57 David to death.
06:58 This isn't to say that David was ever going to be fully redeemed, but when you meet a
07:02 person who has been drained of all of their hope, there's got to be a better solution
07:05 than brutally killing them.
07:06 It's not much of a plea for hope and cooperation, is it?
07:09 4.
07:10 The Great Depression was an eternal struggle - The Grapes of Wrath
07:14 John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath certainly doesn't paint the Great Depression as a
07:18 picnic, but the central family's desperate struggle to survive does feel a little sanitized
07:22 by the film's ending, which deviates from the bleaker finale of the original legendary
07:26 novel.
07:27 The movie concludes when the central family end up at the USDA weed patch camp, where
07:31 they're fed, clothed and have access to indoor toilets and showers, all while Tom,
07:35 played here by Henry Fonda, vows to keep fighting for workers' rights.
07:39 It's certainly not a squeaky clean happy ending, but it paints a picture of hope that
07:43 the family will end up in a much better situation than when we first met them.
07:46 But the novel offers up no such respite, ending on a more fittingly bleak note where we see
07:51 the birth of a stillborn.
07:52 Plus the family suffers through a horrific flood, and there's even a scene in which
07:56 the mother breastfeeds a starving man in order to save his life.
08:00 While you can reason that the haze code of the time prevented the movie from depicting
08:03 things like dead babies and breastfeeding, its more optimistic ending doesn't feel
08:07 quite as true a depiction of the Great Depression's grim realities as a result.
08:11 3.
08:12 Snooping is Bad - The Burbs
08:14 Well at least this one's pretty funny, right?
08:17 The cult favourite 1989 black comedy 'The Burbs' stars Tom Hanks as a suburbanite
08:22 named Ray Peterson, who along with his neighbours comes to believe that the new reclusive family
08:26 on the block, the Klopeks, are actually part of a satanic cult.
08:29 The bulk of the movie serves as a pretty hilarious commentary on suburban boredom, with the expected
08:34 outcome being that the paranoid neighbourhood is absolutely positively wrong about the Klopeks.
08:39 But the ending pulls an insane 180 by revealing that, indeed, the Klopeks murdered the previous
08:44 residents of the house that they'd moved into, effectively justifying the neighbourhood's
08:48 deranged snooping.
08:49 It's a fun twist while you're watching it, though does rather contradict with what
08:52 the movie appears to be shooting for about 90% of its runtime, that is, critiquing the
08:57 fancies of judgmental curtain twitchers who won't just mind their own damn business.
09:01 Apparently one of the several endings conceived for 'The Burbs' actually saw the Klopeks
09:04 be innocent, yet this was scrapped in favour of a punchier double twist.
09:08 As such, it's perhaps little surprise that the film proved majorly divisive with critics.
09:13 2.
09:14 Anyone Can Be A Jedi – Star Wars The Rise Of Skywalker
09:17 It's fair to say that Star Wars The Rise Of Skywalker was ultimately a victim of the
09:21 wildly mixed messaging and uneven plotting across the entire sequel trilogy, but it nevertheless
09:26 contradicted one of the more appealing messages established in the previous film, 'The Last
09:30 Jedi'.
09:31 Brian Johnson's divisive middle chapter revealed that Rey's parents were just some junky
09:35 nobodies, while ending with one of the young, stable hands on the Canto Bight using the
09:39 Force to move a broom.
09:41 These two plot points teed up the notion that anyone could be a Jedi, regardless of their
09:45 humble origins – a slam dunk of an idea which surely appealed to audiences both young
09:49 and old.
09:50 But The Rise Of Skywalker flatly betrayed this by ultimately revealing that Rey is the
09:54 granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, and then having her adopt the honorary Skywalker name
09:59 at the end of the film.
10:00 For many, the appeal of Rey was precisely that she was a nobody without direct links
10:04 to the existing Force users, but by making her grandpa one of the most powerful Sith
10:08 in history, and then having her continue the Skywalker lineage, aggressively undermined
10:13 that.
10:14 1.
10:15 Accept People For Who They Are – Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer
10:18 The 1964 holiday classic 'Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer' follows the escapades of
10:22 Rudolph as he attempts to fit in with the other reindeer despite his glowing red nose.
10:27 Rudolph's nose causes him to be bullied by the other reindeer, and the film's overall
10:31 message is very clearly about accepting people with differences.
10:34 But ultimately the ending, where Rudolph is welcomed into the reindeer clan once they
10:37 realise his nose can be used to navigate Santa's sleigh through a snowstorm, only sees Rudolph
10:42 accepted once they appreciate that his difference is advantageous.
10:46 If Rudolph had another physical oddity or something which couldn't save Christmas,
10:50 it's tough to picture him being so enthusiastically embraced, even if the clan did admittedly
10:55 apologise to him before he saved the day.
10:58 The fact that Rudolph seems oddly unbothered by being shunned, and that the reindeer basically
11:02 brush their terrible behaviour under the carpet in record time, only makes it that much worse.
11:07 And there we go my friends, those were 10 movie messages completely undermined by their
11:11 ending.
11:12 Hope you enjoyed that and please let me know what you thought about it down in the comments
11:14 section below.
11:15 As always I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on Instagram where it's @retroj but
11:19 the O is a zero.
11:21 Hope to see you over there and you can come check out all the Warhammer miniatures that
11:23 I've been painting.
11:24 But before I go I just want to say one thing, this will be an ending that will not undermine
11:28 the messages of the video overall, and that is just going to be a message of positivity,
11:32 because I've always stayed true to that fact and I hope that you're doing well my friend.
11:35 Hope you're treating yourself with love and respect because you deserve all the best things
11:39 in life alright?
11:40 And do not let anything or anyone else tell you otherwise, you are a massive ledge.
11:44 Now go out there and utterly smash it today, I believe in you.
11:48 As always I've been Jules, you have been awesome, never forget that, and I'll speak to you soon.
11:52 Bye.
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