- 6 weeks ago
Think that hero always wins without consequence? Think again. This video breaks down popular movie endings that are far more tragic than they appear, from worldwide casualties to stolen identities and fractured realities.
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00:00Whoamongers doesn't love a happy ending. As long as it feels earned and appropriate for the story,
00:06it's great to see the heroes triumph over the villain, which in turn sends popcorn gobbling
00:12audiences home with a smile on their faces. But sometimes things aren't quite that simple,
00:18and what's framed as a happy ending with jaunty music and a fanfare celebration
00:23is actually anything but. There are even some cases where a sad ending can be made
00:28even darker the more time you spend thinking about it. So with that said, let's get sad,
00:34shall we? I'm Ewan, you're watching WhatCulture, and here are movie endings way darker than you realize.
00:41Valentine's Signal Killed Millions Worldwide. The Secret Service
00:46The villain of the first Kingsman movie, Samuel Jackson's Richmond Valentine,
00:52plans to control the world by giving free sim cards to every human being on Earth.
00:57The catch? Well, he can transmit a signal that turns anyone with one of those sim cards murderously
01:03violent, all in an attempt to control overpopulation and prevent global warming.
01:08And indeed, Valentine activates a signal for a brief period during the movie's third act,
01:14with director Matthew Vaughn briefly showing scenes of chaos unfolding around the world
01:19as people suddenly start killing each other. Yet after Valentine is killed at film's end,
01:24the masses of human carnage which unfolded while the signal was active are oddly glossed over.
01:30It's reasonable to assume that millions of people, especially the young elderly and physically
01:35vulnerable, would have died in droves, severely impacting the population of the next generation
01:41in particular. And this is without even considering that numerous world leaders in Valentine's
01:47Employ had their heads exploded in the climax, likely grading at least a couple of teeny tiny power
01:53vacuums in countries around the world.
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02:12Colter hijacked a guy's body, Source Code. A surface-level reading of Source Code's ending
02:19says that it's a happy one, at least for protagonist, Captain Colter Stevens, played in the film by Jake
02:25Gyllenhaal, who we all dearly love. Stevens eventually learns that he was gravely wounded in action and is
02:31being kept on life support to test out the experimental, past-reconstructuring Source Code tech.
02:37At the end of the film, however, one of the officers overseeing the quote-unquote simulation,
02:42Captain Goodwin, agrees to terminate his life support after one final trip back into the Source Code.
02:49While the termination seemingly freezes Colter in time with his love interest Christina,
02:54a moment later the scene unfreezes, revealing that the Source Code wasn't generating simulations,
02:59but actually creating parallel universes? And so Colter is free to live a full life with Christina
03:06in this newly created reality, with a fully functioning body no less. Except it's important
03:12to remember that any time Colter entered the Source Code, he was inserted into the body of a
03:18school teacher named Sean Fentress, effectively hijacking it. And so, though this outcome is a
03:25fortuitous one for Colter, he's basically stolen the body of another human being, a fact we're slightly
03:32reminded of in the film's ending, when Sean's reflection can be seen in front of Colter. As if
03:38Sean's consciousness being obliterated wasn't bad enough, his family and friends will have to deal
03:44with him having no memory of them whatsoever. Marty's brain struggles to accept his new past,
03:51Back to the Future. Back to the Future's ending sees Marty McFly ensure that his parents
03:56do indeed get together in 1955, thereby securing his own existence. However, doing so also ends up
04:04changing his present of 1985. At the start of Robert Zemeckis' film, Marty's father George is
04:11cowardly and timid, his mother Lorraine is not doing great, and his siblings have really failed to do
04:17anything with their lives. But at the end, their fates have been changed. George is a successful sci-fi
04:23author and an assertive human being. Lorraine is happy and healthy, and his siblings are doing
04:30well for themselves too. Basically, Marty's entire life up to this point has been fundamentally altered,
04:36and while the film keeps it ambiguous precisely how Marty's memories will now work, there are basically
04:42two options we have to work with here. 1. Marty either has no memory of his present and has to
04:48awkwardly
04:49wing it for the rest of his life, or 2. His older memories will slowly fade in over time, given
04:56that
04:56the movie confirms that aspects of the present will slowly update after the past is changed,
05:01like with Marty's photo of his family. Either way, it's going to be a tough period of adjustment,
05:07having no memory of a childhood the rest of his family vividly remembers, or having to experience his
05:12memories being gradually reshaped over time. The whole movie is Walker's dying dream, Point Blank.
05:22Let's look at the story one of Ewan's fave movies entry here. John Borman's Point Blank was the
05:27director's 1967 masterpiece, an ethereal, dreamlike descent into the California underworld with a
05:34career best Lee Marvin as our guide. The film was adapted from Richard Stark slash Donald Westlake's
05:41Parker novels, namely The Hunter. Side note, if you enjoy comics too, the late great Darwin Cook adapted
05:47Stark's Parker novels in the 2010s, and they are all gorgeous and well worth checking out. But yeah,
05:53Point Blank, and spoiler alert of course if you have not seen the film already, and please do go
05:58do that if you haven't because it's amazing. The film stars Marvin as Walker, a wronged professional
06:04criminal with a ruthless mean streak who sets out to take revenge on those who double-crossed him
06:09and stole his score. Marvin's character drifts through California ran through a pop art lens,
06:15systematically taking down those who wanted him to stay dead. The film ends with Walker at the same
06:20place he was originally left for dead at, Alcatraz Island, fading into the darkness to avoid one final
06:26double-cross. But it's also possible that Walker could be fading out of existence altogether. Several reads
06:33of Point Blank, the most notable posited by critic David Thompson, have suggested that the film is
06:38really Walker's dying fantasy, a series of visions promising revenge before he succumbs to his wounds
06:45on Alcatraz in the encounter we see at the beginning of the film. It's also possible to look at Walker
06:50as
06:50something of a spectre. While Point Blank's supernatural elements aren't explicitly telegraphed, and it's
06:56perfectly acceptable to read the film more literally as Walker's actual revenge, Ballman himself did
07:02say that it's possible for Walker to be seen as a quote, ghost or shadow. Whichever read you have a
07:08Point Blank, its ending is still devastatingly good. Ewoks eat the stormtroopers, Star Wars Episode 6,
07:15Return of the Jedi. Much as Episode 6 of Star Wars ends the original trilogy on a triumphant note,
07:21the galaxy-wide celebration is hampered somewhat by the sly implication of human eating.
07:27Return of the Jedi introduced fans to the adorable fuzzy Ewoks, who are nevertheless shown to be
07:33carnivorous given that they very nearly end up eating Luke, Han, and Chewbacca upon first crossing
07:39pass with them. And while they ultimately all worked together to fight the Empire and celebrate it in
07:43unison at the end, the Ewoks almost certainly didn't afford the same quarter to the stormtroopers
07:48they captured during the battle of Endor. But yeah, given that we can even see an Ewok
07:53drumming on some stormtrooper helmets right at the end of the film, it seems pretty cut and dry that
07:58they spit-roasted and ate their defeated foes. Barry is trapped in the Schumacher-verse, The Flash.
08:04The Flash delivers one of the most genuinely surprising WTF endings in recent memory,
08:09when Barry Allen seemingly returns to the presence only to meet up with Bruce Wayne and discover that
08:14he's not played by Ben Affleck, but by George Clooney. Ooh, what a zinger. While on the face of it,
08:21this might seem like a mere goofy nonsensical gag on which to end the film, a head scratching closing
08:27moment to set up a sequel that will never arrive, good going in again Warner Bros., it's actually a
08:33sort of twisted ironic fate for this incarnation of The Flash. Just think about it, Barry has effectively
08:40been banished to the Schumacher-verse of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. I will go on the
08:46record multiple times to defend those movies, but that is not where Barry belongs. His timeline is
08:52still balked in short, and he must now presumably annoy yet another incarnation of Batman in a bid to
08:58fix what he's broken. Here's hoping that Arnie's Mr. Freeze iced him in like 5 seconds flat.
09:03Kong's corpse becomes an attraction. King Kong. No matter which version of King Kong you watch,
09:09they typically end with the death of Kong at the hands of the military. And while the story seemingly
09:14ends there, Joe DeVito's sequel novel Kong King of Skull Island, released shortly before Peter
09:21Jackson's 2005 remake, reveals a bleak postscript addendum to Kong's demise. The novel's most disturbing
09:30revelation? Well, after Kong was shot by the military and fell to his death, his gigantic corpse was
09:36collected and became an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, with patrons paying top dollar to
09:42view his skeleton posed exonically in combat with a dinosaur. There's a tragic irony to this outcome for
09:50Kong, that even in death, the world wasn't done with him. His remains were commodified long after he was
09:56gone. Gentrification still wins. Batteries not included. You have to give the filmmakers behind
10:02batteries not included some credit. Back in 1987, they managed to address the issue of gentrification
10:08in the film aimed squarely at kids. The plot centers around an impoverished New York neighborhood where
10:14an apartment building and cafe operated by the Riley's is under threat of demolition by nasty property
10:19developers. With the Riley's and some of their tenants refusing to move, the developers ramp up their
10:24threats until they are visited by mechanical creatures resembling flying saucers dubbed the
10:31fixits, which promptly start repairing the run-down building. All the same, an arson attack causes the
10:37building to be destroyed near the film's end before a fleet of the fixits returns and rebuilds the entire
10:43apartment block to a better state than ever before. This results in the building being spared by the
10:50developers, with the final shot taking place years later and showing the block nestled safely between
10:55the developers' new fancy high-rises. Though the cafe is said to benefit from the influx of new people
11:01to the area, everything we know about gentrification says this won't be a good thing for the Riley's,
11:08their tenants, or really, any non-rich person living in the vicinity. The property developments would end up
11:14raising the value of the surrounding area enough that it would almost certainly price the Riley's
11:19and their tenants out of the area on a long enough timeline. The Riley's would have to pay more property
11:24tax, slightly forcing them to raise their tenants' rent, while the cost of everything in the area would
11:30also skyrocket, ensuring that affordable living quickly became anything but. As a closing shot,
11:37it's a triumphant image of defiance, but one grimly undone by cold, hard reality.
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