Too often – movies that are good for 98% of the run-time tend to make a weird left turn near the end and you walk out of the theatre going Hrrrrrmm!? A bad ending will spoil an otherwise good movie. So here we have got you a list of 12 movies that were really appreciated — only till the ending came along.
(Spoiler alert – we mention all the endings so look away if you don’t want to know.)
Featured Image Credit: nejron /Depositphotos.com.
The Mist (2007)
A series adaptation of Stephen King’s novella of the same title, The Mist wraps a small town in an endless, sinister, yawning mass of mist with fatally heinous creatures in it. A band of survivors barricade themselves in a supermarket to stop the threat from reaching them, but not before the real evil seeps in, prowling. The male lead more or less drops his family out the window to their deaths (in an attempt to save them) – and just then the mist clears and help arrives. This is a sad, abrupt ending to leave an audience sweating their palms over – no one really appreciated it.
War of the Worlds (2005)
This Tom Cruise-starrer is an alien invasion film – in which a technologically inferior and utterly outmatched humanity struggles to fend off larger, meaner, more malevolent aliens. It has an enjoyable, chest-tightening buildup, where aliens begin jumping, skittering and stomping all over everything — at which point they inexplicably all die of Earth bacteria at the end. Having gone to such lengths to make everything so damn crazy messy and tremendously loud, the pay-off feels limp and lazy.
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I Am Legend (2007)
Will Smith’s character (Robert Neville) in I Am Legend is a man who has survived a viral outbreak that turns people into zombie cannibals in the post-apocalyptic present. Neville spends his days searching for a cure to the blood-borne disease, and trying not to go insane. More than a third of the audience said the theatrical ending – in which Neville sacrifices his life to save others – felt rushed and unsatisfying.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Then there is the ending of Christopher Nolan’s last Batman movie, where Bruce Wayne takes on a new villain, Bane. Bruce gives the city of Gotham a final last-ditch heroic burst and saves it. Only to have Bruce seemingly die, faking his own death and puttering off to Europe to live the life of a rich retiree. It was at the end of that movie that we all scratched our heads at the nuclear explosion, wondering how Bruce had somehow survived.
Signs (2002)
A family living on a farm discovers crop circles and are later the targets of an alien invasion. This story spends most of the movie building up tension and mystery. And then – it is revealed that the killer aliens’ weakness is water – kind of a lame reveal. They have the technology for transdimensional travel in giant exploratory starships, but they target this planet for attack with its toxic water.
The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
The Matrix Revolutions (2003), in which the main character, Neo, gives up his own life to forge some kind of peace between machines and human – doesn’t quite explain how he did so and just leaves it hanging there. A lot of questions were raised after – what was the point to the story? And what were all those philosophy lessons about?
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
The film, a science fiction classic directed by Spielberg, follows a robot boy who has been programmed to love his human mother. For most of the film, David attempts to figure out how to become real so that she’ll be able to love him back the way he loves her. The film’s setup promises a happy ending — until the film abruptly pivots and reveals a clone of David’s mother professing her love for David.
The turnaround is abrupt, producing an awkward scenario that has a group of pretty advanced robots give David a last day with his ailing mother (actually her clone). Some fans thought the film should have ended a few seconds earlier, and that a twist at the end — about what, exactly, was actually happening near the film’s conclusion — wasn’t necessary to drive the point home.
Remember Me (2010)
We witness the making of a young man, Tyler (played by Robert Pattinson), angst-ridden and estranged from his family, in the romantic drama Remember Me. It’s your standard character-based emotional love story — except for one big twist at the end of the film: Tyler died in his office at the World Trade Center, on 11 September 2001. For many critics, the sudden conclusion, coupling a love story with something that actually occurred, was a form of sacrilege and exploitation.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Coen Brothers pick up their thread of sympathetic killers in another neo-noir crime film: a lean picture in which a man finds a suitcase stuffed with cash. He fights a war of life and death against ruthless criminals. It’s a movie that leaves the audience hungry as it courses breathlessly to the very end: then, almost inevitably, the ending leaves the audience cold. The story does not conclude with a shoot-out but with a monologue – a monologue spoken retrospectively by a long-retired sheriff. The villain’s fate remains unknown. For many in the audience, the missing ending to the central story was exasperating.
The Village (2004)
The second film from a young M Night Shyamalan, The Village is a simple story of a small, insular village, which is shut out from the rest of the world by vast woods — where savage carnivorous creatures apparently live. But, little by little, we’re shown that the village is a part of the real world: the so-called monsters are a myth spun by the elders to keep their charges from snooping their way out.
Leaving the cinema that night, many viewers felt cheated — all this drama for nothing.
Savages (2012)
This bleak drug-dealer story depicts a couple of teen pot peddlers and their girlfriend who cross paths with some Mexican cartel. It ends badly. Very badly. The last three minutes, however, lay out not one ending, but two – the first a gore-drenched finale in which everyone gets splattered in a machine-gun fusillade, and the second in which everyone comes out clean.
Every last member of the audience is left scratching their head about what they had just witnessed.
The Devil Inside (2012)
This found-footage paranormal horror film is about a woman who finally gets to the truth behind her mother’s involvement in a deadly exorcism. It’s only at the height of tension that the film abruptly cuts to black, and then to the end credits. There is no end. The filmmakers left you with an open ending – they went ‘whoops’ and just switched their story off half-way through.
Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information.
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