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The Ten Worst Science Fiction Movie Endings
February 21st, 2008
I’ve been invited to participate in another sfsignal.com Mind-Meld event. I like these. They’re fun, and the spectrum of answers to the interesting science fiction questions make for fascinating reading. The question for next week is:
Which SciFi movie ending do you wish you could change?
Well, there are a lot. I decided I’d take my short list and discuss them here before writing my final response for sfsignal.
First, what makes for a good ending? The hallmark of a great movie ending is that it’s impossible to anticipate while watching it, but seems like the only ending possible in hindsight. It shouldn’t fall prey to sentimentality, at least not overly so, and should follow through with the power of the premise. Surprising, inevitable, memorable…some examples that come to mind include: A Boy and His Dog, 12 Monkeys, The Thing, Planet of the Apes (1968). I found a couple of lists here and here of great sf movie endings. A lot of sf movies have conventional endings, a little too pat and expected, but not weird or ugly.
My list of candidates have a number of problems, from being unintelligible to stupid to just wrong. I have some movies on this list I like a lot, most of them in fact, even though I have some issues with the endings. Warning. Spoilers likely ahead.
2001: The ending just doesn’t make sense unless you’ve read the book. I have, so it’s cool. But that’s not how to make a movie. Kubrik could have given more clues.
Contact: Was it really necessary to have the big government cover-up? That’s my real problem with the ending. Watching the academy awards that year when they showed the clip at the end with Ellie’s father, and the crowd laughing weirdly, I realized that the mainstream audience just didn’t quite get it.
Alien: A science point here. I don’t believe the alien should have blown up.
Blade Runner: This otherwise fine movie suffers from having too many endings, ranging from happy happy joy joy, to chilling. Which one is the real final cut? Stop pulling a George Lucas, Ridley Scott!
The Cold Equations: I’m talking about the 1996 sci-fi channel version here, where they changed the story from the original to explicitly make the tragedy the fault of the uncaring giant company. It’s not a terrible movie on it’s own, but the perversion of the originally intended ending gets it on this list.
Armageddon: This movie just sucked over all in my opinion, and changing the ending couldn’t hurt! Maybe the asteroid smacks into the Earth. That would be cool! Or Bruce Willis lets AJ die and goes back to tell Liv Tyler about it to an Aerosmith soundtrack. That would be cool, too! Space madness ho!
The Hulk: I’ll throw in a comic book movie here as sci fi since the ending sucked so badly. Next time, Ang Lee, have the fight in the day time so we can see what’s going on, okay?
Johnny Mnemonic: Having Keanu Reeves turn into another actor at the end might have helped, but too little too late. As cool as the original Gibson story was, the psychic dolphin just didn’t play well on the big screen.
Signs: SPOILIER, SPOILER. WTF? WTF? Goddamn farking WATER disintegrates alien flesh? No farking way. This is just so many brands of stupid I couldn’t believe it. Make it the song “Puberty Love” or anything else, would make more sense. How about a peanut allergy, M. Night?
Return of the Jedi: Ewoks, god damn it! Darth Vader happy good time. Too much…do not want!
What do you think?
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I think what’s so annoying about the ending of Contact is that the rest of the movie is so good and then they just go and take everything away by using such an awful, stupid ending that makes you go all WTF?!?!
It is a bit of a let down, I agree.
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[…] a list of the ten best science fiction movie endings. Nice post to bookend my own list of the ten worst science fiction movie endings. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
Following the internal link to a recent post leads here, so despite being way out of time, I will suggest a really bad sci-fi movie ending for your consideration. Total Recall. Creating an atmosphere for an entire planet in a couple of minutes before the protagonists’ blood boils forces the conclusion that it was all in Arnold’s head. That conclusion is forced if you care about scientific plausibility, anyway. When a constant underlying theme of the film is to create doubt about what is real and what is imagined, that’s not a good thing to do.
Yeah, taken as reality the ending of Total Recall doesn’t seem physically plausible. The question I have about it was whether or not the writer/director meant it to be plausible, and then, yes, that sort of question undermines the theme. Nice point.