Mad Max Fury Road. They defeat the tyrant, and get the control of the water valves. Then they open the valves and seemingly keep them open. One problem, how long is the water reservoir gonna last now?
Logan’s Run. The city dwellers are freed from the computer’s iron-fisted rule, and Carrousel. But their city is in ruins, and thinks to the computer providing everything. They don’t know how to live without it. The city dwellers are going to start dying off real fast.
The Land Before Time. They’re still all going to get hit with a meteor
Well, yeah, but so are we. If we’re lucky enough to last so long.
In Small Soldiers, the whole problem starts when a corporation being lazy and and lacking any regulation puts military grade AI chips in a bunch of children’s toys. In the end, the CEO flies in on a helicopter, writes everyone a check for their silence, and fucks off scot-free.
It’s not a happy ending, but quite realistic.
The Good Place is one of the best shows ever but in the end they basically just re-invent mortality. In the real world you die and we don’t know what happens, in the fiction at the end of the show you die and then spend some time aligning yourself to the standard the main characters set, and when you eventually align with their morals for long enough you either stick around and atrophy until you’re a forgetful idiot or you…die, and we don’t know what happens.
The viewers of the show see bits of Eleanor falling to Earth and inspiring people but the characters do not know what happens.
If you want to get deeper, Michael the demon is granted mortality which means it can be done, it is shown as a special exception but over the course of infinite time either all demons will earn special exceptions and humans will eventually die and be unable to progress through the afterlife because there are no demons left to guide them through, or that doesn’t happen in which case humanity will die out first and the demons will be left with nothing to do for eternity because all humans will eventually work through the system and disappear.
Hard disagree. The ending for that show makes total sense.
On a slight tangent, how come in the Mad Max movies (not the first one) the ‘societies’ he encounters seem to be the products of multi-generational effort, especially Fury Road.
In the first one, there’s a more or less functional world almost as we know it. Then he goes out into the deserts and it’s like 100 years passes.
Max is not just one guy. He is an amalgamation of road warriors remembered in legends by the post-apocalyptic societies they helped
I feel like that’s the official answer that they came up with to explain the differences in the settings between the films. It works, but only because there was a problem for it to fix.
That’s one way to interpret it, but I don’t think the movies ever actually tell us that. The game certainly suggests something else entirely.
I love how the video game does it. It makes more sense Max is a doomed soul forever wandering the wasteland never able to rest. And how all the time has passed but he still remembers earth before
That bothered me too. I binged them all before Fury Road and it was a real whiplash to go from “All the houses are smashed up, there’s bits of siding everywhere and everyone has guns” to “These people live their whole lives on stilts in a fetid swamp like some sort of crazy flamingo men, but that doesn’t matter right now, keep driving”. It seems like more time would have to pass.
Two things here explain this for me. One someone already mentioned I don’t believe Max is one person I think he is a legendary figure that gets merged into one person as people talk about their local heroes. The other is I always viewed the first movie as one of the holdouts of old civilization. For whatever reason that region had the resources to be in a more normal state for longer. When Max fucks off into the desert he’s going deeper into areas that are more desperate and have been hit harder by everything. We don’t know the full landscape of everything. The bat shit stuff we seen in later movies could be relatively isolated even but the society that does remain could be more like city states that dont have the power to go in and control the wild areas.
Max is a pseudo-mythological figure. It’s never clear in the movies how much time has passed. Word of writers says that he’s multiple people retold as one person in retrospective story, but the movies don’t show that so you can take or leave it. The game has him as an immortal doomed soul.
Whatever is the case, I think it’s pretty clear we’re not supposed to take the story we’re told about Max via the movies as told completely faithfully.
Heh heh… I wasn’t suggesting it was a documentary.
Snowpiercer: Sure, there’s some evidence the world is warming, but at current there are two people, a bear, and no real shelter other than a rapidly cooling train. Just how long do they expect to survive?
The Graduate: Ends with the famous fading smile. Sure, you ran off together… now what?
Morbius: The central conflict of the movie is that the vampires who drink real blood go feral but are more powerful, and those who drink artificial blood are weaker but in control. Morbius is under time pressure because the artificial blood is becoming less and less effective, so he’ll eventually have to drink the red blood or die. He got a temporary victory killing Matt Smith, but due to the incompetence of the studio the actual real conflict of the movie is never actually resolved.
I always interpreted Snowpiercer (the movie) as being somewhat ambiguous about whether there were other people. We only have the word of people we already know are authoritarians that lie to keep order.
And the presence of a large carnivore at the end implies the food chain is healthy all the way down.
Starship Troopers. The bugs weren’t actually aggressors, and the big one they caught at the end was just scared and sort of cute.
The main character started as a neutral, somewhat open minded guy and ended up a heartless war machine who drank the fascist kool aid and helped recruit new soldiers for their unjust causes.
Well, thats the point of the movie. To show how militarism and xenophobia lead to fascism and how it just destroys people and their lifes
Samurai Commando Mission 1549 (spoilers for an obscure movie follow)
The Japanese self defence force gets sent back in time to defend the future from the japanese self-defense force sent earlier back in time who is trying to derail history for… no reason really. This is apparently destroying time itself by altering history!
They stop them by blowing up a bunch of stuff and leaving tons of modern tech (including a nuclear weapon, helicopters, tanks, tons of automatic weapons, and an entire oil refinery) in feudal Japan. The movie suddenly ends on a freeze-frame with characters smiling, but none of these issues addressed, which I always understood to mean that they failed and time was destroyed, leaving them forever frozen in that moment.
The movie was unexpectedly hilarious overall. The guy that hosts Iron Chef is in that movie, and is the best character.
The Cat from Outer Space.
Poor cat with superior intelligence now stuck on this planet with us humans.
It’s been about 30 years, but didn’t he get himself a nice dumb girlfriend cat? Maybe he was one of the idiots on his cat planet and now he’s just happier not being low tier.
I didn’t consider that maybe he was low tier and it was a status upgrade for him. I’ll take it.
The vast majority of Earther cats believe themselves to be stuck in this quandary.
Probably, but at least they also believe they are gods here.
Title gore
Also fun fact! This is Lemmy! We can edit post titles!
Japan has a word which I forget, but it means “Furry Bad End”, which refers to any “Happy” ending where a cool animal character turns back into a boring human; e.g. Beauty and the Beast.
The ending of ‘Inception’ is the big hol-up moment. It kind of happy, but we’re not getting the answer how real it is.
The ending of ‘The Sopranos’ is very ‘happy-not-happy’. Despite speculations
spoiler
did was Tony killed or not
:::. I mean, he is main character, and still he is a mafia boss, so could there be really good ending?I also think that the happy ending of the ‘E.T.’ not happy at all. Even if federal government would be good to them, how would those children live their normal lives after all those events?
The ending of Makoto Shinkai’s ‘Weathering with you’ is kinda happy but for real is definitely not. The main couple is together but the price of it is Tokyo drowned.
Inception: the end is real. His totem wasn’t the top like we were led to believe, it’s his wedding ring. He’s only wearing it in dreams and doesn’t have it on when he sees his kids.
Wasn’t it in the end of Inception that the wheel or whatever wobbles which meant that they’re still in a dream? I feel like I remember thinking that the ending isn’t real due to it.
AFAIK it symbolises him choosing to live the dream and surrendering his token, instead of waking up to the harsh reality.
No, if anything the way you can tell you are in a dream is because the top spins forever and never starts wobbling; the way he got his wife to eventually concede that she was in a dream was by setting the top in a perpetual spin so that she stumbled upon it still spinning.
The significance of the ending is not that he is still in a dream but that he is so content with the situation that he stops caring whether he is in a dream or not. (Actually, in fairness that is not quite true either; I’ve heard that basically the ending is more Nolan trolling the audience than anything of narrative significance.)
I’ve never heard that take before, cool! I’ve always loved the final cut in inception, because I felt that I just had to choose to believe that it was a happy ending. I also like the interpretation that by the end he no longer cares whether he is in a dream or not. But I just really want to believe that the top is actually about to fall when the last scene cuts.
Exactly but I think it’s opposite. The top kept spinning, seemingly endlessly, which wouldn’t happen in real life.
