Having invested both time and money in a trip to the movies, there’s arguably no better reward for all your efforts than to be given the chance to watch the main hero secure their dreams, rescue the girl, and save the day. Because when they succeed, it makes us feel good, and that - fundamentally - is what we like to take from our blockbusters, isn’t it?
As effective as it often is, nobody really enjoys watching a good movie protagonist meet their end at the hands of a villain. Sure, sometimes there’s absolutely no way for a character to survive a preposterous set of events without it seeming silly, and a self-sacrifice can be a great way to imbue a character with a dose of added coolness. But generally speaking, we like ‘em to survive. And when they do, it’s great. Unless, of course, there’s something that the movie isn’t telling you.
Yes, caught up in the happiness of a heroic finale, there’s a seriously good chance you might’ve missed some important (and dooming) implications contained in the 8 movies we’ve assembled here. Like, um, how that happy ending wasn’t so happy after all, and that the hero probably died horribly whilst the closing credits obnoxiously obscured your view…
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70 Comments
Give it a rest. Movies are not real life. You are getting a snapshot of a story that draws you in. Is the Von Trapp story true-Yes. Is the geography untrue-Yes, but cinematically it is a powerful bit to leave the audience. Matt Damon’s character dying off camera-This isn’t his story, nor do we know the full extent of his injuries.
Please don’t ever quote, “According to science.” This is a story. Showing the nuke explode 100 miles from Gotham without any fallout might be true; however, cinematically it doesn’t have a fraction of the same affect on the characters in the story or the audience. If you call into mind scientifically accuracy into film, every movie will fall apart. Slim Pickens riding the nuke in Dr. Strangelove, impossible in reality. Carey Grant running on Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest-Sorry. Ripley,Newt, and Bishop not being sucked into space when de pressurizing the cargo bay in Aliens-Please. Reality is heightened on camera in every movie.
You do know that these lists are just a bit of fun don’t you? You’re not supposed to take them seriously, they’re just supposed to be amusing! Lighten up
Pat is basically describing how silly and tryhard it looks to the readers when the writer tries to selectively ignore willing suspension of disbelief in an attempt at “a bit of fun” and being “amusing.”
Not to sound rude but I think most of us realized that Jaguar Paw died if the story were real, but stories take place in their fictional universe, maybe he did have a chance, maybe not. Maybe the writer intended for us to have a profound moment thinking about how futile his survival was, maybe the writer wanted us to enjoy the heroic tale for what it is.
Funny is what scherbatsky, bill and karl said in response, after This list basically implied we are uneducated saps that never paid attention in class or picked up a history book.
Not only that, Belle and the prince dying from the french revolution when in this alternative universe, there are magical talking appliances, where true love dispel transformation magic, that’s forced.
Guess it’s just not our sense of humor.
Nothing wrong with raising a continuing trend of silly writing and bad science. Yes, super hero movies suspend belief up to a point, but they feel so much more worthwhile when that suspension is as limited as possible. Personally I do not like seeing my action heroes surviving nuclear blasts, whether in a refrigerator or not.
“Lighten up,” the rallying cry for crappy writers’ apologists. Just because you label something a joke doesn’t oblige the reader to find it entertaining or to give its stupid premise a pass.
@Dan: The Spanish arrival was the titular apocalypse. The movie preceding it was just their average life. The twist was for US – not the characters.
Wow Pat, I bet you’re a really fun person to be around. How’s being a loser working out for you?
Well, Captain Willard was already out bound when the airstrike came in with lance. PBR streetgang, as the callsign was, was already out of the blast area when the bombs dropped. Fun fact: that was a real B-52 strike at the movies end, it ended up being cheaper to bomb the set then take it down and the airforce agreed to do it. So literally he was out of the way too.
driver is alive. Drive is based on a novel and theres a second one. he didnt die
Thank you! you just made my day
I know someone above said drive was based on a novel and he doesn’t die in the books, but… I felt the movie pretty much implied he was gonna just drive off till he bled out and he was a dead man walking…. I think either way it was a draw your own conclusion ending…
As for Jaguar Paw…. That was kind of the point of the ending wasn’t it? Pretty much showing how ultimately futile his fight for life was and how his real enemy was yet unknown to him… Pretty much the movie pretty much put in big bold letters “it doesnt matter because they’ll all be killed by the spanish anyway!” I think just about every knows what happened after they arived and I think the film was counting on that to connect the dots…
Tsk, still no Gattaca? I really think it should be on a list like this. There’s no way he was going to survive that trip into space with his dodgy heart.
I thought they implied that he did die in the ending..
Since the atom bomb in Batman was made from a potential clean energy source. There will be no nuclear fallout
Actually they make a point in the movie to tell you when the core is removed it becomes unstable, thus it cannot be clean.
It’ll detonate before it can destabilize.
Destabilization is what causes it to detonate, hence the time ticking down till it becomes unstable-do your research
The only byproduct of a nuclear fusion reaction is energy and water. Nuclear fission causes fallout, and the movie clearly states that the reactor is a nuclear fusion reactor.
Actually, when nuclear wapons are detonated high above the ground, there is very little fallout. Fallout is the result of the neutron radiation from a bomb turning dirt radioactive. This happens much more when the bomb detonates on the ground.
Drive has just been ruined for me.
It shouldn’t be. The author of Drive wrote a sequel, so obviously Driver survives.
He survives in the book, but that’s because he doesn’t get stabbed.
Von Trapp’s in Nazi HQ—nope that movie was based on the true story of the family Von Trapp and their escape. It wasn’t easy, but the entire family made it.
Did you even bother to read the article? He states the real Von Trapp’s did survive.
About TDKR. We never know what actually happened with Bruce, was the scene in Italy real or fiction? Maybe, and I kinda hope this plays out. Superman saved batman and took most of the nuclear blow. Tough i cant recall the explosion while typing this. This is pure my fantasy on this particulat plot and how it will play out. Only timr can tell.
It’s heavily implied that Bruce was actually alive in the ending of TDKR. There’s the scene where they talk about how the auto-pilot had already been installed, implying once again that Bruce wasn’t piloting the jet when it exploded.
Holy cow, TDKR wasn’t Inception!!! The ending was not ambiguous. Bruce is alive and well. Alfred seeing him (and the audience!!) is enough evidence, BUT he also let Lucious and Gordon know he was still alive by fixing the Bat signal and showing that the auto pilot was indeed fixed months before the blast. DUH!
You do know that the Von Trapp story is a true one right? and that they all survived!
You know in the movie they head the opposite way as they did in real life right?
The French Revolution… not all nobles died in that one. In fact, most survived one way or another. Some even became part of the revolution, as it was mostly a movement against the monarchy itself, and those who supported it, than against the nobles.
Also, most of those nobles who died were parisian royalists. Those on the country-side or in other cities fared a lot better.
Thank you!
I think this is hilarious, my hubby is forever pointing out these issues with movies. I tell him it’s just a movie, he looks at me as if to say ‘if they were really smart they would put more time into a better ending instead it looks like they were all tired and wanted to go home’. Thanks for the chuckles.
Also most of the beheadings happened in the urban areas, not the country. Also, they could like so many other nobles did- flee. England and Germany were refuges to many French nobles.
In the novel version of True Grit LaBoeuf survives
I’m not a nuclear scientist, but the bomb in the movie was based on fusion and probably ran on hydrogen rather than a radioactive material. The explosion might have caused a great burst of gamma-rays but the left overs would have been close to harmless
Exactly what I was gonna point out.
In TDKR, what fallout would there be? Fallout requires some material to actually be consumed and then “fall-out”. Soil, buildings, stuff like that. If Bats ejected (most likely is some sort of bat-pod) he most likely would have hit the water and been below the surface, protected from the direct rays of the blast. Little or know effect because everyone was far enough from the epicenter so that most of the blast effect would have been little more than a brief compression wave and most of that stopped by the outer layer of city buildings and then the baffle effect of the interior buildings.
The end was real, catwoman was wearing the missing pearls that Alfred didn’t even know about.
Chef was killed before he called in the strike. Willard called it in, and if it was B52s they would have taken hours to arrive.
Does the airstrike even happen?
Willard tells Chef to call in the airstrike at 2200 hours. I believe Willard’s reaction to Chef’s decapitation is supposed to point out that Kurtz killed Chef before 2200; hence, no airstrike called in. Also, Almighty (the radio name for the people carrying out the strike), is constantly trying to get a radio check with PBR Street Gang (Willard). Almighty would not attempt radio checks if they already knew the strike coordinates.
After killing Kurtz, Willard turns off the radio in the boat.
Nowadays, there are thousands of descendants of pre-Cortez Mexicans and Central Americans in the part of the world in which the movie takes place. I have met a number of of native Americans here in Costa Rica who claim they are “puros”, i.e., no European blood. Therefore, there could be many Mexican and Central American descendants of Jaguar Paw.
Also, fusion is inherently clean, hydrogen is fused into helium releasing high energy neutrons. The neutron may injure organic matter but leave no residual radiation. Early H bombs were triggered by an A bomb. But later H bomb testing made cleaner and cleaner bombs. My problem with this part of the movie is the “removing of the core” made the bomb unstable. I think removing the core would make it inert.
Additionally, in the remake of “Total Recall” when they ride the subway thru the center of the earth, they make it seem as if the only time they are freefall is exactly at the core. Not true! It would be the entire trip, not just at the core. A little off topic, but its the little things like this are what bother me.
there theoreticaly wouldn’t be any nuclear fall out. It’s a fusion reactor not a fision reactor. Cold Fusion theoreticaly is spose to be comepletely clean with no by product since it’s creating atoms rather than destroying them.
I loved this. I’m going to tell ALL the girls on HELLO GIGGLES about DRIVE.
You’re a freakin idiot mate! Batman DID NOT DIE in the dark night rises, don’t you remember when he was working on the batwing? He fixed autopilot, then flew it out to sea, jumped out and that’s why Alfred sees him at the end. Duh.
No! Willard can’t die! Yeah, a guy like that probably doesn’t end his life well.
I love the ones about Gotham, Von Trapps, and Beauty and the Beast. Freaking brilliant.
I really enjoyed this list. Well written and a fun and different take on the film list.
I believe that the bomb would be more that of an arc reactor detonating. Although Bane is smart, He’s no nuclear engineer. The initial explosion is that of a 4megaton bomb maybe but wiithout the yield and fallout. Essentially the clean reusable energy reactor turns itself into a clean nuke. Hence the blue and white blast and not dark red and black
Re: The Dark Knight Rises nuclear explosion.
From what we’re told on screen, it’s reasonable to assume that any fallout would be virtually nonexistent.
Fallout consists mainly of fission products, unburned fission fuel, and neutron-activated device residue, mixed with material vaporized in the fireball – particularly after a ground burst.
However, the explosion in TDKR involves no fissile material – it’s due to some kind of experimental fusion reactor. We’d be entirely justified in considering it a completely clean fusion burn. Some neutron activation of the device casing (and the Bat!) sounds plausible, but other than that there wouldn’t be much fallout to speak of. It’s not like a 1950′s ground test, generating a plume laced with unburned plutonium, strontium, cesium, iodine and other nasties.
(For that matter, modern weapons can be extremely clean – early designs were extremely inefficient and left most of their fission fuel unburned, whereas modern weapons can be optimized for a near complete burn. It might not be good for your health, but a modern high-altitude airburst isn’t going to generate a lethal plume of fallout.)
It is not a traditional nuclear reactor but a cold fusion generator. If one of these actually existed they would be all bang and not after affects. This is why Bruce Wayne was working on Cold Fusion because it was a truly Clean energy source.
I’d just like to point out:
Water is a fantastic insulator; go research Bikini Atoll – dudes are SCUBA diving there every day. Basic (maybe slightly advanced) science dictates that The Dark Knight Rises bit doesn’t play here.
excuse me sound of music is a real life story and the all survive. the only difference is that the captain is the nice parent and maria is mean (so mean that the girls runaway to get married.
Amusing lists or not… I’m pretty sure you’ve read WAY too far in to the whole situation. This is an example of a writer grasping at straws and not having anything to really write about.
The girl at the end of AVP, shes left in the middle of the artic with like no clothes just a stupid useless spear, she is DEAD!
Shane probably doesn’t survive til morning. He rides out of town, into a cold night with a serious gunshot wound in his side.
Shane probably does not survive til morning. He rides off into a cold night with a gunshot wound (fired from close range) in his side.
The Ewoks – After the Battle of Endor, that moon would have been littered with Imperial hardware, weapons, and vehicles. And the Ewoks must vaguely know how to use the Imperial rifles since they saw the Stormtroopers firing them and we saw an Ewok carrying one during the battle. Let the bloodbath begin.
Terrible article just desperate to grab cheepo links. Boo!
I don’t know if anyone has pointed this out yet, but in batman the thing that exploded was a fusion reactor, not a fission reactor. A fission bomb works by creating a chain reaction which splits heavy radioactive elements like uranium or plutonium, and the fallout consists of all the radioactive atoms that didn’t get busted. A fusion reaction, on the other hand, works by fusing together light non-radioactive isotopes into helium. There’s an initial burst of gamma radiation (along with the really bright flash) which in the movie would have knocked out every electrical circuit in the eastern seaboard, but no radioactive fallout would remain.
very good list, though i think Beauty and the Beast doesn’t really deserve number one (if they’re in any particular order) seeing as the time period is not very specific, and even if they would probably die at a young age anyway. If you think about it pretty much all the disney princesses were likely to die in child birth anyway. (the ones that got sequels are just lucky to be alive …)We all know what happened to Pocahontas
The real people who need to be worried at the end of “Sound of Music” are the ones that actually helped the Von Trapp family escape!
Given that, in Beauty and the Beast, an entire town’s worth of people who live within WALKING DISTANCE to that enormous castle were completely oblivious to it for at least a decade, I doubt that the French Revolution would affect them at all.
Ok just for your info the Von trapps were a real family and the movie was based on thier lives. They actualy did most of what happened in the movie and they all lived thru the journey to switzerland with no deaths. Thier decendants live on today. Hooray for research try it sometime.
You’re a moron. Try actually reading the article where the writer mentions all this. Except he manages to actually correctly state that they escaped to Italy, not Switzerland. Hooray for reading, try it sometime!
bro you got your timeline totally wrong man in apocalypse now they get there then willard tells chef to call in the airstrike if he’s not back in time. Then willard gets taken prisoner, then without knowing if chef called in the airstrike or not we find out that he doesn’t have a head, implying that he was killed before making the call and then willard is set free… i think
We’re not using the Z word!
Well I think the author of the article got it wrong with Batman DKR. Essentially in the movie, the scientist Pavel states that the bomb at hand is a neutron bomb. Neutron bombs differ from regular atom bombs in that they do not have the same nuclear fallout and radiation levels. Neutron bombs have considerably lower radiation and fallout levels. Now I am not saying that this would mean that Gotham escaped any residual nuclear fallout from the explosion, but it is plausible (even though it might be a stretch) that the neutron bomb was concentrated enough to have extremely low levels of fallout radiation.
I’ll just pick one to argue the point. In Shaun of the Dead, loads of zombies are, for lack of a better word, alive at the end, the cocky kid from the electric shop (rafe spall) pushes trollies, the woman on the talk show still in love with her zombie husband, the childrens tele where the zombies harnessed to a bungee try to get the meat… So Shaun isn’t the only person threatening a second zombie outbreak. But as others have said, They’re just movies.
I love these lists (including this one), but the Von Trapp family actually existed, and “The Sound of Music” is based on their story. Granted, they probably didn’t skip around singing songs all the time, but they did survive the war in the mountains.
No they did not survive in the mountains because in real life they were never in the mountains. The family did not secretly escape over the Alps to freedom in Switzerland, carrying their suitcases and musical instruments. As daughter Maria said in a 2003 interview printed in Opera News, “We did tell people that we were going to America to sing. And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing.”
The von Trapps traveled to Italy, not Switzerland. Georg was born in Zadar (now in Croatia), which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zadar became part of Italy in 1920, and Georg was thus an Italian citizen, and his wife and children as well. The family had a contract with an American booking agent when they left Austria. They contacted the agent from Italy and requested fare to America.
They did not survive the war in the mountains because they were never in the mountains. The family did not secretly escape over the Alps to freedom in Switzerland, carrying their suitcases and musical instruments. As daughter Maria said in a 2003 interview printed in Opera News, “We did tell people that we were going to America to sing. And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing.”
The von Trapps traveled to Italy, not Switzerland. Georg was born in Zadar (now in Croatia), which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zadar became part of Italy in 1920, and Georg was thus an Italian citizen, and his wife and children as well. The family had a contract with an American booking agent when they left Austria. They contacted the agent from Italy and requested fare to America.