10 Awful Endings That Screwed Great Movies (And What Should Have Happened Instead)

1. War Of The Worlds

I'm not talking about the whole aliens catch a cold ending that goes back across all the adaptions. That ending might be both clever and anti-climactic, but it does serve as one of the few ways humanity could get out of this situation alive. I'm talking about that moment Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier makes it to Boston with his daughter to a) find that his ex-wife's house has survived the turmoil completely untouched and b) his son Robbie runs out to greet them unscathed. Seeing the idyllic suburban street, with all the comforts of home, makes a mockery of all the horror Ferrier and his children endured. The death and destruction may have been widespread but his wife and in-laws got to sit it out from the comfort of their home. Steven Spielberg may do happy endings well, but in this film it just feels totally inappropriate and makes you wonder just what the point was. It also makes the 'global' catastrophe' feel very small. After the amazingly tense, uncomfortable sequences, we the audience endured, we needed some emotional release. But this just felt like a step too far. How It Should Have Ended: All the film needed to show us was that his ex-wife and her parents hadn't got out of the invasion without enduring a few harrowing events themselves. Perhaps instead, Boston is devastated but they are reunited in a refugee camp outside the city, battered and bruised but very much alive. The aliens are dead, but there is a sense that everything will need to be rebuilt. As for his son, perhaps he lost a limb in the struggle? That might sound callous, but if Spielberg didn't want to kill him off, he should have at least showed that these characters are going to have physical and emotional scars long after the film has ended, even if they did find each other in the end. Like this article? What do you make of these suggested endings? Let us know in the comments section below.