10 Movie Endings You Definitely Misunderstood The First Time

Years before movies like American Psycho and Inception with supposedly ambiguous endings related to uncertain realities, there was the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring sci-fi classic Total Recall.

Schwarzenegger plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who receives an implanted memory of a Mars adventure which soon enough takes a perilous turn, leaving both him and the audience unsure of whether what he's experiencing is a dream or reality.

The ending seems to leave audiences to decide for themselves if Quaid really was a secret agent who took part in the Mars revolution or merely a regular guy living out a dream in Rekall.

But given that the film's very final moments show Mars' now-blue sky, and the Mars dream Quaid selected at the start of story specifically pointed out a blue sky, the answer doesn't seem so up-for-debate.

Furthermore, director Paul Verhoeven stated on the film's DVD commentary that he preferred to believe that Quaid was indeed dreaming, and given that he literally shot the movie with that mindset, the outcome really speaks for itself.

We all want to believe that Quaid's experience was real, but given its highly fantastical and increasingly implausible nature, it's not very believable. In a 2012 interview, Verhoeven suggested that the ending was misinterpreted by so many because the notion of Quaid dreaming everything is unsatisfying:

"It's a dream, which is disturbing to the audience because they don't want that, of course. They want an adventure story, they don't want a fake adventure story. So they are on [Quaid's] side trying to believe that it's all true, while [Dr. Edgemar] is trying to tell him that it's not true."