10 Movie Endings You Definitely Misunderstood The First Time
2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
There are few movie endings more pervasively and intimately misunderstood than that of Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, despite the film pretty much telling you everything you need to know.
The ending takes place 2000 years in the future, where humanity is now extinct and childlike android David (Haley Joel Osment) is excavated from a glacial Coney Island by strange humanoid-looking creatures.
Many simply pawned these entities off as aliens who'd come to visit Earth on the basis of how they look, but they're in fact highly advanced Mecha known as Specialists, who are desperate to learn more about their human creators.
The film does basically explain this all to the audience, but that didn't stop many taking the Mecha at literal face value during their first viewing, by seeing the creatures' form and assuming them to be extraterrestrials.
A.I. is, perhaps more than any other film on this list, one you should absolutely watch twice just to soak in all the details, and it's little surprise that numerous prominent critics - including Mark Kermode - went on to re-evaluate its quality after revisiting it years later.