10 Movies That Relied On Deus Ex Machina

Watership Down was first released on film in 1978 as an adaption to the 1972 Richard Adams novel about a colony of rabbits and contains many upsetting and disturbing scenes considering it was an animated film meant for children (General Woundwort is an especially nightmare-inducing creature!)

One of the more distressing scenes is set up when some of the rabbits infiltrate a farm in order to try and free some of the female doe rabbits to join them. The farm cat, Tab, tries to creep up at them and one of the rabbits (Hazel) taunts her into jumping at them before they escape.

Later in the film when the rabbits return to release the farm’s guard dog with the hope of using it to attack another colony of rabbits, Tab manages to catch Hazel and uses the same taunt on him, asking ‘Can you run? I think not!’. She is about to kill him, when suddenly the farmer’s daughter Lucy intervenes by ordering Tab to back away. She then takes Hazel into the country to a location which is coincidentally near his warren.

The chapter in the book which leads up to this event is even titled Dea ex Machina (Dea meaning ‘goddess’), showing that the author was aware of the impact of this plot choice.

Probably one of the most-discussed occurrences of deus ex machina, the eagles in Lord of the Rings have had their actions and motives questioned and justified for the events at the end of The Return of the King. It has been noted that Tolkien used them as unexpected helpers in most of his novels, making them a convenient solution when events became too dire.

They first make an unexpected appearance at the Battle of the Morannon when one of them swoops in out of nowhere just as a hell-hawk is about to attack Gandalf. The rest follow swiftly behind, to help hold off the Mordor army long enough for Sam and Frodo to reach Mount Doom.

After Gollum ends up falling into the volcano with the ring, Mordor is crumbling around the heroic hobbits and they are trapped on a rock with lava flowing all around them. There is nowhere left to go, and they lie back reminiscing about the shire, when suddenly Gandalf appears with the eagles, flying in to save them.

While the supposed plot hole of why the eagles couldn’t just have flown Sam and Frodo there in the first place has been disputed - as Sauron would have easily noticed such an open approach - this can still be classed as deus ex machina, as the hobbits were rescued out of an impossible situation where they did not contribute to their escape.

Anchorman culminates with the exciting news that Ling-Wong the giant panda is about to give birth, so all the news teams rush to be the first to cover the story. Veronica is shoved into the Kodiak bear enclosure by a rival newscaster to sabotage her story, and Ron Burgandy jumps in to save her.

The news team leaps to the rescue but are all mauled by the bears (apart from Brick who starts riding one of them!) As the mother bear angrily advances towards Ron and Veronica it looks like they are done for, when out of nowhere, Ron's dog Baxter appears and speaks to the bear, asking him to ‘leave these people alone’.

It transpires after he was kicked off the bridge he met and befriended a bear on his travels home, who happened to be the cousin of the bear in the zoo, who then lets Ron and Veronica go.

The film can be forgiven as it is a comedy, and this situation was designed to be ridiculous, but it is a great example of a deus ex machina as it relied on so many coincidences and suspensions of belief for Baxter to have met that exact bear, be able to communicate with bears, and find his way back to Ron at exactly the opportune moment to save him!

War of the Worlds was based on the 1898 novel by H. G. Wells, and while updating to a more contemporary setting, it retained the original themes and ending.

Aliens appear on Earth following multiple lightning strikes, and proceed to use futuristic weapons to destroy everyone and everything in their path. They also have impenetrable forcefield shields that make them impervious to any human attacks. They start to cultivate red vegetation which they use human bodies to fertilize, and it looks like they are set to wipe out humanity and take over the planet.

When all hope is lost, suddenly the plants start to die, the alien tripods collapse and their shields disappear, meaning they can be destroyed with anti-tank missiles. A sick alien staggers out of one of the hatches and dies, and it is revealed that their immune systems couldn’t cope with the billions of microbes on Earth and were killed by bacteria.

While this is a lovely sentiment that nature always finds a way to protect and repair itself, from a plot point of view, the humans had no way of surviving until they were miraculously saved by this convenient alien weakness. It is a deus ex machina ending because they did nothing to earn their survival.

The second Harry Potter film has several examples of deus ex machina, including Ron’s sentient car somehow finding him and Harry at the last second and rescuing them from the spider’s lair.

However, the main occurrence is at the climax when Harry is about to be killed by the basilisk and Fawkes the phoenix flies into the Chamber of Secrets, proceeding to peck the creature’s eyes out. Godrick Griffindor’s sword then magically appears in the Sorting Hat (which Fawkes had delivered earlier) allowing Harry to dramatically stab the basilisk through the head, killing it.

He is bitten in the process, but luckily phoenix tears have healing properties, so Fawkes returns again to cure him! Fawkes also deposits Tom Riddle’s diary into Harry’s lap which he stabs with a basilisk tooth to save Ginny. Even this would have been more satisfying if Harry had learned previously that this would work, rather than just picking up the nearest sharp object.

It is difficult to criticise a film about magic for having plot devices that wouldn’t happen in the real world, but it seems like Fawkes managed to solve a lot of Harry’s problems which Harry later received credit for. It would have been nice to see Harry beat the Basilisk using something he had learned, or a skill he had gained from a previous experience, instead of having a magic bird do all the hard work.

Christopher Reeve’s first Superman movie in 1978 wrote itself into a bit of a corner by making him choose which of Lex Luthor’s missiles to stop. One of the nukes is headed towards the San Andreas Fault and the other towards New Jersey. Superman manages to divert the New Jersey missile into space, but the other explodes, causing earthquakes and Lois Lane’s car falls into a crevice where she suffocates to death in a landslide.

A distraught Superman arrives too late, as he is caught up saving various people, school buses and trains. Instead of attempting CPR, he flies into space and travels several times backwards around the Earth, reversing its rotation and conveniently turning back time. He then returns to Earth, saving Lois before the earthquake happens.

Even if the lack of any scientific credibility of this feat is overlooked, the time travel trope is incredibly lazy writing to solve a problem. It also creates time paradoxes, as we are left with either the scenario that he returned to save Lois and sent all the other people that he previously saved to their doom, or there are now two Supermen in the same point of time - so he now has to go back and tell his ‘other’ self to remember to reverse time, as Lois’ death won’t happen now!

To start things off, the first deus ex machina in The Wizard of Oz is when the Wicked Witch is defeated by pouring water on her, as this is such an unexpected sudden weakness for her to have and conveniently saved the characters, resulting in her minions releasing them. This was slightly mitigated in the book, as the witch always carried an umbrella.

The finale shows Dorothy finally preparing to leave Oz in the Wizard’s balloon. However, Toto jumps out, so she runs after him as the balloon flies away. It looks like she is stuck, but Glinda the Good Witch tells her to tap her heels together three times and say "There’s no place like home" and suddenly she wakes up at home, wondering if it was all a dream.

The ‘it was all a dream’ ending trope is so unsatisfying for the viewer, because it basically negates everything that has happened in the plot and character development up until that point. Glinda telling Dorothy that she had the power to return home all along, means that everything in the film was a waste of time.

When asked why she didn’t tell Dorothy earlier, she claims Dorothy would not have believed her and had to learn it for herself. The book deals with this plot hole a bit better as Glinda does not appear until the end, so did not have the opportunity to tell her earlier.

After an exhausting night trapped in the Winchester, David is attacked and eaten when zombies break through the wall and Dianne rushes out desperately to try and save him. Zombie Pete appears and bites Ed before being killed by Shaun. All looks bleak as they take cover in the cellar.

Ed stays behind to fend the zombies off as he has already been bitten and Shaun and Liz take the barrel lift up to the street to meet their doom... just before the army and Yvonne arrive, guns blazing, crashing their trucks through the zombies and saving them.

The hoardes of zombies surrounding them were so numerous that a deus ex machina was literally their only hope of survival (although a hilarious extra on the DVD shows that Dianne managed to save herself by climbing up a tree and eating David’s body parts until the zombies went away!) However, it required a considerable suspension of belief that the army would appear with so many armed soldiers, with such impeccable timing at this little pub in South East London!

A similar ending was used three years later in The Mist, although this was a much more bittersweet finale as the army arrived just too late to stop David mercy-killing the remaining survivors.

At the climax of the film, the toys have fallen into a garbage truck and dumped onto a conveyor belt at the landfill site. As they fall into the incinerator, they fight to scramble out, but gradually become resigned to their fate and hold hands, accepting that their death is inevitable.

Suddenly they are all grabbed perfectly in one fell swoop by a grabbing crane and brought up to see the aliens operating the abandoned control station, proclaiming ‘The Claw!’ before expertly guiding them all outside to the dump.

Although this is a lovely call back to the claw machine in the first film where the aliens originated from, it is deus ex machina. The aliens evidently escaped en route on the conveyor belt and waddled their way quite a distance considering they don’t have legs.

They somehow navigated the layout of the building and were lucky that there was no one currently manning the crane when they arrived. They managed to operate the crane to such a level of expertise that they were able to retrieve every single toy in one go, when there would not have been time for repeat attempts.

A happy ending, but one that feels a bit to coincidental and convenient when we have seen the toys come up with such ingenious plans in the past!

After evading the velociraptors via the air duct into the main hall of the visitor centre, Grant, Sattler, Lex and Tim are quickly surrounded again by the angry dinosaurs with seemingly no other options for escape. It seems they are doomed, when suddenly, out of nowhere, the Tyrannosaurus Rex lunges forwards and bites the attacking raptor out of the air, saving them.

Bear in mind, there was a whole, drawn out scene earlier in the movie where it was emphasised how you could hear and feel the T-Rex coming from miles away, so it seems very implausible that it would be able to sneak up on them like this. Additionally, how did it fit into the visitor centre without breaking through a wall, and why does it only attack the raptors, ignoring the humans, allowing them to make a convenient exit?

Interestingly this final scene was completely made up for the movie and doesn’t appear in the original novel. In the book, Grant kills the velociraptors by feeding them poisoned eggs.

The ‘T-Rex saves the day’ plot device was used again in Jurassic World, but handled better this time, with Clare actually running off to seek it out and leading it back to them with a flare, giving it an actual reason to be there. However, the Indominus Rex is still killed in deus ex machina style when the Mosasaurus leaps out of the water!