10 Movies Where It Didn't Matter That The Hero Lost
These guys all found victory in defeat.
In the space of no more than a couple of hours, a good movie can not only present you with a strong character, but almost force you to make a connection with them. To genuinely care about the people on the screen is part of the magic of cinema.
These protagonists will face adversity and challenges throughout the story, and the majority of the time will ultimately win the day. Good triumphing over evil, the underdog grabbing the unlikely victory, etc. Though it's typically expected that the hero will be victorious, it's not always the case.
Not everything has a happy ending, and sometimes they come up short. This can be a devastating loss, like when the Avengers couldn't stop Thanos from snapping his finger. However, other times, there are more important parts of the story to be found than just winning.
Whether the real victory was in simply taking part, the opportunity to be a good person came at the expense of a trophy, or someone else was there to save the day in the end, heroes have suffered defeats that ultimately didn't matter.
10. A Great Old Joke - The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre
The saying goes that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Essentially, you take the bad that is thrown at you in life and you do your best to turn it into something positive. Sometimes a situation is only as good or as bad as you make it.
The ending to the 1948 John Huston movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, is a perfect example of this. The story follows three men who come together to go gold prospecting in Mexico, but the whole thing becomes an ordeal. The pull of the potential riches is too much for Fred Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) as he tries to kill Bob Curtin (Tim Holt) and steal everything.
Ultimately it's Dobbs that is killed, and the gold dust that Curtin and Howard (Walter Huston) had found ends up blowing away in the wind. They went through everything just to be no better off than when they started their journey.
The other way to look at their situation, however, the way that Curtin chose, was instead that they were no worse off. When he considered that Dobbs had lost his life, the fact that he was down only about 100 dollars wasn't really too bad. It didn't matter to Curtin and Howard that they lost all the gold simply because they didn't let it matter to them. Instead they took it as a great joke played by God, and to do something different with their lives instead.