10 Movies Where The Good Guy & Bad Guy BOTH Lose
6. Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa's seminal Seven Samurai follows a group of desperate farmers who enlist a group of seven rōnin to take out the bandits who plot to steal their crops.
While the samurai epic concludes with the bandits indeed being fended off, it comes at a huge cost for the rōnin, with four of their number dying in the battle, leaving just three alive.
And if the point hasn't been hammered home yet, the final scene makes it abundantly clear that the samurai didn't win here. Kambei (Takashi Shimura) unforgettably tells Shichirōji (Daisuke Katō), "In the end we lost this battle too... I mean, the victory belongs to those peasants, not to us."
The crops may have been saved, but that provides little salve for the samurai, who mourn their fallen and remain very much without purpose, all while the villagers blissfully sing and plant their crops with little recognition of the sacrifices made for them.