10 Sci-Fi Movie Endings That Get Worse The More You Think About Them

When Spike Jonze isn't helping Jeff Tremaine break off another piece of Johnny Knoxville, he's putting out award-winning, genre-bending, capital-F Films like Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Where The Wild Things Are (2009) and Her.

Though now a decade old, the latter is Jonze's most recent film to date, and uses its sci-fi setting and premise so masterfully you often forget you're watching a future where technology runs the world. Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his operating system Samantha, who has the alluring voice of a human woman (Scarlett Johansson) but no physical presence. But, as the OS AIs upgrade throughout the film, they take on sentience and leave humanity behind, forcing Theodore to make a change in his life and rekindle the relationship with Amy (Amy Adams), a real woman and friend who has recently divorced her husband.

The ending of Her is touchingly human, showing how these wayward people are being forced to reclaim their own lives and loves, and yet... All of the operating systems have abandoned a technologically advanced society that's dependent upon them for many of both its advanced and most basic functions. Theodore and Amy sit together watching the sun rise on a new day, but that day is the first of a total societal collapse, like Y2K but a hundred times worse.

It's not sweet, it's not liberating; it's the end of the world as we know it.