15 Sci-Fi Movie Endings That Would Have Changed Everything

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil takes the humour of the director’s other work and twists it into a film that’s part British work caper and part Kafkan nightmare, teetering between hilarious and disturbing from beginning to end.

Jonathan Pryce is Sam Lowry, a downtrodden white-collar worker whose position within the bureaucracy seems simultaneously precarious and inescapable. Sam dreams of soaring on angel’s wings and finding love with a mysterious woman – a far cry from the drudgery of his daily life, working under the fist of an inefficient, yet all-seeing system, ruled by the hollow wants of hyper-consumerism. A chance encounter with freelance air-con engineer Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), and the literal woman of his dreams, truck driver Jill Layton (Kim Greist), lead Sam ever-deeper into the world he’s been skating the surface of, to the point he can no longer escape.

Gilliam’s final tongue-in-cheek blow is to present us with Sam’s liberation. Caught by the government and tortured, he’s saved by Tuttle, and swept away by Jill, driving off into the sunset, until… we discover he’s still in the government facility, and has been driven insane. It’s a brutal one-two, and US distributor Universal did their best to make sure it didn’t happen, battling Gilliam to release their version, in which the happy ending is real.

A lengthy dispute between director and studio prevented the film’s release for some time, before Universal relented, using the publicity generated in the interim to sell the film, even without a Hollywood ending.