4. Goodbye, Old People
Having realised that their movie was populated with a psychotic amount of death, thousands dying every minute, the filmmakers needed to find a way to make the tsunami meaningfully tragic for the end-of-Act-2 downbeat. How to do it? Wipe out some old people. A dotty elderly couple look behind them, and see the tsunami coming for them. They embrace in a final moment of tenderness before the end, borrowing a page from the Titanic playbook of audience manipulation. If you need a carnage-hungry audience to suddenly become self-reflective and full of feelings, show some old people resigning themselves to their fate.