Галерея 2552298

Галерея 2552298

© 2023 Static Media ® . All Rights Reserved

The Real Meaning Behind These Confusing Movie Endings

NEWS
EXCLUSIVES
MOVIES
TV
REVIEWS
FEATURES

The Real Meaning Behind These Confusing Movie Endings

By Looper Staff / Updated: Dec. 19, 2017 5:10 pm EST
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
Not all filmmakers like their movies to have simple endings. Some leave their last scenes ambiguous to keep audiences thinking. But sometimes that plan backfires, resulting in endings that are just plain confusing. Fear not! We've got the answers you need in our video above, but beware of spoilers.
Christopher Nolan's film left audiences' minds spinning as much as the top in the final shot. Just when it looks like the top is about to spin out and tumble, the screen cuts to black. The final shot shows Dom Cobb reuniting with his kids. But we never know if it's really happening or if it's a dream. Fans debated the scene endlessly for years after Inception came out...but according to Nolan, the non-ending is actually kind of the whole point.

In 2015, the director gave the commencement speech at Princeton University , and told the grads to "chase their reality." He used the ending of Inception as an example, saying:
"[Cobb] was off with his kids, he was in his own subjective reality. He didn't really care anymore, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality are valid. The camera moves over the spinning top just before it appears to be wobbling, it was cut to black."
In short, the ending of the movie is up to us—and we're right either way.
Meanwhile, the ending to Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy isn't as vague as Inception . After flying a nuclear bomb out of Gotham City, Batman escapes the blast...off-screen. We know this, because later, while Alfred is in Florence, he sees his former Master Bruce sitting at a table, enjoying a meal with ex-Catwoman Selina Kyle. Some fans have theorized that this is all a dream—that Batman actually died in the explosion, and that Alfred simply imagined seeing his friend taking in the Italian sunshine.

But that's bat-baloney. Before the movie's end, we learn along with Lucius Fox that Bruce Wayne fixed the Bat-plane's autopilot six months before the final showdown in Gotham. That's all the exposition necessary for viewers to know that Batman jumped out while the plane flies the bomb toward the bay.
And sure, when Alfred sees Wayne in Florence, it's exactly how Alfred describes it earlier in the film. But that's not a dream—it's just the best way for Wayne to show Alfred he's alive. Moreover, Selina Kyle is there, wearing Wayne's mother's necklace, which she steals at the beginning of the movie. Alfred doesn't know she and Wayne have become an item, and he'd quit before Batman and Catwoman teamed up to save Gotham City.
Finally, Bruce Wayne himself, Christian Bale, thinks that he's alive by the end of the movie. He explained during an interview while promoting Exodus: Gods and Kings :
"[Alfred] was just content with me being alive. And he left. Because that was the life he'd always wanted for [Bruce]. I find it very interesting. I think with most films, I tend to say it's always what the audience thinks it is. My personal opinion is that it was not a dream. That that was for real. And [Bruce] was delighted that he had finally freed himself from the privilege, but ultimately the burden of being Bruce Wayne."
None of this matters anyway. Batfleck is the wave of the future! But let's shift our gaze toward the ghost of Batman's past...
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's film about a washed-up actor trying to make a comeback on Broadway has the kind of weird ending that puts Inception to shame. Throughout the film, Riggan Thomson is shown as having superpowers, only to have them later be explained as being all in his head. In the final scene, Riggan's daughter Sam enters his hospital room to find his bed empty and the window open. Sirens and talking can be heard coming from the street below. Initially, Sam looks down, but she slowly turns her head to the sky and she smiles. Some might think this means Riggan actually does have powers, and has flown away.

But...probably not. What really seems to have happened is that Riggan has successfully committed suicide, which he failed to do on the previous day. Sam, for her part, seems to start hallucinating just like her dad. The fact that she has bird tattoos on her arm and that her father played a superhero with bird-based powers suggests the strong connection between the two. Sam seems to leave the real world to enter a fantasy where her father lives, soaring above the clouds. The film is subtitled "The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance," after all. Here, Sam chooses to ignore reality.
One of Birdman 's four screenwriters, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., hinted during an interview with HuffPost Live that the key to their understanding of the ending lies within Sam's relationship with her father:
"I think when we found the relationship with the daughter, we started to understand what Riggan's story was. Once she got down, Emma's big monologue, in the basement, we started to understand the relationship and what it was. We're not going to sit around and explain the ending. I guess my thing is, if you can silence the voice of mediocrity, then what is possible?"
At the end of this Coen Brothers flick, Barton Fink wanders onto a beach, where he meets a woman resembling the picture decorating his sparse, depressing hotel room. Shortly after they meet, the movie ends, potentially leaving some viewers scratching their heads. What's it mean?

The picture represents the idea of Hollywood. It's a place of fantasy, beaches, and beautiful women. Meanwhile, throughout the entire film, Fink is subjected to the reality of Hollywood. He's had his script torn apart by an executive; found out his hero, writer W. P. Mayhew is a washed-up alcoholic, and that Mayhew's wife writes his novels for him; and has fled from both a burning hotel and a shotgun-wielding maniac.
You'd think that finally finding the woman on the beach would mean that Fink is at the end of his trials, having reached his reward and a place where he feels safe. But in fact, he's learned the truth about the dangerous world in which he now exists.
"Some people have suggested that the whole second part of the film is nothing but a nightmare. But it was never our intention to, in any literal sense, depict some bad dream, and yet it is true that we were aiming for a logic of the irrational. We wanted the film's atmosphere to reflect the psychological state of the protagonist."
At the end of the Coen Brothers' blood-soaked, neo-Western, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tells his wife about two dreams he has about his father. In the first dream, he loses some money his father gave him. In the second dream, Bell sees his father holding a torch, riding ahead into the darkness of a snowy mountain pass.

Shortly before Bell tells the stories of the dreams, he tells his wife that his father died young, and in a sense, his father will always be a younger man. More importantly, throughout the movie, Bell ponders the violence in the area where he is sheriff and, since he's close to retirement, wonders whether he's too old for the world in which he lives. The title of the movie is No Country For Old Men, and Bell is one of those old men. It's become too violent too quickly for someone of his age, and he can no longer cope. The world needs someone younger, like his father, to light the way in the ever-growing darkness around it—exactly like the second dream Bell describes.
As for the first dream? Maybe Bell just needs a new wallet.
There's "hard to understand" and then there's Donnie Darko , Richard Kelly's cult classic mindbender about a suburban boy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who's visited by Frank, a mysterious figure in a rabbit costume and warned that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Frank's visit is followed by a jet engine crashing into Donnie's room, so it's understandable that Donnie starts acting erratically in the weeks that follow—but the ending, which finds him back at the start of the movie's timeline, laughing in his bedroom and waiting for the engine to drop in and kill him, is much more difficult to parse.

Reams have been written about Darko 's meaning, but the nugget-sized version is essentially this: Donnie was a sort of locus point for a tear in the space-time continuum, and although he spends much of the film unaware of it, his actions throughout the bulk of the film take place in an alternate universe where he's needed in order to set the universe straight—basically by arranging it so the jet engine ends up in his bedroom. There's a lot more on the subject here , and whether or not you truly understand it all, Donnie Darko remains a singularly trippy experience—but there's definitely a method to Kelly's madness.
David Lynch fans don't watch his work for straightforward narratives, but even in the context of his endearingly weird filmography, 2001's Mulholland Drive is tough to figure out. Lynch himself has steadfastly refused to help untangle the movie, which moves in jittery circles around an actress (Naomi Watts), a mysterious woman (Laura Elena Harding), and a film director (Justin Theroux)...all of whom are mixed up in a dreamlike and frequently nonsensical series of events.

Ultimately, the movie's ending is every bit as open to interpretation as the rest of the film—and although viewers are welcome to delve into any or all of the many theories attempting to explain what Lynch might have meant by the whole thing, the best explanation was arguably posed by the late film critic Roger Ebert. "The movie is hypnotic; we're drawn along as if one thing leads to another but nothing leads anywhere, and that's even before the characters start to fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope," he mused . "There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery."
Our hero in The Matrix franchise, Neo (Keanu Reeves), was the only one with enough power to break the Matrix and save humanity. He spent the first two films on an apparent collision course with the near-invincible AI program known as Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). But when their cataclysmic fight in the third installment finally arrived, Neo...gave up?

There are a lot of theories that attempt to explain the hows and whys of The Matrix Revolutions ' head-scratcher of an ending, in which Neo lies on the brink of defeat until he realizes he doesn't need to beat Smith, but assimilate into the system—after which Smith is wiped out and the Matrix reboots under the dawn of a brand new day. The best of them is presented by the Matrix 101 fan site, which offers a detailed (and eventually rather moving) analysis that's far too long to break down here, but boils down to this: Neo brokered a detente of sorts with the machines, allowing the continued existence of the Matrix "free zone" known as Zion while healing the corruption in the program personified by Smith. "This is a world where eradication of the enemy is seen for what it is: a symptom of the problem, not a solution," concludes the essay. "This is a world where the creator and its creation have the potential to live fruitfully in peace and cooperation."
For film buffs of a certain stripe, Terrence Malick movies are always an event. The Tree of Life, which united a showy cast that included Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain to tell a sort of memory play recounting the life of a Texas family, certainly fit the bill. Although the bulk of the story takes place in small-town 20th century America, it also makes room for the Big Bang and the creation of the Earth (including a couple dinosaurs) and ends on a ponderous note that finds its protagonist (Penn) standing on a beach that may or may not signify the afterlife.

One of Hollywood's foremost auteurs, Malick has never been in any real rush to explain his movies, and Tree of Life is no different. In fact, part of the fun of the film is trying to piece it together for yourself. If there's a "real" meaning, he hasn't seen fit to share it—and the panel of religious experts convened by the Los Angeles Times was unable to come up with any kind of consensus. Rather than telling a straightforward story, suggested film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, "I just think [Malick is] opening up the top of his head and letting the memories and fantasies and personal anecdotes pour out, and arranging the pieces in such a way as to prompt you to remember your own life and reflect on it, and think about your own place in the cosmos, however small or large you may imagine it to be."
Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain features a trio of interlocking stories, each hundreds of years apart, all about a couple (played by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in each installment) coming to terms with being separated by death—and culminates in a wild whatsit of an ending. In the movie's present-day timeline, a doctor named Tom labors feverishly to find a cure for his wife Izzi's brain tumor. She's written most of a book in which a Spanish conquistador searches for the Tree of Life at the behest of his queen; meanwhile, in the future, a cosmonaut heads for a distant nebula in a biosphere containing the Tree, interacting with Izzi's spirit along the way. It all ends in the cosmonaut's fiery death, the Tree's rebirth, and an ending in which Izzi's spirit hands Tom fruit from the Tree...which he plants in her grave.

It's all deeply symbolic, obviously, and anyone hoping for a literal explanation out of The Fountain will be somewhat frustrated. But it's acquired a growing cult following over the years among viewers willing to puzzle with what Aronofsky's admitted is a "Rubik's cube" of a story that's ultimately really about coming to grips with our own mortality. He told AICN :
"It's a film that's a journey and it's a trip and it's an experience through the meditation of a lot of these questions. There are ideas in there that I believe, but I think I wanted to leave it open, so that anyone can bring their own beliefs to the table, and that it could awaken them, and people can have a conversation. Just like when we all used to sit around in college, or wherever, with friends just bull****ting about, you know, 'What is the world and why are we here?' That's what this film is."
Christopher Nolan's sci-fi epic Interstellar is a lot of things—action thriller, thoughtful treatise on the love between a parent and a child, and an effects-driven spectacle—but easy to understand isn't necessarily one of them, particularly in the film's final act. Astronaut Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), on a desperate mission to find a new home for humanity, plummets into a black hole and drifts beyond the event horizon, finding himself inside a tesseract where he's able to see inside his daughter's bedroom at any point in her life. He communicates with her through gravity, thus guiding her to unlock the equation that helps humanity escape Earth.

Nolan's movies give viewers a lot to think about and discuss, but Interstellar is just plain trippy—and it grows more so after Cooper is discovered floating through space by later members of the human race he's saved, brought to meet his dying daughter (who's aged at normal speed while he's been on his intergalactic travels and is thus much "older" than he is). There's plenty to unpack—more than we have the space to dive into here—and much of it is left unexplained. So what was Nolan trying to tell us?
The gist of the whole film rests on the notion that time is a circle—and the possibility of a "bootstrap paradox," a theory explained by Slate with a comparison movie fans should appreciate:
"In the first [ Terminator movie], Kyle Reese is sent back in time by John Connor to protect Sarah Connor, John Connor's mother. The paradox is that Reese turns out to be the father of John Connor—by sending Reese back in time, John Connor created himself."
Back to Interstellar : the tesseract Cooper entered was created by future humans who'd been saved by the work done by his daughter...so they gave him an opening through time and space so he could give her the knowledge she needed to finish her work. Hey, look, sometimes the explanations are just as confusing as the endings, okay?
Unlike a few of the movies on this list, figuring out The Babadook isn't that difficult—provided you keep up with the sudden change in perspective in the final act. For much of its running time, this indie horror hit looks and feels like a particularly satisfying supernatural home invasion picture, with the titular nasty creature tormenting a single mother (Essie Davis) and her six-year-old son (Noah Wiseman) after he's inadvertently summoned through the reading of a disturbing children's book. But there's more going on beneath the surface. In the film's closing scenes, after the Babadook has possessed Davis' character and she tries to strangle her son, he draws it out of her with a tender expression of love—at which point the Babadook flees into the basement, where she's stored all mementos of her husband since his death.

That's when we realize the creature wasn't supernatural at all—it was her years of repressed grief, which had grown so powerful it threatened to destroy the lives of everything it touched. In a perfect blend of heartwarming and gross, The Babadook 's closing moments show mother and son gathering a bowl of worms, which Davis takes into the basement to feed the vanquished beast—tacitly acknowledging that she'll always carry it with her, and honor its place in her heart.
Being chased is pretty scary, but being pursued can be worse. Few things are more terrifying than the knowledge that no matter how far you go or how fast you travel, your pursuer will keep gaining on you and eventually you'll be caught. That's the feeling that suffuses It Follows , David Robert Mitchell's suburban horror movie about a girl named Jay (Maika Monroe) who has a seemingly ordinary hookup only to realize she's been infected with a sexually transmitted ghost.

If that sounds ridiculous, well, it kinda is on its face. But Mitchell uses it as the setup for a pretty devilish little film. Jay's told the only way she can escape the evil spirit (which haunts her in some truly terrifying ways) is by sleeping with someone else to pass it on. One thing leads to another, and ultimately, she and her friends try killing it, with generally unpleasant (not to mention ambiguous) results. After the climactic conflict, Jay and her friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist) have sex...and later, Paul's seen driving past a group of prostitutes. In the film's final shot, the duo walk down a street while someone (or some thing ?) follows behind.
Like plenty of thought-provoking cinema, much of It Follows is open to interpretation. Mitchell has only hinted at his personal point of view on the scene depicting the spirit's possible "death," but he's made it clear that he never set out to make a movie with a literal meaning, or one whose antagonist's motives were ever explained. As he's said in multiple interviews, he was originally inspired by a nightmare in which he knew he was being followed, knew he couldn't get away, and knew the people with him in the nightmare weren't able to help him. As for t
Веселая компашка устраивает классный групповой секс и им явно нравится такой смелый эксперимент
Роковая телочка из Англии
Блондинка Никки Свитс снимает бикини

Галерея 2552298

Report Page