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The Importance of Endings
(Spoiler Alert!) This post is about movie endings. So if I mention a movie, there is a very high chance that I will talk about its ending. So if you don’t want a movie that I mention spoiled, either stop reading, or skip the paragraph on it.
Sometimes, the ending of a movie is the most important part. It’s the emotional payoff and it wraps up the story that the audience has been following for the past two hours.
I recently watched Wind River, which was a gripping crime movie. Until the end. This was a movie that had tense and slow paced detective work to try to find the cause of death of a young woman. What would be expected at the end of this sort of movie is to see the main characters find the culprit and solve the case. But that isn’t what happens. I’m all for twists and unpredictability, but this film just resorts to a shootout between the main characters and some nameless thugs.
A change of pace that is this dramatic almost takes the viewer out of the movie. Sometimes, it’s almost as if the filmmakers feel like they need to add something “exciting” at the end to make the viewers happy.
I felt the same way last year when I watched Baby Driver. This was such an excellent, well-edited, and well-acted movie up until the last twenty minutes or so. But that’s when it all fell apart. It devolved from a character driven heist movie with meticulously crafted action scenes to something that looked like the end of any other Hollywood action movie.
One of the worst examples of this is a movie I love, but where my love for it diminishes in the last five minutes: The Departed. This, like Wind River, is an intense crime drama without much action in the first 2 hours out of its 2 and a half hour runtime. In the end, there is a gunfight, which is fine because it was a satisfying action sequence at the end of the movie. But the movie keeps going. A little while later, four of the main characters get shot in the head in the span of four minutes. It’s out of nowhere and it takes you off guard.
Many people praise the ending of The Departed because it’s something they weren’t expecting. And I think that’s part of the problem – that people get that shock value or “woah” factor. All three of these movies that I mentioned were good and engaging enough that they didn’t need a big, attention-grabbing end. Tense movies like this can have a shocking ending without violence.
Two films that initially come to mind when I think of a shocking, nonviolent ending are The Usual Suspects and Se7en. These are two crime movies that are interesting and gripping the whole way through that shock the viewer at the end with a surprising twist… that both happen to have Kevin Spacey right in the middle of the twist.
The Usual Suspects says, “Here’s everything you think you know and here’s why you’ve been interpreting it incorrectly.” It shocks the audience and doesn’t just play its twist for the shock value. It makes sense and it is mind blowing.
This same idea is true for Se7en. Finding out exactly what John Doe did is shocking and it adds so much more weight to the story. It made it personal to Mills and leaves the viewer with a sense of horrified awe.
Endings have the ability to make or break a movie. There is an art to the way they’re done, and if they’re done poorly, it takes away from the overall quality. But if they’re done well, they have the chance to make a film that much more memorable, and even iconic.
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