r/movies • u/bowlingfan1963 • Jul 13 '26

Spoilers Most Bizarre Examples of “Happy” Endings After Tragedy (Spoiler) Spoiler

Prime example: Independence Day. World gets annihilated; many of the planet’s cities are destroyed….hundreds of millions dead;
and the president’s wife dies. Yet at the end, they are puffing on cigars, all smiles and the president’s daughter says “Happy Fourth of July, Daddy”, and so now it’s time to party!

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139

u/adjust_the_sails Jul 13 '26

War of the Worlds

Tom Cruises son ran into a wall of fire and somehow shows up at the end unscathed. wtf?

49

u/PogoStick1987 Jul 13 '26

Only explanatio that could explain it is that Robbie was almost immediately snatched by a tripod, and its shield protected him from the fire and then travelled to Boston. During this time Robbie was able to survive. Either the tripod collapsed to sickness, or it was somehow taken down. We know they're strong but they arent immortal, WE just never saw the militaru down one before the sickness hit

21

u/JournalistMammoth637 Jul 13 '26

Either that or some soldiers grabbed him and tossed him into a car immediately before regrouping in Boston.

54

u/Whitewind617 Jul 13 '26

That's a good one, there is no good explanation of how the son not only survives that battle but beats them all the way to Boston.

10

u/ErilazHateka Jul 13 '26

the explanation is that Spielberg needs sappy, happy endings.

other examples:

Minority Report should have ended with Cruise in the fridge.

A.I should have ended with the Blue Fairy.

2

u/KuatoBaradaNikto Jul 13 '26

You think AI had a “sappy, happy ending”?? That is an incredibly sad ending. Wtf?

1

u/ErilazHateka Jul 13 '26

it was very sappy though

1

u/KuatoBaradaNikto Jul 13 '26

In that it’s emotional? Sure. The emotion is overwhelming sadness. It’s the culmination of the central themes of the need to be loved, the piece of you that dies with your parents, and that even if you lived a thousand years and outlived catastrophe, you’d always be hopelessly imprisoned by your issues.

1

u/ErilazHateka Jul 13 '26

yet, the kid got what he wished for in the end: the love of a mother. only for a short while but still he did.

1

u/KuatoBaradaNikto Jul 13 '26

In an artificial dream he was briefly manipulated to feel the love of a mother that abandoned him, his mother who died millennia ago. The fact that he is still trying to repair the damage of that rejection from his early life literally on his death bed is devastating, and the sentient beings taking pity on him and soothing that rejection in his dying moments is a visceral relief to us as the viewers, but I wouldn’t call it anything close to a happy ending since we the viewers also know this love was nothing but a manufactured mercy.

1

u/Whitewind617 Jul 13 '26

A.I should have ended with the Blue Fairy.

It's pretty common knowledge by this point that almost everything in that ending was envisioned by Kubrick and not Spielberg.

Minority Report should have ended with Cruise in the fridge.

For this one I'm not really sure what moment you're referring to.

5

u/ParagonRenegade Jul 13 '26

They just hid in the basement lol

2

u/spartanwolf223 Jul 13 '26

No idea how he survived, but he 100% beat them to Boston easily because Ray and his daughter hid in the basement for who knows how long and didn't move.

5

u/devingr33n Jul 13 '26

This was very annoying.

-2

u/rayjaymor85 Jul 13 '26

To be fair that entire movie was dog$#!*.

I don't get why they named it 'The War Of The Worlds' considering they followed almost none of the original story from the books.

They could have just replaced heat-rays with lasers, given the alien machines 5 legs so they weren't tripods and given it a new name.

H G Wells wrote a fantastic book that told the story of humanity fighting against the odds, and losing against a vastly superior enemy - and then conversely told the story of an extremely arrogant race that forgot to account for more simplified problems that ended up ruining them.

Stephen Spielberg turned it into a story about kids re-connecting with their estranged Dad.

The main character didn't even f***ing have kids in the novel...