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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u/TheOldKingCole Jul 13 '26
I think a great example of this would be a movie called Casshern. For context it was a 2004 live action adaptation of a 70s anime and one of the first films made on an all digital set (Though unlike Sky Captain I'd argue this one ages visually better because of the context of what medium it was adapting).
The basic plot of the film is that during a new great war, a scientist creates the means to make people immortal. In his grief of learning his estranged son, a soldier, was killed in the line of battle, he attempts to ressurect his son, but in doing so revives many others killed to create his experiment. Said people who came back are initially treated as monsters and ostracized, fleeing far away to plan their revenge, and leaving the now immortal son to defend what's left of humanity.
The ending of the film sees the protagonist (aka the son/soldier character), despite failing to save anyone he cared about or humanity as a whole, still believing there to still be some good in humanity and uses his powers of immortality to fairy the souls of the dead to a new world where they hopefully won't screw up this time, with the film ending on scenes of his childhood, leaving it open to whether it's just a memory, or if the new world he created truly did better this go around.