But before saying goodbye to genre work for a bit, Cronenberg gave us one of his strangest movies, eXistenZ. He eventually switched gears for a couple of decades, focusing on thrillers and psychological dramas such as Eastern Promises and Cosmopolis, not returning to body horror until 2022’s Crimes of the Future. Even his early Canadian productions like Shivers and The Brood mixed meditations on human nature with pulsating bodies, elements that would come to mark Hollywood works, such as The Fly and Videodrome. eXistenZ (1999)īy 1999, David Cronenberg had established himself as the master of thoughtful gross-out horror. But 2001 remains a movie better experienced than explained. Over the decades, people have devised plenty of explanations for that ending, mostly around Dave becoming the next stage of human evolution. In the next shot, he’s a (very) wide-eyed infant sitting in a bubble, who goes through the monolith and floats above the earth, as the strains of Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” blast on the soundtrack. The monolith appears again before him and he reaches for it. The film ends with Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) sliding through a vortex of lights and stars until he arrives in a well-appointed bedroom, laying in bed and dying as an elderly man. However, the movie’s popularity does not come from its clear narrative. Yet, despite these oddities, 2001 not only thrilled millions upon release but also remains deeply baked in our collective consciousness, with references popping up in the most unlikely of places. In between, we have similar bits of fan service like, uh, a pencil floating in anti-gravity and classical music. After all, the movie begins with a bunch of apes beating each other up in front of a monolith and ends with an old man in a fancy bedroom dying and reincarnating in front of that same monolith. These days, it’s hard to believe that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. As a result, science fiction has a higher rate of confusing endings than any other genre. Branching timelines, alternate realities, altered consciousness, and mind-bending concepts can break traditional story structure, especially when trying to cram that story into a traditional 90-120 minute movie. But that’s part of the deal with sci-fi stories like Watchmen. It all simply is, at least from his perspective. But for Manhattan, who exists at all points on his timeline at once, the answer isn’t so simple. Viedt, of course, wants to know if it’s over, if he did truly save the world. Manhattan’s statement comes as a warning to Veidt, who tried to save humanity from itself by manufacturing an alien invasion at the cost of nearly half of the world’s population. Manhattan and Adrian Veidt in Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s Watchmen. Nothing ever ends.” If you’re a geek reading Den of Geek, you probably recognize those words as the final ones between Dr. Or should that be the end? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind employed similar narrative gymnastics (albeit in a more romantic setting) four years later.This article contains spoilers for various sci-fi movies The big twist is that Shelby accidentally killed his diabetic wife with an insulin overdose, and that he’s created the backstory of the elusive “John G” to give his life purpose – instantly explaining why Teddy (seemingly Leonard’s closest friend) was shot at the beginning. Up to the final scenes, Memento’s focus is on Leonard Shelby, an amnesiac who can’t make new memories, and uses tattoos and Polaroids as reminders in his quest to find his wife’s murderer. Technically speaking it shouldn’t really be on a list of the best movie endings at all, seeing as the tricksy backwards structure means the end is actually the beginning of the story, but it is a genuine original. It may not Christopher Nolan’s debut (that honour goes to Following), but Memento is the film that announced the arrival of an exciting new filmmaking talent.
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