Happy endings that aren't happy the moment you think about them - Happily ever after...or is it? Deconstruct the shit out of happy endings in media.

[Michael Jacks0n]

Sounds like a cop out to me

"A wizard did it!"

 

[Nick Obre]

In Fury Road, they defeat the tyrant, let up the masses, give the control of the water valves to the fat women and...

They open the valves and seemingly keep them open

How long is the water reservoir gonna last now? I get being less stingy with water than Joe was but jeez ladies don't throw away the EXTREMELY VITAL AND SCARCE RESOURCE you have that may not be available anywhere else

 

[TheHarbinger]

Let The Right One In. The ending has the main child character get saved from bullies trying to kill him and escaping with the vampire who saves him. But in reality the vampire has successfully groomed the kid into being his next helper who kidnaps people for him to feed on. But the movie plays it up like some victory for a kid against bullying and escaping from a bad life at home. Complete with super romantic orchestral scores that sell it as well.

The Truman Show. His life will be just as miserable in the real world as he is still a celebrity. Just this time with way less privacy. He will need round the clock security to prevent people from invading his privacy and his home.

You could argue Taxi Driver if your interpretation of the ending is that it is in his imagination. Meaning he doesn't save the young girl from being raped as a street prostitute and her pimp is still alive preying upon women.

Game of Thrones. King Bran? He can't have kids so his kingdom falls apart in a generation. Seems like war is right around the corner.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

50 first dates, it looks like a happy ending until you realize that he has to explain every time that he isnt a trespasser trying to rape her and that that child over there is theirs.

I only saw that film once back in the day and even then I thought that movie was weird.
"Our friend/relative is severely brain-damaged and is totally dependent on her family as carers"
"A hole's a hole!"

Perfect Dark. You kill a religious leader of an alien race (the Skedar) and desecrate their most holy shrine. This is implied to deal a hammer blow to the Skedar's morale. However the Skedar still exist. Everything shown about them up to that point has depicted them as a violent and, more importantly, spiteful race. Even if there are only a few of them left, they have ship-cloaking capabilities and can disguise themselves as humans. There's nothing stopping them from carrying out a jihad against Earth. Not even destroying it; just killing as many people as possible.

There's a more benevolent alien race that's been helping the humans out up to this point. They're going to have to protect Earth 24/7 until the Skedar are confirmed to be eradicated. This is a direct quote from the Skedar:

As humorous as the concept of a human wiping out the Skedar race is, we must not be blind to the power of vendetta.

Oh, and your boss has you shoot up Area 51 at one point, killing dozens of government employees, doing millions of dollars of property damage and stealing their research. You later save the President from a conspiracy, so the Carrington Institute probably has his protection while he's in office. But your boss and your character are almost certainly getting bumped off at some point.

 

[The Nothingness]

Richard Dreyfuss being selected by the aliens to join them in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is presented as a happy ending for the character since his wife abandoned him along with taking the kids. I guess the children thinking their dad was a nutjob will deeply affect them later in life. Spielberg admitted him not having kids in the 70s made him oblivious to how that ending looked. Also, the abductees from the WWI and WWII time periods looking the same as they disappeared will be in for big shock along with their family members.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

In Fury Road, they defeat the tyrant, let up the masses, give the control of the water valves to the fat women and...

They open the valves and seemingly keep them open

How long is the water reservoir gonna last now? I get being less stingy with water than Joe was but jeez ladies don't throw away the EXTREMELY VITAL AND SCARCE RESOURCE you have that may not be available anywhere else

I find that in most post apocalyptical settings the hero is more often times worse than the villain. Usually the villain has most of the dwindling human population under control and the hero character ends up either killing them or dooming them in the long run regardless whatever if that population had a choice or not.

 

[Town Drunk]

50 first dates, it looks like a happy ending until you realize that he has to explain every time that he isnt a trespasser trying to rape her and that that child over there is theirs.

Except it's stated in the movie that she actually has sub conscious feelings and memories of him. Still a bit weird, but he tries to stay away until this is realized.

 

[thediad]

50 first dates, it looks like a happy ending until you realize that he has to explain every time that he isnt a trespasser trying to rape her and that that child over there is theirs.

Maybe I'm not a romantic but no way am I doing that shit for the rest of my life for some arsehole. Sometimes a bitch just wants to sleep in, you know?

The Truman Show. His life will be just as miserable in the real world as he is still a celebrity. Just this time with way less privacy. He will need round the clock security to prevent people from invading his privacy and his home.

I'd love to seem them do a skit ala adult Kevin McCallister based on Truman. Him as a hasbeen who consists on shows like celebrity Big Brother would be funny/depressing.

 

[Clockwork]

Logan's Run.

At the end of the film, the humans are free of the computer's iron-fisted rule and no longer have to end their lives prematurely with "Carrousel".

On the other hand, their city is in ruins, all they have are the clothes on their backs, and (having lived pampered hedonistic lives with the computer providing everything) none of them are likely to know the first thing about outdoors life. Nothing about hunting/foraging/farming for food, purifying water, making fire, building shelter, etc.

Unless doddery Peter Ustinov and the moldering books in Washington can bring them up to speed, the city dwellers are going to start dying off real fast.

 

[The handsome tard]

Forrest Gump is the classic example. Retard gets saddled with an AIDS-riddled whore and her bastard child which she claims is his but probably isn't. She dies and now, best case scenario, he's raising a child by himself. Somehow this is portrayed as a good thing.

It's a classic joke associated that the ending of the movie is hardly a happy ending when you think about it. Even Family Guy pointed it out in a sketch

50 first dates, it looks like a happy ending until you realize that he has to explain every time that he isnt a trespasser trying to rape her and that that child over there is theirs.

It's a short term happy ending. The real question is how realistically he can keep this up until this starts to eat up at his patience and sanity. Good fucking luck raising a child in a healthy environment where they gotta be told mommy will forget them and they gotta bring her up to speed every morning.

It's just not a sustainable lifestyle.

Elysium ends with the entire impoverish population of Earth being made citizens of the titular affluent orbital colony thanks to the rebellious heroes hacking the computer mainframe. This initiates the deployment of automated shuttles carrying Elysium's miracle medical machines to the Earth's surface to heal everyone's ills, the entire plot being a very obvious analogical advocacy for free health care.

As I watched this in theaters, two immediate thoughts occurred to me. First, it is stated explicitly in the story's setup that the world is in the dumps because of overpopulation, often reiterated by the movie's own marketing, so it goes without saying that granting effective immortality with these miracle medical machines is just going to make that global overpopulation problem worse. Second, given the world's broad state of anarchy, I can easily imagine the undefended medical shuttles (shown landing in garbage camps and other places of total squalor) being attacked and stolen by local warlords.

In Fury Road, they defeat the tyrant, let up the masses, give the control of the water valves to the fat women and...

They open the valves and seemingly keep them open

How long is the water reservoir gonna last now? I get being less stingy with water than Joe was but jeez ladies don't throw away the EXTREMELY VITAL AND SCARCE RESOURCE you have that may not be available anywhere else

I hate when movies just ignore those good questions or, if they are brought up at all, it's by the villain so that the good guy has an excuse to ignore said good questions. Feels like they were too focused on what it meant on irl than it's significance in universe

 

[ShittlerNiggler]

I find that in most post apocalyptical settings the hero is more often times worse than the villain. Usually the villain has most of the dwindling human population under control and the hero character ends up either killing them or dooming them in the long run regardless whatever if that population had a choice or not.

Walking Dead is another good example of this. What's worse is that the series mostly just keeps repeating the formula of group find other group "oppressed" -> defeats baddies -> keeps running away from, eh zombies with a walking speed of 3 km/h instead of building anything longlasting.
Negan build an entire feudal-like system from the ground up. Most of his tributaries are mostly independent. The MC just started participating in a conflict that they had nothing to do with and started killing Negans men. Instead of wiping them out he instead offers mercy to most of them and a place in his small quasi-kingdom. It would have been a niche post apocalyptic setting with lot of potential but the show just had to repeat it's already overused formula while the fans hyped it up only because Negan killed a fan favourite character once, who helped slaughtering his men, and some other dude which name I keep forgetting because he no longer had any reason to be on the show anyway.
Dropped the show after that, apparently he is good buddies with some of them now?
On the other hand that's the show where people are to stupid to build spears and instead stab zombies with knifes so I might just overthink this shit a bit.

 

[Calandrino]

It's a Wonderful Life

 

[Nick Obre]

I find that in most post apocalyptical settings the hero is more often times worse than the villain. Usually the villain has most of the dwindling human population under control and the hero character ends up either killing them or dooming them in the long run regardless whatever if that population had a choice or not.

I hate when movies just ignore those good questions or, if they are brought up at all, it's by the villain so that the good guy has an excuse excuse ignore said good questions. Feels like they were too focused on what it meant on irl than it's significance in universe

Recently I watched all of Mr. Robot (I'd watched almost to the end once before, life got in the way, and I'd been meaning to go through it again ever since), and one thing I like about it is that the "heroes" (aside from the fact that they're lead by an mentally ill man on a literally insane mission) hack the financial system to release everyone from debt and from the control of the secret rulers of the world, but they don't really foresee the consequences; the evil elites just turn things around on them and common people get the worst of the fallout, becoming even more dependent on the handouts of the system, while also losing all of their personal wealth. Meanwhile the antifa-occupy posers do their vandalism and their symbolic commie iconoclasm, and only the main characters realize how badly they fucked up, and they have to go to great lengths to try to undo it.

That said, at the end of the show they kind of go back into it, by succesfully taking all the money from essentially the Illuminati, a thinly-veiled World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group kind of organization, and redistributing it to everyone (I guess in the US, not the whole world) in equal amounts. Everyone is ecstatic at seeing their bank accounts swell like that, but no one realizes, and (despite doing a good job of it about the previous hack) the show doesn't address, that this is gonna cause the value of that money to plummet. Everyone will have a big number in their accounts, which will mean nothing as soon as this lack of financial disparity triggers the worst inflation anyone has ever even thought of. But at least they're not under the boots of the globalists and this one particular chinese tranny, who is the main villain.

 

[The Nothingness]

I'm not sure if the Kingsman sequel addressed the elephant in the room from the first movie's climax. So, the heroes stop Black Bill Gates' plan of depopulation and activate the failsafe in the chips of those who sided with him. This kills all the wealthy elite and world politicians, including Obama (while his face is never shown, the voice and back of his head basically tells you it's him). There is no chaotic fallout in the countries who no longer have a number of their top elected officials.

Then again, maybe this happy ending doesn't need to be deconstructed

 

[Hijo de Dang Woodchucks!]

(...) at least they're not under the boots of the globalists and this one particular chinese tranny, who is the main villain.

Wait, No-Dong Fong is the main villain of Mr. Robot?

Shit, maybe I should watch it.

 

[Nick Obre]

Wait, No-Dong Fong is the main villain of Mr. Robot?

Shit, maybe I should watch it.

You should, it's a good show. With all the stuff about rich people being evil, you can probably imagine what kind of politics it has (including an Alex Jones pastiche, and some jokes about the then recently elected Trump), but it's also surprisingly nuanced, and both the character work and the plot (and the goddamn great cinematography) elevate it beyond just lefty messaging.
I don't really wanna say more to not spoil things (more than I already did, I spilled out part of the ending), so any jokes or comments I'd like to make about the tranny, I'll keep them to myself.

 

[Kulee Baba]

The really pretentious but aesthetically pleasing Gattaca comes to mind.

TL;DR Science perfected gene editing but only part of the population gets perfect conditioned humans creating a apartheid state. The protagonist wants to be an Astronaut but is ruled out for having a heart defect. The happy ending is he gets to go to space and proves his will power has more say over his destiny than his genetic testing.

But here's the thing, the dude has a HEART DEFECT. He shouldn't go into space! You need a clean bill of health to be an astronaut!

 

[Arthur Morgan]

I'm not sure if the Kingsman sequel addressed the elephant in the room from the first movie's climax. So, the heroes stop Black Bill Gates' plan of depopulation and activate the failsafe in the chips of those who sided with him. This kills all the wealthy elite and world politicians, including Obama (while his face is never shown, the voice and back of his head basically tells you it's him). There is no chaotic fallout in the countries who no longer have a number of their top elected officials.

Then again, maybe this happy ending doesn't need to be deconstructed

In the sequel, the American president is a Dubya allegory so it kind of got addressed, but they mostly gloss over it.

I'll go with Constantine (2005). John (Con Job in name) manages to redeem himself in the end by sacrificing his life to save another, causing Lucifer to remove his lung cancer tumors so John can live long enough to earn his place in the depths of hell. At the end, John is shown chewing gum, so we know he's quit smoking and will be fine.

Multiple problems with this. Firstly is that John Constantine is a bastard, even this version is a piece of shit, just less of one than his comic book counterpart. As Gabriel points out, he doesn't kill demons to do the right thing, he does it to try and buy his way into heaven. Hell, Shia Lebouf was killed in the climax and he didn't care in the slightest. But the big problem: Smoking is one of the easiest addictions to relapse on. Most smokers who quit admit that if there was a cure for lung cancer, they'd go right back to it. And most quitters have gone back to it multiple times before finally kicking the habit for good. John has gone from a pack a day to cold turkey? Yeah, he's gonna come back to the cancer sticks.

If he got hit by a car just after the climax? He'd be fine

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Monsters Inc. Their entire infostructure would collapse in on itself since they overhauled it from scaring children to making them laugh.

 

[ditto]

The whole point of the story is that Donnie surviving a the start of the movie is him averting fate and has a ton of bad consequences for everyone, the main one being his girlfriend's death, and him at the end of the movie choosing to die as he was "fated to" prevented all the tragedies.

IIRC that's the same for the movie The Butterfly Effect. One of the deleted scene had the main character going back in time and committing suicide in his mother's womb which didn't go over well with test audiences.