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.

As seen in What if "Independence Day" Happened? (Realistic Aftermath) by AlternateHistoryHub, a realistic outcome of the scenario of the ID4 movie wouldn't be so pleasant.

/watch?v=YkFLpMkADnA (tl;dw: civilization would most likely collapse because of all the destruction)
 
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Art School Confidential - Dark comedy by Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, Crumb, Bad Santa). The protagonist faces zero consequences for all of the terrible shit he does (including negligently killing a bunch of people), gets fame, fortune, and the girl, but is still miserable at the end because he realizes it has nothing to do with his talent and the art world is just a giant mutual grift. One of my all-time favorites.

The Big Nowhere - Bleak even by the standard of James Ellroy's other books and is probably my favorite of his. Fat, corrupt bagman Buzz Meeks finds some redemption at the cost of getting himself marked for death by just about every corrupt cop and organized crime figure in LA. At the end, he has a bunch of guns, a car, and a brief head start, giving you the slimmest bit of hope for him (he is promptly killed at the start of the next book).
 
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mlanguishi said:
A.I. is a good example. When I first saw it with a friend I thought it was 'happy' and he said 'gawd that was depressing'. Not sure to this day which it's truly meant to be.
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It's bittersweet. The hero won but there was still massive losses cried like a bitch when i watched it

Symphogear XV-
There's going to be massive gouges across the planet from where Yggdrasil had sprouted that'll fuck the general area. Shem-Ha had already started fucking with Earth's rotation and orbit so chances are the conditions on earth are fucked from that.

With no curse of Babel and plenty of Annunaki tech lying about there's nothing stopping someone reapplying Shem-Ha's hivemind plan in the future

Also Enki's moon base will fail eventually and the moon will fall onto earth again

Probably would have been better off as an aliens supercomputer
 
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Your Starter for 10 said:
Like at the end of Saving Private Ryan when they rescue that faggot and you're like well at least they got their mission done so that's good.

And then you realize you've been rooting for the wrong side the whole time. Hell of a mindfuck I tell you.
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People who simp for Nazi Germany are all retarded and would be the first to go on the firing line if they got their wish and the Nazis won.
 
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It's been a million years since I watched it and I was never a huge fan to begin with so I may have missed something, but Donnie Darko

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.

But among all the bad things that his survival caused was also a pedophile getting exposed. Doesn't Donnie's death mean that, yeah, a bunch of bad things don't happen anymore, but the pedo gets away with it?
 
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mlanguishi said:
A.I. is a good example. When I first saw it with a friend I thought it was 'happy' and he said 'gawd that was depressing'. Not sure to this day which it's truly meant to be.
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I was completely fine with it ending at "and then he sat at the bottom of the ocean forever"
it was a perfectly fine depressing ending
the shit with the nth generation robots in their flying apple cube felt needlessly tacked on, particularly the "we can bring her back but not but yeah but sorta"
 
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Nick Obre said:
It's been a million years since I watched it and I was never a huge fan to begin with so I may have missed something, but Donnie Darko

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.

But among all the bad things that his survival caused was also a pedophile getting exposed. Doesn't Donnie's death mean that, yeah, a bunch of bad things don't happen anymore, but the pedo gets away with it?
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It's been a while but I think writer or producer or director said the pedo still gets exposed, just differently and later down the line.

XYZpdq Jr. said:
I was completely fine with it ending at "and then he sat at the bottom of the ocean forever"
it was a perfectly fine depressing ending
the shit with the nth generation robots in their flying apple cube felt needlessly tacked on, particularly the "we can bring her back but not but yeah but sorta"
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Kubrick films almost never end in a happy tone. Even the less bittersweet ones tend to still leave doubts, like the end of Eyes Wide Shut, the conspiracy is supposedly over and our leads are free to go back to their mundane lives but it's left ambiguous if their marriage will last after this or not.

With that said, given how Kubrick wanted this movie to be a more emotional project, I can imagine the advanced robots stuff was his idea but clearly it's something that clashed with his style of directing. And it wasn't even him directing this but Spielberg trying to replicate his style and vision.
 
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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.
 
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