The twists, time loops, and surreal head trips which left viewers wondering "What the..."
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00:00Some sci-fi movies are almost impossible to understand.
00:03Sure, there are plenty of Star Wars and Star Treks to go around,
00:06but outside of the genre's more approachable side,
00:08there are always more strange, thoughtful, and downright surreal offerings
00:12which defy all explanation.
00:14With that in mind then, despite the fact that we don't know what's going on,
00:17spoiler warnings are in full effect,
00:19because I'm SciForWhatCulture.com
00:21and these are 10 sci-fi movie endings no one understands.
00:25Number 10, 12 Monkeys.
00:27What was the point of time travelling?
00:28Released in 1995, Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys
00:31may be one of the perpetually studio-stifled former Python's most beloved films.
00:36However, like his equally acclaimed earlier effort Brazil,
00:39it's also one of the filmmaker's bleakest hours.
00:41The film follows our potentially insane hero Cole
00:44after an epidemic wipes out much of the world.
00:47Sent too far back in time and ending up in an asylum,
00:49he attempts to inform himself of the danger
00:51in order to stop the tragedy ever occurring.
00:54However, Cole is soon stuck being bounced back and forth
00:56between intersecting timelines in a story which becomes more bizarre
00:59and Byzantian the further it progresses.
01:02By the end of the film, our nominal hero is dying in front of his younger self,
01:05embodying a nightmare he's had throughout the whole movie.
01:08But why?
01:09Why send him back if he was doomed to repeat this fate?
01:12What would have happened if he hadn't gone back?
01:14What was the whole point?
01:15This complex film posits that you can change what you take from the past,
01:19even if you can't alter what happened back then,
01:21through an uncompromisingly bleak and convoluted plot?
01:24Number 9, Coherence.
01:26What will M do next?
01:27Coherence's story can technically be followed on first viewing,
01:30but requires numerous spreadsheets to successfully untie every knot.
01:34This underrated 2013 sci-fi follows a group of friends at a dinner party
01:38who are besieged by odd occurrences,
01:40only to discover that they are accidentally able to walk into an alternate,
01:43simultaneously occurring reality alongside their own.
01:46By the time the film's surreal ending rolls around,
01:49you may well be lost,
01:50as the friends have encountered and clashed with so many versions of themselves,
01:53that it's impossible to remember which reality the film has settled in.
01:57Not only is the cause of this temporal anomaly
01:59never explained beyond one mention of a passing comet,
02:02our heroine is now stuck with a group of people
02:04who have no idea about the emerging multiverse realities.
02:07So good luck explaining whatever the mind-eff that was
02:10that viewers just witnessed to these versions of your friends, M.
02:13Number 8, The Quiet Earth.
02:15Where is the Beach?
02:17Released in 1985,
02:18this New Zealand sci-fi film is still an underrated slice of post-apocalyptic action.
02:23The Quiet Earth follows the fate of three survivors after the end of the world,
02:26a scientist, an aboriginal man,
02:27and the love interest who the pair are soon competing for the affections of
02:31in a love triangle that turns metaphysical fast.
02:33At first, the film's tense and interesting action is fairly easy to follow,
02:37with the unlikely trio attempting to survive,
02:39as well as trying to understand what happened to their devastated planet.
02:42Then comes the film's infamously strange ending,
02:45wherein our hero crashes a truck rigged with explosives,
02:48and wakes up on a dark beach,
02:50watching cloud formations as they emerge from the ocean in front of him.
02:53The imagery in this one may feel impossible to decipher,
02:56but the director insists it's a pretty easy-to-uncover metaphor for purgatory.
03:00Maybe it helps if you share his lapped Catholicism,
03:02but luckily, said director also conceded that enigmatic is good.
03:06Just as well he thinks so,
03:07given the fact that almost no viewers understand what's happening here the first time they see it.
03:11Number 7. Stalker. Was the wish granted?
03:15Released in 1979, the deeply confusing and complex Stalker
03:18is often singled out as the finest film from Solaris director Andrei Tarkovsky.
03:23The body of the film's action sees the titular guide bring a heartbroken writer
03:26and their disagreeable professor companion through The Zone,
03:30a space which is said to contain a room that grants the wishes of its visitors.
03:33All manner of metaphysical arguments proceeds from here,
03:36as well as plenty of stunning scenery and strange surreal imagery,
03:39and of course, an enigmatic ending.
03:41It's impossible to decide for certain whether our young heroine monkey
03:44is moving glasses with her mind,
03:46or the passing trains soon seen by the viewer
03:48are causing them to shake along with the rest of the house.
03:50Thus, the viewer is left to decide for themselves whose desire was granted,
03:54and how real or imaginary The Zone's supposed power was, after all.
03:58Thus, Stalker leaves viewers no clearer than they were at the beginning.
04:02Number 6. A scanner darkly. What's the motive?
04:05Who would you trust more, a pharmaceutical company or the feds?
04:08No matter your answer, the ending of this Philip K. Dick adaptation
04:11is likely to leave you heartbroken.
04:13A scanner darkly is likely the most personal of the many stories
04:16mined from the prolific sci-fi writer's back catalogue.
04:19Its tale of an undercover cop who falls in with a crowd of drug users
04:22and grows to care for them more than his shadowy superiors
04:24was based on Dick's own experience with drugs
04:26and the gradual dissolution of his friend group through the tragedy of addiction.
04:30So, appropriately enough, the end of this dark 2006 adaptation
04:33sees Keanu Reeves' paranoid anti-hero become addicted to Substance D.
04:37He appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that he's farming the flowers
04:40used to synthesize the drug for the mysterious and dangerous company who produce it.
04:44But then, he steals a sample to provide his superiors, meaning he's still undercover,
04:49provide for himself, since he's still addicted,
04:51or provide to his friends who the viewer is pretty sure are dead and gone.
04:55It's hard to tell, but whatever the answer,
04:57it's probably better than being stuck farming drugs for your enemies.
05:00Number 5. Life Force.
05:01What's going on with the space vampires?
05:03Poor Tobey Hooper.
05:05The horror genius behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre created what is undoubtedly
05:09one of the most intense horror films in cinema history with his 1974 mega hit.
05:13However, in the decades since, he never really reached the same staggering heights artistically
05:17with a string of interesting but flawed films following his initial blockbuster success.
05:22Case in point, 1985 sci-fi vampire horror Life Force has a killer premise
05:26which soon becomes drowned in overly complex plotting.
05:29The movie follows a set of scientists as they attempt to study a trio of astronauts
05:32who appear to have transformed into space vampires,
05:35a conceit with plenty of potential provided it doesn't become needlessly convoluted.
05:39The film's problem is epitomized by its bizarre ending,
05:42one of which remains a point of contention for sci-fi and horror fans alike.
05:45So, one of our heroes was a space vampire the whole time,
05:48unbeknownst to himself due to a hitherto unmentioned psychic Bond,
05:52and said space vampires arrive and leave Earth based on the passing of Halley's Comet,
05:56and they simply transform our hero included into a vanishing column of energy to disappear at the end.
06:01Of course, what could have been clearer?
06:03And here this one seemed confusing for a minute.
06:05Number four, Planet of the Apes 2001.
06:08How did the apes change reality?
06:10It's pretty much impossible to overstate the influence of the ending featured in 60s sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes.
06:16The otherwise solid Charlton Heston vehicle became instantly iconic and spawned an entire franchise thanks to its killer twist.
06:22The reveal that, as Troy McClure would put it,
06:25it was Earth all along was an unheralded and dazzling ending,
06:29which would still make the likes of Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan proud.
06:32So, the oddly chosen director Tim Burton's 2001 remake of the classic had pretty sizable shoes to fill in this regard.
06:39The film attempted to outdo the original bombshell twist,
06:42but instead left viewers with a brain-melting, time-twisting paradox of alternate histories to untangle.
06:47By the time this version reaches its close, our hero has returned to his own time,
06:51but the apes have gotten there first somehow.
06:53Not only that, they've gone and replaced the statue of Abraham Lincoln with a villainous future ape.
06:57Well, presumably they've done more than that whilst rewriting history,
07:00but good luck working out how they managed it on first viewing.
07:04Number three, The Black Hole.
07:05What's in The Black Hole?
07:07Now, most of the entries on this list do have explanations which can untangle their initially impossible-to-decipher meanings,
07:13but your guess is as good as ours on 1979's The Black Hole and its strange surreal closing coda.
07:19Your interpretation is also as good as the director's, too,
07:21as the film's creators admitted they never had an ending in mind when working on this Disney flop.
07:26All that can be said for sure is that, yes, our heroic captain finds her father's long-lost spaceship near a black hole
07:32and decides to board the vessel in order to solve the mystery behind his disappearance.
07:36But from there on out, trippy 70s sci-fi psychedelia takes over proceedings
07:40and maintains a stranglehold on the plot until the infamous ending.
07:44No matter the elasticity of your interpretation,
07:46all that appears to be clear is that, yes, the characters enter and later leave
07:50what looks like hell through the titular black hole at the film's close.
07:54The film then sees its characters plunging towards a faraway star that
07:57might be heaven, might be the way back home to Earth.
08:00It might just be a star.
08:02Who knows?
08:03Number two, Vanilla Sky.
08:05What is tech support?
08:06Released in 2001, Vanilla Sky is one of director Cameron Crowe's most underrated cinematic offerings,
08:11as well as being a major tonal departure for the almost famous filmmaker.
08:16This Tom Cruise vehicle is a surprisingly cerebral and dark thriller
08:19which sees our hero thrust into a world of mystery and intrigue.
08:22It all starts in the iconic sequence wherein he awakens to an empty New York City,
08:26a surreal sight which serves as a warning that all is not as it seems.
08:31And indeed, the viewer eventually learns that this isn't New York at all.
08:34The protagonist has been in an induced coma this entire time,
08:37and the glimpses of his real life have been glitches in the system.
08:40Well, don't expect any answers from the film's ambiguous ending anyway.
08:44So-called tech support offers the above explanation,
08:46but there's no way of knowing if they're telling the truth,
08:48if this is all a dream, or if it's a dying hallucination in the moment since his car crash.
08:52In the end, the viewer knows our hero is choosing to wake up,
08:55but whether he's dead, alive, in heaven, in purgatory, in a coma,
08:59or anywhere else, is very unclear.
09:02Number one, Beyond the Black Rainbow.
09:04Everything about it.
09:06Released in 2010, Panos Cosmetos' Beyond the Black Rainbow
09:09signalled the arrival of a singular new talent in the world of psychedelic sci-fi.
09:13Garnering understandable comparisons to the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky,
09:16the film saw the visionary director turn the story of a telekinetic girl
09:20and the shadowy doctor experimenting on her into a total brain melter.
09:24How much so?
09:24Well, the movie manages to make a shot of some carpets
09:27into a trippy, nightmarish, prolonged sequence.
09:30So its take on telekinesis, mind-melding,
09:32and new age transcendence are understandably pretty insane too.
09:35But as confusing as the bulk of this film's action is,
09:38the ending truly takes the biscuit,
09:40with a wild and impossible to decide for psychedelic odyssey,
09:42which makes Kubrick's 2001 look easy to follow in comparison.
09:46Suffice it to say that the viewer never learns the mysterious origins
09:49or intentions of the Arborea Institute
09:51outside of the eponymous doctor's attempts to achieve transcendence,
09:55a goal which ends with him maybe succeeding?
09:57Definitely becoming something more than human and very dangerous.
10:01As for our heroine, she may be free to roam the earth,
10:03but the viewer still has no idea where she came from,
10:06how she acquired her powers, or what's next for her.
10:09And that's the list.
10:10Let us know what you thought of this video down in the comments below.
10:12Which of the sci-fi movie endings blew your mind the most?
10:15And of course, let us know of any others that we missed.
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10:24I've been Cy for WhatCulture, and have a good week.