Saturday, July 16, 2016

Movies That Have Left Me Dissatisfied

This was something I just wanted to share, since it occurred to me that, lately, I've been subjected to certain stories that have made me want to scream with frustration. Only one novel I've read in recent memory has had this affect on me, and that was The Phantom of the Opera.

But this post is about the movies that left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, literally.

I don't really know why I wanted to make a post about it, but I guess I wanted to talk about story endings. I know that there are effective ways to end a story, but some of them end up being totally unnecessary. Really, some endings I've seen on movies have just left me frustrated and furious.

Here is a list of movies that have made me frustrated:


  1. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
  2. The Amazing Spiderman 2
  3. Star Trek Generations
  4. Maze Runner & Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
  5. The Pretender: Island of the Haunted

Usually, I'm pretty tolerant about how a story is crafted, due to the fact that I'm a realist 50% of the time. Real life often doesn't allow for happy endings of "happily ever afters". So when something doesn't go perfect for the main characters, then I'm fine. Because that's realistic. Though, even though I'm fine with it, that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it, lol.


1. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life


One evening, Mom was flicking through the channels when she stumbled across this movie. She went "eh, why not?" and changed to it. When I was little and I was just becoming coherent enough to play computer games (I've been playing video games since I was five - and computer games are more challenging than video games, I swear! lol) I discovered Mom's copy of the Tomb Raider CD-ROM disk. I quickly discovered that I could only make it through a quarter of the first level before I would make it to a stone bridge in this cave where I would be taken down by a couple wolves (and where exactly did those come from???) and GAME OVER would be thrown up onto the screen.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: Terry had to be such a overgrown baby in the Cradle of Life. Didn't he realize that if he took Pandora's Box, he could, eventually, be the last living man on Earth (if he opened the box) or would eventually become a victim of the plague contained within the box (if he sold it)? I was really disappointed that he was greedy enough to try to push past Lara in the Cradle so she was forced to shoot him. I really liked Lara and Terry as a pair.


2. The Amazing Spiderman 2


I really enjoyed the first Amazing Spiderman movie, so I thought I would love this movie just as much. At the beginning, it was exactly what I expected, but then it quickly spiralled into something less than what I was hoping for. I sympathized for Max Dillon/Electro - one of the villains.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: Gwen's death. The subsequent twisting of Harry Osbourne's mind because of his inherited disease so that he was eventually so desperate to live that he labeled his childhood friend - Peter Parker - his enemy. And he killed Gwen! I fully believe that Peter should have been able to save Gwen despite how intense his battle with Harry was, but the writers decided that she had to die instead of actually getting to fulfil her dreams. (Oh, and if you can't figure out why she died when Peter clearly caught her - well, the sudden stop caused by Peter catching her with his webbing snapped her back).


3. Star Trek Generations


I like this movie. I loved how it brought the original Star Trek series and The Next Generation together through finding Captain James T. Kirk in the Nexus. One thing I didn't like about it, though, was the fact that Data just had to swear as the Enterprise-D's saucer-section crash-landed. Was that exactly necessary? I thought people had almost completely discarded the instinctive need to swear? I know Data was trying out his emotion-chip, but still--

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: Captain Kirk's death. Probably every Star Trek fan agrees with me - Kirk's death was unnecessary. He had plenty of time to get off of that catwalk before it fell. I knew that he was out there distracting Soran so that his rocket would blow up on him, but Kirk could have started running for solid ground as the rocket exploded, or he could have run over to somewhere else. I really wanted to see how Kirk would have reacted to the 24th Century.


4. Maze Runner & Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials


Where can I begin? For one thing, I really don't like dystopian films or novels, but the action in the first movie had me intrigued. I got to like the characters, even though dread throbbed in the pit of my stomach. I was intrigued from the beginning of the first movie because I wondered if these kids were on some other planet, and were being dropped off by machines left over from the human race and that the human race no longer existed. But then I quickly learned that, no, the teenagers were not on another planet, but were actually on Earth, and Earth has been hit by some sort of catastrophe caused by the sun?? I'm not sure since it's only called "The Flare". Apparently there was a massive solar flare that must have weakened every human's immune system that a plague of epic proportions swept through the population of the planet. I didn't like The Scorch Trials at all, and spent the time my family watched it building Lego as it droned on in the background.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with these movies' ending: I admit, I liked the action in these movies, but the endings left me with bitterness to end all bitterness in my mouth. With the first movie, when they killed Chuck off - they didn't have to kill Chuck off! But probably it happened in the book (I haven't read the book). The ending of the second movie frustrated with how Teresa betrayed her friends for W.C.K.D. even though it was made very apparent that W.C.K.D. is evil. Really, Teresa??!?


5. The Pretender: Island of the Haunted


The Pretender has to be one of my favourite cat & mouse-themed TV shows of all time. In each episode, Jarod - the main character, the "pretender" - goes about helping someone who was wronged, like a security guard who was killed by a couple of police officers who broke into the bank he was guarding and made it look like he was the criminal. Or the family of an pilot who was accused of being drunk when he was flying a jet (so it crashed and he died) so they couldn't get his pension. And all the while he teases and taunts the organization who kidnapped him when he was a kid and exploited his genius for their research. More often than not, I wish the Pretender had gone on for more than four seasons and two movies.

The reason why I was dissatisfied with this movie's ending: This is the second movie of the two movies produced to help tie up the TV series since the Pretender was cancelled, leaving it at a very tense and suspenseful situation. The reason why I was dissatisfied with the ending of this episode was the fact that it revealed why Jarod was taken by the Centre when he was a child. He was taken because of a prophecy. But that's not entirely the whole reason why I wasn't happy with ending - viewers were left with Jarod still on the run. What I wanted was for the entirety of the Centre to be gone, destroyed, so Jarod could settle down, start a family, and find his mother, father, and sister. After all, wasn't that his goal and was what he had been striving for the entire show?

~~~

Now, those are the movies, that I can remember, that have frustrated with their endings. They leave me going into overdrive with my thoughts. I overthink about it until, ultimately, I have to abandon it knowing I can't change them. So all I can do it fume quietly about them, lol.

But every writer has a reason for an ending that may annoy me, but sometimes those endings really don't make sense, or entirely unnecessary.

What movies have driven you up the wall, or driven you crazy?


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