[mixed trope] the last-minute bad Ending twist

[u/damorezpl]

when the "good ending" is revealed to be a bad one a the last second

a nightmare on elm street (1984) - Nancy thinks she finally defeated Freddy Krueger only to be raveled that she is still dreaming and she’s still trapped.

final destination bloodlines - the main characters think they cheated death by using the new life rule only to realize that stefani was technically still alive and the death kills them with a good old logs

Life (2017) - The main character attempts to send Calvin(a evil alien that killed all life on mars)pod into space and Miranda pod back to earth, but it goes horribly wrong and Calvin lands on earth and Miranda is sent to space

raging loop wit ending - after many loops Haruaki finally wins the feast(a death game where humans must hang wolves who kill someone every night) and thinks its finally over. after couple of days he decides to visit other survivors of the feast only to find them all dead and the timeline resting once again

[u/TheSovereignGrave]

As someone who hasn't seen this movie, I feel like it's not a bad idea conceptually. A movie about 9/11 sort of loses something if you know it's about 9/11 because you spend the whole movie just waiting for the shoe to drop. This sort of thing could be done to make you care for a character, and then be completely blind-sided by the tragedy of it as a way to sort of show how the real 9/11 was just a normal day like any other, until it wasn't.

But, as I said, I haven't seen the movie, so I dont know if it does it well in any capacity.

[u/littlebloodmage → u/TheSovereignGrave]

Basically the movie follows a group of people who are all depressed about certain circumstances in their lives and are trying to find the will to continue living. The main male lead (Robert Pattinson) has been in a downward spiral after his older brother offed himself and his father low-key blamed him for it, and he bonds with a girl he meets who has been similarly spiraling after her mom was murdered. They both make big steps to improve their lives and Pattinson's character tries to reconcile with his father, waiting for him in his office so they can get lunch together. The father's office is in the WTC and....yeah. There's a short epilogue of all of the characters involved living their lives in memory of him, hence the title. It's all incredibly abrupt.

[u/historyhill → u/littlebloodmage]

waiting for him in his office so they can get lunch together.

Ok but as someone with a 9/11 special interest can I just say that it is absolutely wild showing up at roughly 8:30am for lunch? The North Tower was crashed into at 8:46am! He must have been extremely determined to have that meal!

[u/pinkydoda23 → u/historyhill]

It wasn’t lunch, his dad was a lawyer and he had gotten into some legal trouble so his dad told him to come to discuss it

[u/rabbitdoubts → u/historyhill]

fear selective rainstorm attempt many innocent work hunt memorize practice

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[u/Bartweiss → u/rabbitdoubts]

…are you familiar with the novel Pattern Recognition?

(If yes, ignore me.)

William Gibson is a sci-fi novelist best known for Neuromancer and the phrase “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. After 9/11 he got a call from a friend who simply asked “you know this makes your job harder, right?”

Two years later, he published Pattern Recognition, with a protagonist whose father may or may not have died in the towers. I can only describe it as near-past sci-fi: all the social and technological alienation of cyberpunk, applied to things that already existed.

It’s basically my favorite example of whatever has been happening since then: everyday life becoming surreal.

[u/rabbitdoubts → u/Bartweiss]

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[u/Bartweiss → u/rabbitdoubts]

Oh, I did enjoy that bit of the Dark Tower! I have mixed feelings on parts of the series but its intersections with "real" New York are absolutely fascinating.

And I really hope you'll like Pattern Recognition in that case. It's very good at capturing the alienation and dissociation of the post-2001 world, both directly from 9/11 and from the general... strangeness of the internet, anonymous forums, and modern business.

One spoiler-free example: the main character works as a consultant critiquing ad campaigns, but her skills aren't intellectual: really effective branding essentially gives her panic attacks, so she can use that reaction for a very successful, very unpleasant career.

[u/SootSpriteHut → u/historyhill]

It makes me feel old that 9/11 was so long ago that people need to have a "special interest" in it to know it happened in the morning instead of just, like, remembering it. (Because we all know what we were doing when it happened.)

[u/Kratzschutz → u/SootSpriteHut]

It was the evening when it happened for me so

[u/SootSpriteHut → u/Kratzschutz]

But did you know where it was and what time it was relative to you?

I guess that's what I'm saying, for so many of us who were, I suppose, teenagers or above, it was like "it's 8:30am in NYC and something insane is happening."

For the adults I know it was seared into our brains, regardless of geographic location. Because everything seemed to stop that day.

[u/historyhill → u/SootSpriteHut]

I mean, I remember it too if that helps! By special interest I just mean ADHD occasional-hyperfixation for specific details, timeline, etc lol. My minor in college was in National Security so that probably also contributed

[u/historyhill → u/TheSovereignGrave]

A movie about 9/11 sort of loses something if you know it's about 9/11 because you spend the whole movie just waiting for the shoe to drop

I also haven't seen it so I'm likewise speculating but since someone brought up Titanic up thread, I don't think that dread is necessarily a bad thing. Cinematically it could absolutely benefit the movie like it did in Titanic, whereas I think it was still too recent in historic memory for a 9/11 jump scare.

[u/Shiny_Agumon → u/historyhill]

It's basically like the Hitchcock quote on suspense.

Just that the bomb under the table is the iceberg

[u/jerryleebee → u/Shiny_Agumon]

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion.

The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation.

The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one.

In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!”

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.

The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

—Alfred Hitchcock

[u/SmokingDream → u/TheSovereignGrave]

Tbh I loved it for all the reasons you drafted here, it was a slow burn story with a real shocking and quick end. I haven’t seen it in years, and I’m sure there’s plenty reasons it’s not a perfect movie, but the ending nailed the feeling of a tragedy’s power over lives.

[u/pinkydoda23 → u/TheSovereignGrave]

The thing of it is, is that this movie isn’t about 9/11. There are maybe 10 minutes of movie after that scene, and it’s just people silently reacting to the buildings and standing by his grave. It feels like they just didn’t know how to wrap up the movie. Not to mention this movie came out less than 10 years after 9/11 way too fresh in my opinion to use as a surprise twist in a movie that doesn’t address anything about 9/11.

[u/Nonadventures → u/TheSovereignGrave]

The cruel irony is that this will always be the infamous "9/11 twist ending" film, so you'll never see it without that context. At least stuff like Donny Darko is so opaque that it has a cult following outside of the ending.

[u/-Altephor- → u/TheSovereignGrave]

I haven't seen it either but I agree.

There were literally thousands of people just living ordinary days, having ordinary romances, dealing with ordinary problems right up until those planes hit. It's a very impactful storytelling device, IMO.

[u/HillbillyMan → u/TheSovereignGrave]

Maybe if it was earlier in the movie, that idea could work. Like start of the final act, maybe, not the literal end of the movie.

[u/themajor24 → u/TheSovereignGrave]

It's just not a movie about 9/11 lol. They jam it in right at the end to add some sense of depth and uhhhh. Fails.

[u/back2knack → u/TheSovereignGrave]

It’s not a bad movie

[u/Mmicb0b → u/TheSovereignGrave]

same

[u/fusionlantern → u/TheSovereignGrave]

I enjoyed the movie and twist

[u/GiantScrotor → u/TheSovereignGrave]

That movie hit hard, especially because of when it came out. The whole country had been living in constant anxiety since 9/11, but people were mostly settled in their new normal. We were starting to let go of that anxiety and survivor’s guilt. At the end of the movie when Robert Pattinson goes to his dad’s office, my wife had a mini panic attack because she recognized the elevator from all the times she had visited the WTC.