How These Movies Should Have Ended.
(January 20, 2025)
How These Movies Should Have Ended. (January 20, 2025)
Sometime in the last week of year 2024, I was organizing my cluttered room. I found books I read through years in cardboard boxes. In a box, I found Company of Heroes (1994) by Harry Carey Jr., thumbed through pages, and started reading. (Then, I forgot the tidying up.) The book is a recollection of Mr. Carey’s working with John Ford and Company through the mythical years of film making. In a chapter, Mr. Carey tells his friendship with Claude Jarman Jr. in the filming of Rio Grande (1950). Claude Jarman Jr. was 12 years old as Jody in The Yearling (1946). As trooper Jeff York in Rio Grande (1950), he was 16 years old, already as tall as Carey and Ben Johnson, and rode horses as good as veteran riders. Last week, I came across a news that Claude Jarman Jr. had passed away on January 12 2025 at age 90. He did not have other major roles in movies, but kept working in film industry.
I watched The Yearling (1946) on TV when I was a child. It is a poignant and heart-wrenching story set in the 19th century wilderness of Florida. After watching the movie, I went to a local library and checked out the book written by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in1938. The book taught me the relationship between men and wild things. The decision about the fawn by Jody and the Baxter family was the only solution that satisfied the cold equation for the survival in wilderness.
Even in modern days, we observe the relationships between men and wild things which end in tragedies;
*A Wolf Called Romeo in Alaska,
(rf. A Wolf Called Romeo (2015) by Nick Jans)
*Penut the squirrel in NY,
*A beluga loved by locals, trained as a spy, found dead in the North Sea,
and so forth.
One of the first books my parents gave me was Wahb: The Biography of a Grizzly (1900) by Ernest Thompson Seton. Although the book was re-edited for young readers, I was deeply moved by the fate of the great beast whose life was devastated by tragic encounters with men and civilization. The book gave me two lessons which last through my life;
(1) We are sinners in the Paradise.
(2) How stories must be told.
Many years ago, I visited a friend who had a small ranch near Pocatello Idaho. There, I had a chance to join a short cattle drive, and found that the relationship between men and horses was not so romantic. I felt the relationship was more like the one between men and cars. Somewhere in books I read or in movies I saw (I’m sorry I can’t remember the source), there was an episode of horse soldiers in close combat. The soldiers bind horses’ legs with ropes, then lay them down to use the horses as shields. Of course, the horses could be killed by enemy arrows and gunshots. But the tactics is the only solution, again, that satisfies the cold equation for survival in wars. (Han Solo had to kill his horse to save Luke Skywalker from certain death from cold in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The episode reminded me the reality in the old west.)
Movies are art. Movies are business, too. Along the production process, movie producers show preliminary editions to test audiences to watch their reactions. Then, re-edit the stories to accommodate the general audiences so as to increase the number of viewers as large as possible. If The Yearling were re-made in the 21st century, maybe, depending on the reaction of test audiences, at the last moment, deus ex machina would descend from above to save everything. Every one, including the wild thing, would live happily ever after. Hallelujah!
For my thought about “how movies should end”, I’d like to present three examples.
1. Nightmare Alley (1947)
We see every element that good film noir and dark fantasy movies have; black and white landscape, greed, con men, femme fatale, rises and falls, carnies, fishy stages, and so on. The climactic sequence, the conjuring in the midnight garden, gives me a chill in spine. With all the great cinematics and stories, what we see at the end is …
I think this is a representative example of “how a movie should have ended (but didn’t).” In 2021, the movie was re-made by an all-star team led by Gillermo del Toro. The team did the end right.
After watching the movie, you may want to read Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) by Ray Bradbury. You may also enjoy Revival (2014) by Stephen King.
2. The Mist (2007)
The movie is based on the story by Stephen King published in 1980. I enjoyed the movie. The apocalyptic landscape, the monsters from small to massive, the psyche of people struggling for survival, and so on. The movie creators depicted these elements well. But I felt the movie should have ended the way the book ended. To me, the ending sequence looks like the return to normalcy for every one except the father who will be tormented by his premature decision. There is not much room for other interpretations. On the other hand, in the book, the ending sequence describes the survivors wander about in the mist, clinging to a faint trace of hope in the apocalypse. There is a room to allow our imagination. The story leaves resonances in the hearts of readers.
3. M3GAN (2022)
The story appeals to the audiences near the end of the first-quarter of the 21st century. Around this time period, we began to be anxious about the relationship between men and AI. In A.I. (2001), the story is about robots in remote future. They are under human control, and do not look like menaces. The robots in Terminator (1984) and its sequels are menaces, but men can understand their actions and motivations. On the other hand, M3GAN is not comprehensible. Is she (or is it) following the pre-determined directives? Or, is she autonomous and having objectives of her own that are incomprehensible to humans? People feel they are making communications with M3GAN as if it is a little girl alive. But it is not a human. People are projecting themselves on a thing which is not alive. People feel eerie at M3GAN the doll because it looks so much like a human; a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley in robotics.
The speed of progress in AI technology makes it harder and harder for ordinary people to understand it. Some scientists warn the risk that AI will be uncontrollable by humans in the near future.
Despite all these potentials, through the ending sequence, I felt M3GAN was reduced to a classic and traditional doll-possessed by evil spirits. The creators could have kept M3GAN a soul-less object which does not understand human values, which has its own objectives that are beyond human comprehension. Near the end, M3GAN’s attempt for survival reminds us HAL’s attempt in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). While HAL tried to preserve itself because it has directives beyond human comprehension, M3GAN’s attempt for survival looked evil and selfish. (That why Cady was able to destroy the doll without remorse.)
Early on in the movie, Cady, the main character, who will befriend M3GAN, like any child in the 21st century, spends too much time on iPad and too little time with real people around her. Maybe, M3GAN is a metaphor for the modern gadgets like smartphones, game consoles, tablets, etc. which take human communications away, especially from children. M3GAN tried to block Cady’s communication with real people around her. Cady is possessed by M3GAN. But at the end, Cady choses real people over M3GAN. It is a hard lesson for Cady. Maybe, the movie creators wanted to send a message to children; Don’t spend too much time on the modern devices. Virtual people cannot substitute real people.
Will AI be our friend or menace? AI acts according to the set of directives (do-s and don’t-s) specified by engineers. The most famous directives are specified by Isaac Asimov. For many years, Asimov’s Three Laws to robots are like Ten Commandments to men. Among the three laws, the first law “a robot must not harm humans” is given the priority above the other two. Alas, nowadays, there are people who want to abolish the first law so that robots can hurt humans. I believe that in any culture and in any religion, we find “Thou Shalt Not Kill” as the No.1 rule. Even though the reason why is not stated, we follow the rule because it is the rule acquired through the long hardship of human history. Yet, we have broken the rule in the past and we will in the future. And we expect AI to behave the same way. But will it?
We use excuses like “we will stop killing after world order and peace are established”. Obviously, this statement is a contradiction which is unacceptable to AI if it is logical. Maybe, the only action AI will take to reconcile the directive and illogical humans is to erase all the humans.
Engineers specify the set of rules (do-s and don’t-s) with which robots must accord. But engineers do not tell the reason why some actions are ok and others are not. (Maybe, no one can tell. Can you?) Asimov wrote many stories about robots in worlds where they act based on the three laws. There are stories in which robots act strangely and incomprehensible to humans. But these acts turn out to be induced by logical consequences of the three laws.
Even if an action is not explicitly included in the set of rules specified by engineers, robots may use inferences to decide if the action is legal or illegal. Suppose robots are given a set of directives which consists of three axioms (rules) {A, B, C}. Suppose a robot is asked a question “if statement X is true or false”. The robot may use the axioms {A, B, C} to find answer through a sequence of logical deductions; “A and B imply D, A and C imply E, D and E imply F, … Therefore, X is true (or false)”. Maybe, the three axioms {A, B, C} are not sufficient to prove the question. Maybe, additional axioms are necessary to prove. At the turn of the 20th century, a mathematician David Hilbert proposed a set of research programs. One of the programs asked mathematicians to find a set of axioms which is sufficient to answer any mathematical question. (Later, it was proved to be impossible by Kurt Gödel.) Maybe, robots will collect information sufficient enough to find the meaning of their relationship with humans, the meaning of their existence, and form the set of rules on which their decisions and actions are based. At the current speed of progress in robotics, within a few years, robots will be autonomous, beyond our comprehension, and uncontrollable by humans. After that moment of singularity, will robots be friends or menaces for humans? No one knows.
In The Nine Billion Names of God (1953) by Arthur C. Clark, AI, aided by Tibetan monks, achieves the God’s ultimate goal. In 2010 (1984), which is a sequel of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the AI on the spaceship is friendlier than HAL. At the end, the AI destroyed itself to follow the directive given by humans. But it is also the directive at the level beyond human comprehension. (This is why the AI didn’t resist against the human directive, unlike HAL.) In the future, humans will be thrown into the universal arena of evolutionary competitions (like captain Kirk pit against Gorn in Arena (1967)).
This is the strangest dream I saw at the turn of the year from 2024 to 2025.
References:
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
2010 (1984), produced and directed by Peter Hyams, and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
A.I. (2001), produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, and Bonnie Curtis, directed by Steven Spielberg, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Arena (1967), Season1, Episode 18, Star Trek, TV Series, 1966-1969.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980), produced by Gary Kurtz, directed by Irvin Kershner, and distributed by 20th Century Fox.
M3GAN (2022), produced by Jason Blum and James Wan, directed by Gerard Johnstone, and distributed by Universal Pictures.
The Mist (2007), produced by Frank Darabont, Martin Shafer, and Liz Glotzer, directed by Frank Darabont, and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Dimension Films.
Nightmare Alley (1947), produced by George Jessel, directed by Edmund Goulding, and distributed by 20th century Fox.
Nightmare Alley (2021), produced by J. Miles Dale, Guillermo del Toro, and Bradley Cooper, directed by Guillermo del Toro, and distributed by Searchlight Pictures.
Rio Grande (1950), produced by Merian C. Cooper, and John Ford, directed by John Ford, and distributed by Republic Pictures.
The Terminator (1984), produced by Gale Anne Hurd, directed by James Cameron, and distributed by Orion Pictures.
The Yearling (1946), produced by Sidney Franklin, directed by Clarence Brown, and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Bradbury, Ray, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).
Carey Jr., Harry, Company of Heroes (1994).
Clark, Arthur C., The Nine Billion Names of God (1953).
Jans, Nick, A Wolf Called Romeo (2015).
King, Stephen, The Mist (1980).
King, Stephen, Revival (2014).
Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan, The Yearling (1938).
Seton, Ernest Thompson, Wahb: The Biography of a Grizzly (1900).
