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.
01:47By the time the film's surreal ending rolls around,
01:49you may well be lost, as 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 never explained beyond one mention of a passing comet,
02:02our heroine is now stuck with a group of people who have no idea about the emerging multiverse realities.
02:07So good luck explaining whatever the mind-eff that was that viewers just witnessed
02:11to these versions of your friends, M.
02:13Number 8, The Quiet Earth.
02:15Where is the beach?
02:16Released in 1985, this 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, and 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, wherein our hero crashes a truck rigged with explosives
02:48and wakes up on a dark beach, watching 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, given 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 is often singled out
03:19as 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 is moving glasses with her mind,
03:46or the passing trains soon seen by the viewer are 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.
04:04What'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 is likely to leave you heartbroken.
04:13A scanner darkly is likely the most personal of the many stories mined from the prolific sci-fi writer's back catalogue.
04:19It's tale of an undercover cop who falls in with a crowd of drug users and grows to care for them more than his shadowy superiors,
04:24was based on Dick's own experience with drugs and the gradual dissolution of his friend group through the tragedy of addiction.
04:29So, appropriately enough, the end of this dark 2006 adaptation sees 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 used to synthesise 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.
04:54It's hard to tell, but whatever the answer, it'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?
05:04Poor Tobey Hooper.
05:05The horror genius behind the Texas Chainsaw Massacre created what is undoubtedly one 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 with 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 which soon becomes drowned in overly complex plotting.
05:29The movie follows a set of scientists as they attempt to study a trio of astronauts who 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 epitomised by its bizarre ending, one 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, unbeknownst 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 4, 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, it was Earth all along, was an unheralded and dazzling ending which 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, but 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, but the apes have gotten their 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, but good luck working out how they managed it on first viewing.
07:04Number 3, 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, as 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 and maintains a stranglehold on the plot until the infamous ending.
07:44No matter the elasticity of your interpretation, all that appears to be clear is that yes,
07:48the characters enter and later leave what 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 might be heaven, might be the way back home to Earth,
08:00it might just be a star, who knows?
08:03Number 2, Vanilla Sky.
08:05What is tech support?
08:06Released in 2001, Vanilla Sky is one of director Cameron Crowe's most underrated cinematic offerings,
08:12as well as being a major tonal departure for the almost famous filmmaker.
08:16This Tom Cruise vehicle is a surprisingly cerebral and dark thriller which 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.
08:53In 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, or anywhere else, is very unclear.
09:02Number 1, Beyond the Black Rainbow.
09:04Everything about it.
09:06Released in 2010, Panos Cosmitos' 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 into a trippy, nightmarish, prolonged sequence.
09:30So its take on telekinesis, mind-melding, and new age transcendence are understandably pretty insane too.
09:36But as confusing as the bulk of this film's action is,
09:38the ending truly takes the biscuit,
09:39with 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 or 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.
10:08And 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.