Alternate Endings

There's a website I'm rather fond of. Some of you may know of it. If you don't, you need to check it out. It's called How It Should Have Ended .com. (Literally www.howitshouldhaveended.com) On this website, some very clever people (spearheaded by a dude I know only as 'Daniel') put together flash animations of how they think some very popular movies should have ended. Used to be a hit and miss thing, but over the past few years they've gained a few sponsorships and now turn out a new video basically every month.

Anyways, this website has changed the way I watch movies. I'm now very much in the habit of finding something I don't like about an ending or something that doesn't quite work, or picking up the blatant issues with some, and thinking up an alternate ending. I'd like to share a few and see if you don't agree that this is how these movies should have ended.

The first is Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Not a bad movie, don't get me wrong, but certainly there were some issues with the ending. The main issue I take is with Anakin's conversion to the dark side. It seems really contrived and weirdly convenient. And with the character that George Lucas has spent the first two movies developing, it doesn't quite make sense. Let's be honest. Weak, inconsistent, and troubled are all things that Anakin definitely is, but evil? No, though a little misguided at times and pretty blind to the obvious, he tries to do what is basically right.

So how should it have ended? We're at the scene when Anakin first finds out that the Chancellor is actually a sith lord. He pulls his lightsaber on him. Palpatine walks past him and with his back to him says in a very evil and frankly provoking voice, "Yes, you want to kill me, you know you should" or something to that effect. And then? Anakin, unpredictable in the highest and so beyond Palpatine's ability to predict, runs him though with his already drawn lightsaber. And then he says "I should not have done that. It is not the Jedi way." after which we pan through a series of short scenes where he's talking to various people (Mace Windu "No, that was probably a good thing. He was too dangerous to be left alive." Yoda "Hmm, clear the force is. Brought balance, you have." Padme "Good thing he's gone. Did you hear he was planning on turning the Republic into an Empire?") and finally comes to grips with the fact that he has done the right thing, and then Padme doesn't die and he turns away from the dark side completely. Granted, then we don't get the last three movies, which are much better than the first, and there's no Darth Vader. But let's be honest, was anyone really ever convinced that Anakin turned into him anyways? I think it was all an elaborate cover-up. The real Anakin actually died on the operating table.

The next movie is The Phantom of the Opera. I've talked about why I don't like this ending already, but I've never really decided how it should have ended instead. Now I've figured it out. During the song The Point of No Return, when the Phantom is on the stage with Christine and the whole place is full of cops with rifles, the logical ending is for someone to stand up and inform the crowd that there's a known murderer on the stage and arrest him, or simply have a sharpshooter take him out from the back and answer questions later. But, assuming that everyone on the "good" side is really as stupid as they seem to be in that movie, then I think that when Christine and Raoul are sailing out of the Phantom's little cave on the boat right at the very end, and Christine looks back at the Phantom, she should have turned into a pillar of salt. Because we all know that you can't look back.

Anyways, those are the two that have been nagging at me. I'm sure they won't be the last.