The Trouble with Endings
By John DeNardo |
Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at
12:43 pm
James Schellenberg over at The Cultural Gutter has an interesting artcile about The Trouble with Endings. In it, he talks about how good stories are let down by weak endings. His examples include the films Minority Report and 28 Days Later and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
I would add some other movies and books which I thought had a disappointing ending:
- The Naked God by Peter Hamilton – The Deus ex machina ending of the third book in the trilogy was not worthy of the excellence that preceded it.
- The Inverted World by Christopher Priest – An excellent book but a brief and unexplained ending.
- Jupiter Project by Gregory Benford – A decent book until the main story line abruptly switched near the end.
- Independence Day – An uploaded virus? Come on! Don’t these technologically advanced aliens have a firewall?
- 3001 by Arthur C. Clarke – An uploaded virus? Come on! Aren’t these aliens smarter than the ones from Independence Day?
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I have to second John’s nomination of The Naked God‘s weak ending. All that build up for that.
I don’t usually gripe about endings in books (movies are a different matter), but the end of Absolution Gap also left me going: ‘Wha?’. Too bad, as I enjoyed Reynolds’ Inhibitors series immensely.
Those are the only two that I can think of recently (and recently is a relative term) that had less than interesting endings.