The movie Steven Spielberg admits “doesn’t have a good ending”
As one of the best directors of modern Hollywood cinema, Steven Spielberg has gifted the industry with some of its finest-ever releases, from the magic of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 to the harrowing WWII drama Saving Private Ryan in 1998. Along the way, he has also inspired the industry with many of the greatest cinematic endings of all time that have enthralled audiences for generations.
It doesn’t take too much searching to find such classic endings either, with the finale of 1989’s Last Crusade containing all the adventure and terror you could ever want from an Indiana Jones tale. Further still, Spielberg finished 1993’s Schindler’s List with one of cinema’s greatest footnotes, reminding audiences that the shocking events of the holocaust had a devastating effect on the lives of those still living today.
Very few of the director’s movies could be said to have an objectively ‘bad’ ending, but Spielberg himself doesn’t tend to agree, once telling the Titanic director James Cameron that he wasn’t all that proud of his ending to the 2005 sci-fi flick War of the Worlds. Adapted from the iconic tale by H. G. Wells, Spielberg’s ambitious take on the story dragged the sci-fi genre into the 21st century with a cast that included Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning.
Yet, as Spielberg stated in James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction, “That film doesn’t have a good ending. I never could figure out how to end that darn thing”. Telling the story of vast alien creatures who land on Earth and attempt to take it over, much of the film is focused on the survival of the protagonists, with the extraterrestrials eventually being killed off by the kind of flu that a regular human could brush off with a Lemsip and a day off work.
Sympathetic, Cameron seemed to be in slight agreement with Spielberg, stating, “I don’t think H.G. Wells could figure it out. The common cold takes out the bad guys,” before the War of the Worlds director responded, “I did the same thing. I had Morgan Freeman help me with it with his narration”.
Many film journalists came out in criticism of the movie’s ending upon its release in 2005, with many presumably wanting a big sci-fi battle between humans and aliens. Yet, the ending of the film and Wells’ novel is actually pretty plausible, even if it is admittedly anticlimactic.
Take a look at the climactic scene of 2005’s War of the Worlds below.
