10 Confusing Sci-Fi Movie Endings Fans Still Don’t Understand

The great thing about sci-fi is its willingness to ask big questions. With so many of the genre’s premises involving extreme life-or-death situations like, say, the end of the world, a mysterious plague, or even an alien invasion (to name but a few), these stories often posit questions of an earth-shattering nature, which, in turn, allows them to explore existential spaces in a manner other movie genres simply can’t.

Sometimes, those questions can lead to confusing moments for audiences. Not everyone in a movie theater is on the same wavelength at all times, and it isn’t a given that they’re all necessarily interested in pondering the meaning of life. In such cases, a sci-fi movie’s attempt to reach for the stars (so to speak) by thinking outside the box during its third and final act isn’t always appreciated or even easily understood.

10 2001: A Space Odyssey Ended With a (Star Child’s) Whimper, Not a Bang

Symbolism Ushers in the Dawning of a New Epoch

At the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, scientist David Bowman stops the rogue supercomputer HAL 9000 from killing him before he makes it to Jupiter. Upon arrival, Bowman uses an EVA pod to investigate the monolith floating in orbit around the planet, which, in turn, takes him through a giant wormhole to a regal bedroom in which he watches a duplicate version of himself grow old and die. Upon his death, the Star Child emerges and orbits the Earth. Cue credits. Yeah, you can imagine how an ending like that might confuse people.

Audiences have been debating and arguing over the meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s landmark film since its release in 1968. For the most part, Kubrick always kept his cards close to his chest and refrained from speaking about the meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s ending to anyone. However, before he passed, the master craftsman gave an interview with Playboy in which he did (vaguely) discuss the ending’s philosophical musings. For anyone who wants the ending to the film spelled out for them, now that option’s available. For the rest of us, it’s simply more fun to invent our own symbolic meaning for the conclusion of one of the greatest films ever made.

9 eXistenZ’s Conclusion Questioned the Nature of Reality and Artificiality

And As Always With David Cronenberg, It All Comes Down to Bodies

By the late ’90s, Canadian director David Cronenberg had already successfully cemented his place as the foremost director of contemplative gross-out body horror. Some of his earliest films back in Canada, like Shivers and The Brood, explored those exact spaces, concocting a meditation on how human nature intermingles with flesh-and-blood bodies. Once he got to Hollywood, movies like The Fly and Videodrome continued this trend, and before he switched gears to focus more on psychological dramas, Cronenberg capped his initial body horror oeuvre off with one of the strangest movies of his career, eXistenZ.

Admittedly, eXistenZ is like many ’90s movies in that it treats virtual reality gaming as something akin to a separate universe, one that players can enter through a plug embedded in their spine. What sets this film apart from the rest of those sci-fi films is how it chooses to use this premise as a launching pad to explore philosophical questions like the nature of reality versus free will. That’s best summarized at the end of the film when our heroes (Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh) have escaped back to reality. Unfortunately, once they’re back, they can no longer tell the difference between the game and the real world. It’s as if David Cronenberg is asking every one of us: Is there even a difference?

8 Stalker’s End Disputes Whether Action Should Be Taken Or Not

Salvation Is Never Easily Achieved

At the end of Andrei Tarkovsky’s incredible sci-fi thriller Stalker, the film’s three main characters have finally accomplished their goal of reaching a mysterious Room that will grant anyone who reaches it their wildest wish by traversing an irradiated stretch of land known as “The Zone.” Each of the three men has a reason for wanting to reach the Room for themselves. The Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is searching for inspiration. The Professor (Nikolai Grinko) is in pursuit of the answers to life’s hidden secrets. As for the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky), well, he seems just to be there to make sure the other two men reach their goal.

As the three men draw closer to the Room, the Professor drops a bombshell (literally). He is carrying an explosive with him to destroy the Room in the hopes of keeping it out of a potentially evil person’s hands. That no doubt sounds like Stalker builds towards an epic and violent conclusion, but in actuality, the film ends with an extended conversation regarding human nature and morality, one in which it is decided that none of the three men will enter the Room. In the film’s concluding moments, the Stalker’s daughter (who has been dealing with physical health concerns) is seen sitting at her kitchen table, appearing to use telekinesis to move around a series of glasses. Whether the Stalker broke his promise and entered the Room unbeknownst to the others or whether the glasses moving around were the result of a train passing by is left up to the audience.

7 Primer’s Final Few Moments Is All About Subjectivity

And Proves That Time Travel Will Likely Never Work Out the Way We Hope It Will

2004’s criminally underrated sci-fi movie Primer sees two engineers inadvertently creating a means of time travel by creating a causal loop that allows an individual to travel six hours into the past simply by sequestering themselves inside a box. As one is likely to do in a situation like this, these two geniuses devise a plan in which they use their newfound ability to travel back to the past and make a killing on the stock market. Of course, that, in turn, leads to a complication when their timeline gets royally messed up.

As the two men begin tampering more with the timeline, multiple versions of themselves start appearing, and everything spirals out of control. Primer ends with one future version of an engineer keeping a watchful eye over all the others while another builds a giant warehouse-sized box so that he can travel back in time to before the experiment began. The motives of every alternate version of these engineers are entirely unclear and purposefully devised so that the audience can decide for themselves. And decide they have. Every fan’s interpretation of Primer’s ending is subjective, and that’s no doubt exactly what the filmmakers were looking to accomplish.

6 Interstellar’s Ending Makes Us Question the Nature of Our Relationship with Time

And Appreciate How Much of it We Have With the Ones We Love Most

Christopher Nolan is one filmmaker who quickly proved he’s capable of creating some of the most thought-provoking endings of all time. One such conclusion arrived at the end of Interstellar, which concerns the attempts of Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA engineer, who has been tasked with piloting a craft carrying 5,000 human embryos to a new hospitable planet because Earth is dying. Cooper’s journey takes him through a wormhole where he discovers that he is the “ghost” trapped inside his daughter’s bedroom back on Earth in the past.

During the earlier stages of Interstellar, audiences learn that some ghost or spirit has been doing its level-headed best to communicate with Cooper’s daughter through binary and Morse code. At the time, neither Cooper nor his kid had any understanding of what was going on. But once Cooper flies through the wormhole and interacts with a giant tesseract, he learns that he was the ghost all along and that he was trying to send his daughter the necessary coordinates to lead the remnants of humanity to the right place. Everything ends up working out perfectly except for one thing: when Cooper finally concludes his journey, he’s been gone for so long that his daughter is now elderly and close to death, while he is more or less the same age as when he left.

5 Solaris Finale Posits That There Is Something After Death, But What?

The Strength of Love Can Overcome Even Death

Despite being critically well-received, audiences absolutely despised Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Solaris when it was released in 2002, awarding it the dreaded “F” CinemaScore, a rating that only 22 films in history have ever achieved. That letdown no doubt stemmed from the film’s ambiguous ending (okay, not just ending but nature; after all, the entire movie is philosophical and cryptic).

This version of Solaris ends with Dr. Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) realizing that despite what his eyes tell him, he did not actually return to Earth following his mission into deep space to visit a space station orbiting an alien planet. Instead, a flashback shows audiences that Kelvin decided to stay on the soon-to-be doomed space station to remain with the ghostly visions he’s experiencing of his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone). When Kelvin asks her if he’s still alive, her response is: “We don’t have to think like that anymore.” Whatever is truly going on with Chris and Rheya, they have somehow managed to transcend death, and Solaris leaves it up to the audience to determine how.

4 Blade Runner’s Final Few Moments Asks If Androids Dream of Electric Unicorns

And If So, Does That Make Them Human or Not?

With at least seven different versions of the film in existence, there’s a reason why the ending to Blade Runner confuses so many people, and a lot of it has to do with these alternate versions significantly altering the film’s story. The film’s throughline is simple enough to follow. A former detective named Deckard (Harrison Ford) tracks down rogue Replicants (androids) and retires them permanently. While attempting to retire three dangerous Replicants, Deckard falls in love with a Replicant named Rachel, who believes herself to be human. If one Replicant can (wrongly) believe herself to be human, couldn’t another?

As Blade Runner moves closer and closer to its conclusion, it becomes impossible to ignore the possibility that Deckard might be every bit a Replicant as well. The Director’s Cut hones in on this subplot by ending with Deckard discovering a Unicorn origami sitting in front of his door. Having experienced a dream of a Unicorn earlier in the film, one popular reading of this scene suggests that Deckard’s superiors on the police force know that he is a Replicant and that the origami is an allusion to such knowledge. Others, meanwhile, are happy to read the Unicorn as simply a signifier that Deckard has freed Rachel and himself from the constraints of the corrupt society they find themselves in.

3 The Thing’s Conclusion Wants You To Question Who Can Be Trusted

And Whether It Matters In the Face of Inevitable Death Anyway

As if having to contend with a man-killing shape-shifting alien wasn’t bad enough, John Carpenter’s The Thing dares to end its story with an ambiguous conclusion suggesting that maybe none of the scientists living on a remote arctic base survived their run-in with “the thing from outer-space.” In the film’s final few moments, Kurt Russell’s MacReady sits beside his sole remaining co-worker, Childs (Keith David), as the wreckage of their base burns down around them. The alien has seemingly been stopped, but the men might not survive the elements.

After everything they’ve been through to survive the attack by this alien creature capable of disguising itself as other people, neither MacReady nor Childs can trust that the other is who they say they are. As the film ends, the two men refuse to take their eyes off one another, and John Carpenter leaves it up to the audience to decide what might happen next. Some fans believe Childs is secretly the alien because his breath doesn’t show up in the cold weather. Others are under the impression that the only tell-tale sign is a glint of light in the eyes of someone who has been assimilated. As for Carpenter, he’s of the opinion that it doesn’t really matter, believing that both men are dead anyway.

2 Annihilation’s Ending Suggests That Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

And That Truly Knowing Oneself Might Not Be Possible

Sporting a premise that’s more or less an homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Alex Garland’s Annihilation sees troubled scientist Lena (Natalie Portman) investigating an unstable part of nature that has seemingly bonded with something alien, resulting in a stretch of landscape known as “The Shimmer.” She does so in the hopes of discovering what happened to her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), who suddenly fell into a coma after returning from “The Shimmer.” When Lena reaches the lighthouse at the end of her journey, she comes into contact with an amorphous creature that eventually comes to resemble herself.

After destroying her doppelgänger, Lena is reunited with Kane and learns that he has awoken from his coma following the collapse of “The Shimmer.” When the two finally come face to face, each asks the other if they are truly who they say they are. Neither husband nor wife can admit to knowing the truth, and both their eyes shimmer eerily as they embrace, and Annihilation cuts to black. There’s no further explanation from there; it’s just one last strange occurrence in a movie that has been beautifully filled with the inexplicable.

1 Inception’s Ending Is a Beautiful Dream Trapped Within a Potential Nightmare

And Yet, the World Just Keeps on Spinning

If you were lucky enough to catch Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Inception in theaters when it was first released in 2010, then you no doubt remember that when this sci-fi action epic finally reached its concluding moments, the silence in the theater was likely so loud you could hear a pin drop. That’s because the dream-within-dreams nature of Inception’s plot leaves audiences second-guessing the reality of everything they see, including the film’s seemingly “happy ending” when professional subconscious thief Dom Cobb is reunited with his children.

The only thing that Cobb wants to do throughout Inception is clear his name and get back to his children, who have been living without him and his wife since he was wrongly blamed for her tragic death years earlier. When Dom finally accomplishes this goal, he places his totem, a small object that notifies him of whether he is still in a dream or not, on a nearby table and lets it spin. But Cobb is overcome by emotion at the sight of his children and doesn’t stick around to find out for himself what the totem tells him. As he goes to greet his kids, Nolan keeps his camera trained on the totem, which stays spinning for so very long that the audience comes to the uncomfortable realization that Cobb very well might not have accomplished his goal after all and might, instead, still be dreaming.