What I learned about ending a story from watching the movie Tomorrowland.
/If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s simultaneously about the past, the future, founding a utopia, and the end of the world. It’s also about a young woman named Casey (played by Britt Robertson) and her search for Tomorrowland, and an old guy named Frank (played by George Clooney) and his creepy love obsession with a preteen android named Athena (played by Raffey Cassidy). In other words, it’s several disparate and contrasting story lines all tied together into a cohesive narrative. Well, a mostly cohesive narrative, definitely cohesive-ish.
Cards on the table, is it a great movie?
No.
Is it a bad movie?
No.
Could they have cut the uncomfortable parts with Clooney falling in love with a prepubescent robot without taking away from the good parts of the movie?
Yes.
Should they have?
Yes.
Failing that, could they have at least aged the android girl to make it less weird and borderline wrong?
Yes.
Could they have simply written the roles as a platonic relationship?
Again, yes.
Okay, enough. This post is about ending a story, and in that respect, the movie mostly crushed it.
A great story needs a great ending. And a great ending needs two things:
1. A great ending wraps up existing plot lines in a satisfactory way. This should be the bare minimum all storytellers should aspire to so we don’t end up with any more Losts or GoTs.
Note to self, make a t-shirt with the words “GoT Lost?” inside a circle with a slash through it. Below that put the words: Endings Matter. Wear to HBO and ABC headquarters.
Obviously (to everyone except studio execs), tying up plot lines is critically important. The last thing anyone should be asking at the conclusion of a story is, “What about this plot device or what happened to that character?” It should be a no-brainer that, if people are watching or reading a story, it’s because they want to know what happened.
So tell them.
2. The best endings not only resolve existing plot lines in an awesome way, they also imply that the characters’ world will continue and their stories will go on.
I don’t mean in an obvious cliffhanger way that some movies/books/TV shows use, by either not finishing the story or by adding a new character/hero/villain in the last scene solely to set up a sequel. (Especially when, as we all know, sometimes there is no sequel. E.g. The Incredible Hulk (2008), Green lantern (2011), The Amazing Spider Man 2 (2014), etc.
Let me be clear here, I’m in no way suggesting that any of these movies should have had sequels. I think we can all agree that Mark Ruffalo is a superior Hulk, Deadpool is a superior superhero, and Tom Holland is the best Spiderman ever.
What I do mean, is that a great ending lets the viewers/readers know that the characters haven’t disappeared, and more importantly, that their lives will continue along the correct story arc. Heroes will get their happily ever after, minor villains will get their comeuppance (since the main villain is already dead or vanquished, see “wraps up existing plot lines in a satisfactory way” above), and the rest of us will go to sleep at night with the knowledge that the underdog really can win, the impossible is possible, and that life, at its core, is fair.
In other words, that fairy tales can come true.
Which is exactly how Tomorrowland ends. After the final battle, where the inter-dimension doomsday radio is destroyed (yes, you read that right, people who haven’t seen the movie), there’s an end scene set against the backdrop of a renewed bright and cheery Tomorrowland. Casey and Frank are speaking to the next batch of pre-teen android recruiters they’re prepping to send out into the world, and Frank says, “It isn't hard to knock down a big, evil building that's telling everybody that the world's going to end. What is hard, is figuring out what to build in its place, and if we're going to do that, we can't do it alone. We're going to need all of you.” And when one of the android recruiter kids asks for more specifics, Casey says, “Dreamers. We are looking for dreamers.”
Then the movie ends with a montage of bunch of random people (the “dreamers”) finding Tomorrowland pins snuck into their belongs.
Is that campy and hokey?
Yes, but that’s not the point. Technically, the story could have ended after they blew up the doomsday radio.
The point is, those final scenes do something incredibly important. They let us know that the story keeps going. That even if they never make another Tomorrowland movie (which seems likely, although with Disney’s cash and Hollywood’s lack of originality, even lackluster franchises are fair game for sequels and reboots), it’s okay, because a great ending not only gives us the warm-fuzzy-happy-ever-after feeling, it reassures us that somewhere, somehow, the story goes on, even if we aren’t there to see it.