Watching a film when you know the ending

[IsraelRocks]

This came to me after watching Movie bobs review of"Rise of the planet of the apes "

With lord of the rings being the exception i find it hard to enjoy movies when the ending is well known in detail. to be more specific i am referring to "rise..." and the star wars 2nd trilogy.

what do you think escapist?

 

[4RM3D]

Usually movies never surprise me to begin with. I can already predict the ending. But what I find fascinating is the journey the movie makes towards that ending. Prologues gives us that insight. Unfortunately, not all prologues are good but some are epic. The first example that comes to mind is X-men: First Class; awesome movie.

 

[Zantos]

I love watching films regardless of knowing the end if it's a good film. I watched The Prestige for the second time a bit back and actually enjoyed it more than the first, just because I knew the finish so I paid more attention to the little bits I'd missed.

 

[Jamboxdotcom]

It's the journey. I know how a lot of movies will end but i still watch them because i want to see how they got to that point.

This. If you don't believe that the journey is more important than the destination, try reading some Vonnegut sometime; almost all of his books tell you the end at the beginning, yet they're still incredibly enjoyable. Besides, how often do you really not know from the outset roughly how it's going to end? How many stories or movies actually, genuinely surprise you?

 

[w9496]

I can watch a film I know the ending too. At my home, if any of the Die Hard movies are on we all still sit and watch.

 

[SammiYin]

It's usually pretty easy to guess how a film ends, but as said before, it's the journey.
Also nothing beats the feeling when a film manages to outsmart you, and gives you an ending you didn't see coming.

 

[badgersprite]

I don't have any problem with this the vast majority of the time. I regularly rewatch films, simply because I enjoy watching films. I like noticing other stuff in the middle I didn't see before. I like thinking about whether they're foreshadowing the ending, or whether knowing the ending changes what earlier scenes mean or how they appear.

Yeah, enjoying movies I've seen more than once isn't usually a problem for me. Actually, if I'm being honest, some of my favourite movies are ones that I didn't really appreciate until the second or third time I saw them, and picked up on things I'd either missed or not really thought about the first time.

Generally, I take the view that if I can't sit through it more than once, it's probably not a very good movie (or not an entertainingly bad movie).

Admittedly, there is a serious problem that appears in prequels, and that's where you know where the events lead to, but the prequel itself doesn't make any sense in that continuity. That's annoying as hell. Knowing that a character is going to grow up to be evil or whatever can lead to a really interesting, tragic tale. But, done badly, it can completely undermine the credibility of the story it's trying to set up, either by undermining the characters we're interested in, contradicting events we know to have happened, or just by being flat out stupid.

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

I hate it when someone spoils the ending of something for me, usually i cant enjoy it because it takes all the surprise and joy of discovery out of it, and i'll just be trying guessing how it happens the whole way through

I think prequals are a bit different though, because they assume you know how it ends, so the film or game or whatever is spent exploring the characters and events that lead up to whatever after

I think rise could be quite interesting, whereas if i were back in the time when planet of the apes was first being released, and someone told me it was earth all along before i had seen it, i'd be pretty annoyed