Tanis said:
I can't think of a lot of 'downer movies' where, in the end, the good guy dies/fails to stop the nuke/whatever.
I was just wondering if ya'll knew any...
*Movies that end in a cliffhanger don't count.
Some spoilers below (though I am mostly avoiding them)
Well, I'm not a big fan of most "downer" movies, but I will mention that there are plenty of horror movies that end this way, especially when the writers are trying to establish a franchise. In some of the "Nightmare On Elm Street" movies for example the good guys THINK they stopped Freddy, only to have him take out the survivors. Similar things happen in movies like "Drag Me To Hell", and well... lots of them. The kind of ending your taking about kind of fits with the idea of Horror, though even then I tend to prefer things ending on a high note.
From fairly recent movies I'm surprised nobody mentioned "Watchmen" or "Cabin In The Woods".
The ending of the comedy TV series "Sledge Hammer" has our "hero" trying to disarm a nuclear bomb, giving his classic "Trust me, I know what I'm doing..." before blowing it up and taking out the city.
The ending of the TV series "Lexx" amounts to an epic fail, in a series that is ultimatly about epic fails.
There are also numerous movies where the bad guy is actually the good guy (Watchmen is debatably this, as is Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog), or where the good guys fail but something happens to end things on a high note anyway.
The Anime series "Speed Grapher" ends on a note where the good guy fails to defeat the bad guy, who for all of his evil has a somewhat noble motive despite the collateral damage and twisted stuff he does. The hero lives on having lost the one thing he cherished, his eye-sight, no longer being able to take the pictures he loved, and the bad guy's plan ultimatly fails leaving nothing but ruin in it's wake as the greedtastic corrupt elite he set out to bring down just gets replaced by a similar group, including his own surviving minions.
While not as dramatic as your example, since nobody dies, the movie "Rocky" arguably fits the definition as well. Our hero ultimatly fails, the story being mostly about how incredible it was he went up against the champ and survived as long as he did when nobody else could. The later movies in the series (2 through 4) were more typically upbeat, but it's important to note that in the original story, which was meant to stand alone (and was based very loosely on a stumblebum who fought Ali and survived many rounds) Rocky does not win.
