PopcornTreeCt

The Jurassic Park ending is pretty damn good compared to what was originally conceived (Grant picks up a rifle and blows away the 2 raptors) I think the ending to War of the Worlds was pretty bad. All of a sudden they just stop killing people and die. It's like Spielberg yelled Cut! and then the aliens stopped acting and let Tom Cruise save the day. Oh, the Matrix Revolutions had to have the worst ending in all of movie land.

xraybies

Both Signs and The Village suffered from major suckage due to DEM, seems like Shyamalan has been watching too many Twilight Zone episodes. Let's the Lady in the Water isn't as bad but I'm not hopeful.

Supermallet

Signs technically IS deus ex machina since the implication is that God himself ordained all this stupid shit to happen. I mean, if that isn't the definition of deus ex machina, I don't know what is.

chowderhead

I think the Gandalf character in LOTR is completely a DEM. He can come in at any time and wipe out entire armies and yet only does that at the last minute i.e. LOTR:TTT.

The ending of the Bone Collector was ridiculous as well.

Supermallet

Tolkien was always loathe to use Gandalf for that exact reason.

Tscott

What was the deus ex machina in The Village? There was a twist, but a twist doesn't equal deus ex machina.

Groucho

The giant eagle as much of a DEM in Lord of the Rings as Gandalf.

kgrogers1979

I never read the LOTR books, but weren't both Gandalf and Saruman lesser gods or something? I thought I read that somewhere. That would explain why Gandalf is so powerful and why he didn't die against the Balrog.

Giantrobo

Huh? What? I never took it as "God" doing that and I don't think it was ever implied that it was God or any other diety doing it. Just like Forrest Gump, it was "shit" that happened or worked out in the grand scheme of things.

Supermallet

Well, the ending of Signs is left vague but the impression I got was that all this "random" shit wasn't really random at all. Frankly, I thought it was laid on rather thick. I was waiting for Jesus to show up and kick some alien ass.

Groucho

The impression I got from Signs was that:

Supermallet

Yes, I got that, as well. But more than that.

Charlie Goose

The Bad Seed - original from the 50s.

That is an example of DEM.

Supermallet

Great example! Still, I love that movie.

Troy Stiffler

Yea. The little girl who leaves waterglasses laying around. The little boy who has asthma. The "Swing Away" stuff. And the movie is called SIGNS. The ending is, by no means, DEM.

I wouldn't even say that the solution was WATER. It was like all of those things, put together. The water was just a small part.

Rockmjd23

In Demons,

moocher

Actually I think JP3 is a better example. was a rather lousy and cheap ending to an otherwise enjoyable flic. Why end it that way when the movie only ran 90 minutes or so? There was plenty of time to set up a better and more satisfying ending than that. Pretty lazy writing if you ask me.

GoldenJCJ

House on Haunted Hill (1999) -

UAIOE

I actually found it to be funny.

Yes its still a DEM moment, but the writers were aware of it and poking fun of it.

Troy Stiffler

Now THAT is a good example! That movie went SOOO downhill in just the last five or ten minutes. Then he said that, and the ghosts are like "oh, I'm sorry, pardon me, sir".

It's still lot of fun. And I still like to watch it. Great sets. Fun, twisted storytelling. Lots of geniunly 'freaky' moments - which really hit my senses. I just really phase-out during those last few minutes.

Jon2

Sorry, Charlie.

(I really am sorry, but I couldn't resist using that line. I hope Starkist doesn't sue me.)

It depends. The original 50's version I saw, didn't end that way. In the one I saw, it was the

The funny thing is that either ending could be considered a DEM as a DEM plot device isn't restricted to happy or upbeat endings.

And, I'll agree that Signs sucked, but it's not a DEM ending.

Forrest Gump, on the other hand, was filled with DEM plot devices.

dhmac

The second Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, has at least two Deus Ex Machina scenes in it:

- Once when Harry is stuck in the forrest about to be attacked,

- And the ending, when

GuruTwo

I don't understand the people who claim the "Signs" thing came out of nowhere. Now, don't get me wrong, I really liked "Signs". When I was a kid, I wasn't scared of ghosts or monsters under the bed, I'd read books about alien abduction (not your typical childrens-section fluff, I was reading the books written for adults around the time I was 10 or 11) and that's always terrified me. Coming from a kid who slept with his head under the covers to prevent alien abduction (because aliens have mastered intergalactic travel but would shrug their shoulders and give up when they reached the inpenetrable shield that is a quilt my grandmother made) and had nosebleeds and headaches and a bunch of other "abductee symptoms", I thought the movie was really spooky.

I'm not a huge Shyamalan fan (still haven't seen "The Village") but I like him as a writer, but the whole time I watched "Signs" for the first time, I was like "all this water is the setup for some payoff". I don't think I guessed that the water would be the weakness of the aliens but it was certainly set up throughout the whole movie and defintitely not even subtlely.

I agree about "Jurassic Park III". Once again, I like the movie, I don't think there's a huge variance in quality among all three "Jurassic Park" movie, but the ending of "JPIII" is lame. It's somewhat set up but I still think it's definitely deux ex machina, but the worst thing about it is that you think "wow, we're at the 90 minute mark, that leaves us 20-30 minutes of dino vs. military action" but no, it just ends.

ItsGreekToMe

Now, it's been a while since I read the book, but doesn't the ending of the book involve poisoning some eggs and the raptors dying after eating them? Or an I completely remembering that wrong?

Anyway, I thought the ending in the film was far better and gave us the slam-bam ending that most people want in a summer blockbuster.

Filmmaker

The thing I liked about JURASSIC PARK's deux ex machina is that it succinctly visualized the theme of the entire film, that a) recreating a past species is an inherently ill-advised undertaking, b) Man and dinosaur were not meant to share the planet and c) Man is unprepared to handle the chaos this genetic engineering hath wrought; therefore, logically, only dinosaurs can effectively handle the threat of dinosaurs. The entire species of Man and our gross collective hubris is brought low in that final scene.