Let's talk for a few minutes about trick endings in movies. I've identified two trick endings that have been used to death, and therefore suck. A quick warning: you may disagree with the following assessments of these movies. You're free to have your own opinions. Just know that they're wrong, unless they're the same opinions I have.

Let's start with The Cardinal Sin of writing: the "It Was All A Dream" ending. It's the ultimate slap in the face for everyone who's watching or reading what you have produced. It is in effect saying "Thanks for sticking with me through two hours of this nonsense; now I will reward you with the fact that NONE OF THAT JUST HAPPENED. That's right, it was all a huge waste of your time and attention!" If you know me at all, you know that I hate the movie Vanilla Sky with a passion. That's because, as I remember it, about a third of the way through the movie, Tom Cruise has some kind of accident. For the following 90% of the movie, we watch him running around doing some things, see Penelope Cruz's boobs, and are generally kind of bored but wondering what's going on. Then, right at the end, BAM! He wakes up. See, after his accident, he went into a coma or something and was preserved in some kind of science fiction life preserving thing. So what you just watched for the last hour and a half didn't happen at all. At this point, the viewer throws up their hands at the screen and exclaims "Are you KIDDING!?" and walks out of the theater wondering why he wasted his life watching a mediocre movie that didn't even happen.

A similar and equally frustrating movie was Oceans 12, in which the caper they were spending the whole movie focusing on was actually completed soon after the opening credits. It goes a little something like this: Movie starts, caper is explained, caper is completed, lots of unnecessary actions, wasted time acting like the caper wasn't completed, fake "witty" dialog, and then, right at the end, BAM! the big reveal that you just wasted an hour and a half of your time watching unnecessary actions, wasted time, and real "shitty" dialog, because the damn deal was done in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.

I'm not sure what kind of sadistic people think this stuff up, but the "...then he woke up" or "...it was all solved a long time ago" ending, what I am deeming the WOYFT (Waste of Your Fucking Time) ending, is a cruel joke, an easy way to get an "oooooooooo" from a stupid audience. It's a cop out, a cheap way to explain away any inconsistencies in the plot or any unrealistic items therein. It should be taught in Intro to Kindergarten Writing that any ending that totally negates the entire movie or book is a bad ending. I don't want to invest my time and money in something that is ultimately going to tell me that it was all a dream, a joke on me.

The second trick ending that needs to be put to bed is the "They're the same person!" ending, made popular for our generation by the timeless classic Fight Club. I'm sure there have been plenty of movies before that one that used this ending, but that one was the one for me that made me go "Holy God, they're the same fucking person. I just peed myself a little." It was awesome. The ending was used to much the same effect in Identity, a neat little thriller that pulled it off well. But then there were throngs of movies and shows where multiple people were the same person in actuality. It actually got to the point where at the beginning of every movie and TV show, if there are two people talking to each other, I assume that they are the same person right up until the end of the movie, regardless of whether that assumption makes sense or not. I had this feeling during the first three seconds of the movie Secret Window, and it turned out, I was right. Johnny Depp and John Turturro were the same person, and the whole time the movie was ever so subtly leading up to this point, I was just repeating "they're the same person" over and over in my head. It ruined the movie knowing the trick ending before it started, and it ruined the movie that it was so painfully obvious that that's what was going to happen.

Signs that you're watching a movie that's about to roll this dusty corpse of an ending out onto the screen include two characters never being in the same place at the same time (Superman Syndrome), two characters being at the same place at the same time but other people don't seen to notice one of them (Sixth Sense Syndrome [yeah, I know Bruce Willis and that kid weren't the same person, and actually, Sixth Sense was an excellent trick ending, but still, they were in the same place all the time and no one paid attention to Bruce Willis, so you see where I'm going with this]), and watching a movie made in the early 2000s that was a thriller. This is an example of a great trick ending being used so often that it becomes a bad cliche ending. I call this the They Were All The Same! (TWATS!) ending.

I actually thought of one more ending while writing this, and that's the "Aliens Get Killed by Some Common Earth Substance" ending. I'm looking at you, Signs and War of the Worlds. Let's start with some awesome killer aliens coming and just dominating Earth, enslaving people, killing people, destroying civilization. But wait! This hyper advanced civilization out in the universe conquering lesser civilizations should have done more research on OUR planet, because we have water, and that decimates them! Or, our atmosphere is toxic and they just kind of die. Someone back at home base is getting fired for this one! Seriously, what we want to see is an epic human-alien battle in which our obviously pathetic-in-comparison species is obliterated by these evil aliens. That's a realistic ending. You think these guys have mastered bending space so they could conquer the universe, built crazy ass ships and weapons, and they didn't look into the fact that WATER KILLS THEM!?!? I don't have trouble believing that there are aliens wanting to kill us, I have trouble believing they'd commit an oversight of such majestic proportions. I call this the Stupid Aliens Die (SAD) ending.

So, moving forward, Hollywood, please stop making movies that end like this. Also, stop making bad sequels to bad movies, remakes of bad movies, and bad movies. Thank you.