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| source// TriStar Pictures |
You might be surprised to read this but… people die. No, it’s true. If this is brand new information to you then please accept this very sincere apology. But since death is an as-of-yet unavoidable part of life, then it’s important for movies to show this as well.
The operative word there, by the way, is show. Unfortunately, a lot of directors tend to forget that old adage of “show don’t tell” and opt to simply talk about a character dying rather than actually demonstrate the grisly business onscreen.
Now, sometimes a death will occur away from the camera lens in order to surprise the audience or help them relate to another character in the film. For instance, one character happens upon the dead body of her lover and freaks out. And because we as the audience didn’t witness the death either, we can freak right out along with them.
Oftentimes, however, the reason for an offscreen death is much less romantic. It’s usually just a mixture of laziness and scheduling conflicts with the actors that ultimately deprives viewers of watching the life go out of a character’s eyes.
…What? Too morbid?
9. The Kraken – Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End
The most impressive and imposing of all the creatures in the never-ending Pirates franchise, Davy Jones’ beastly “pet” monster provides the most exciting moments in the second instalment of the series, Dead Man’s Chest.
Say what you want about the rest of the film, but the Kraken was epic, and since the time we see the creature it’s dragging Captain Jack Sparrow down to the depths of the ocean and into Davy Jones’ Locker, one would safely assume that Jack would get a chance at revenge in the next movie.
He doesn’t. Instead, we’re treated to an ultra brief scene where Sparrow and Barbossa encounter the dead carcass of the Kraken on the beach. Jones himself had to put down the monster under the orders of Lord Cutler Beckett, which we never get to see.
Granted, the discovery of the deceased beast leads to a nice heart-to-heart between Captains Sparrow and Barbossa about mortality, but that scene would have played just as well had we gotten to witness its demise!
8. Tank – The Matrix Reloaded
The first Matrix film is pretty much a bloodbath for the human characters; basically anyone who stepped foot on the Nebuchadnezzar was dead before the ending credits rolled. The second-coming of Judas, Cypher, goes ahead and kills off most of the other crew members, including Apoc, Switch, Dozer, and Mouse before being executed himself, leaving the only good guys to make it out of the first movie alive Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and Tank.
And yet, one of those four never made it to the sequel. Rather, a throwaway line in The Matrix Reloaded tells us that Tank died – the how and why is never fleshed out – and his duties have been given to his brother-in-law, Link.
It’s a thoughtless swap-out that makes the mid-series recasting of Becky on the sitcom Roseanne look seamless and inspired by comparison. Did they really think no one would care that Tank was killed off and substituted with another random black guy (kinda racist, by the way)?
In one of many instances of real life meddling in the good intentions of screenwriters, it turns out the guy who played Tank in the first Matrix, Marcus Chong, got a little too big for his britches and demanded the same salary as Laurence Fishburne for the sequel. The Wachowskis responded by showing him just how replaceable he was.
7. Xander Cage – xXx: State Of The Union
James Bond on a skateboard. Extreme 007. GoldenEye with a nu metal soundtrack. However you want to label it, Vin Diesel’s attempt to create a spy thriller franchise pretty much fizzled out, even after the first xXx (the random capital letter makes X-tra special) put up Fast and Furious numbers at the box office.
Most of that is due to Diesel’s reluctance to get onboard with the sequel because he felt the script “didn’t feel xXx.” That didn’t stop the studio from performing the ever-popular switcheroo, tossing Ice Cube into the role for the next film.
Rather than call the movie something else entirely, however, they opted to stick with the xXx branding, which meant they had to explain to audiences why Xander Cage was suddenly the former member of NWA. They did this by a) killing off Diesel’s character via offscreen explosion, and b) retconning the core concept of the movie, claiming that xXx is simply a codename for any secret agent hired by the NSA (despite the fact that Xander Cage called himself “xXx” before he was ever hired by the government agency).
Anyhow, literally blowing Cage up was a terrible idea, both for the story and for any future franchise prospects, as screenwriters will now have to find a way to retcon the story again if Diesel has his way and stars in another sequel.
6. Doughboy – Boyz N The Hood
For those who don’t remember or who have chosen to block it out of their memories, John Singleton’s directorial debut was a bit of a bummer, to say the least. Depicting the less-than-ideal life of those unfortunate enough to live in South Central Los Angeles, Boyz N The Hood leaves no stone unturned in relating just how depressing life for young, disadvantaged black men can be.
And holy crap does Singleton do a good job of it. By the end of the film, death feels like an inevitability for these kids. Try as hard as you might to avoid gang life and walk the straight-and-narrow in this rough neighborhood, eventually you’ll be forced into a situation that puts you on the Grim Reaper’s doorstep.
That’s what makes Ice Cube’s character, Doughboy, such an integral part of the story. He fully embraces the violent lifestyle, brandishing his handgun to end arguments and refusing to back down from confrontation. So it’s a solid gut-punch when Doughboy’s brother Ricky, the fun-loving football player with a college scholarship, is the one gunned down in the film’s final act.
Doughboy gets retribution for his brother’s demise, however, killing the three guys responsible for the drive-by in brutal fashion. But just to prove that the cycle of gang violence is unending, Singleton makes sure to let us know, in the epilogue, that Doughboy was murdered two weeks later. In a rare instance of offscreen death proving effective, his death manages to hit hard even in a caption.
5. Sarah Connor – Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines
In the first (and best) two Terminator films, the story revolves around Sarah Connor and her evolution from a vulnerable damsel in distress to a certified badass, militant heroine. The character quickly stole the show from the titular Terminator while Linda Hamilton revolutionized the role of females in action movies.
When the franchise began to hit the skids, it was no coincidence that Sarah Connor was nowhere to be found. The shift of focus from the protective mother to her son, John, may have been a natural progression, but the jarring manner in which it occurred during the third film couldn’t have been more stilted.
In Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, the audience is told that sometime between the second and third film, Sarah succumbed to leukaemia. The way she died wasn’t the biggest issue – although it certainly felt a little cheap to hear that someone who got stabbed by a shapeshifting robot and lived to tell the tale was ultimately defeated by cancer – but it was the fact that it was so callously glossed over that really stung.
Behind the scenes, this was because Hamilton chose not to reprise her role again, as she felt her character’s story had already wrapped up.
4. Newt, Hicks, & Bishop – Alien 3
Damn, what is it about the third movie in a franchise that brings out the necessity for offscreen death? And another James Cameron franchise, nonetheless!
On a cinematic level, the sudden, very undramatic deaths of Ripley’s surrogate family – Marine leader Hicks, traumatized young girl Newt, and android Bishop – were probably necessary to move the story forward. After all, David Fincher’s brutally dismal world as portrayed in Alien 3 wouldn’t have allowed for a happy, ragtag family story.
Still, the impact of their loss was pretty much nullified by the fact that we don’t even see their faces for a single frame. It’s heartbreaking to see the news of their deaths delivered to Ripley, but it would’ve been ten times more powerful had they made it past the opening credits and we’d been allowed to witness their deaths firsthand.
It seems, we have more behind-the-scenes shenanigans to thank for this, since the production of Alien 3 was pretty much a clusterf–k from start to finish, with multiple scripts being mashed together at the last second. Ultimately, these three characters, who were all vital to the story in Aliens, were chopped out of the film to make it easier on everyone involved.
3. Llewelyn Moss – No Country For Old Men
Dammit, Coen brothers! You’d earned so much goodwill from fans with Raising Arizona and Fargo that you just had to go and see how far you could stretch it, didn’t you?
We all know Joel and Ethan Coen can write a great death scene (wood-chipper, anyone?), but with No Country For Old Men, they also proved they could write a very frustrating death scene.
Josh Brolin’s character, Llewelyn, is a Vietnam vet who looked to outsmart the sociopathic hitman, Anton Chigurh, sent to track him down for “stealing” money after coming across a drug deal gone awry. Llewelyn is the one shining ray of hope in this bleak movie, the only one the audience can really root for. All we want to see is a final confrontation between Llewelyn and Chigurh, hopefully with Llewelyn coming out on top.
We get none of that. Instead, he’s killed by a seemingly random group of Mexican cartel members. We find out about it just as Tommy Lee Jones’ character does, finding Llewelyn dead on the floor of a hotel room. Suddenly, the hope is gone. Everything is futile once again. Thanks, Coens.
2. Adrian – Rocky Balboa
In the story of Rocky Balboa, his wife Adrian might just be the most essential part of his journey. Sure, it’s Rocky’s rotating cast of unique opponents that most people remember, and those characters certainly helped Rocky grow as a competitor, but it’s Adrian who did the most to help the guy become an actual human being once the gloves were off.
Adrian was his motivation to fight Apollo Creed in a rematch, Adrian stood by him when he was on the brink of poverty once again, and Adrian forced him to snap out of it and stop neglecting his son in favor of some random gym rat he wanted to train.
After all of that, though, Sylvester Stallone decided that the best way to make Adrian a pivotal character in the long-awaited Rocky 6 was to kill her off a few years before the events of the movie take place.
Yes, Adrian succumbed to “women cancer” as the always eloquent Stallone put it, using her death as a way to turn Rocky into a grieving, sentimental moraliser. Stallone figured her death would “cut Rocky’s heart out and drop him down to ground zero.” He just didn’t want to waste any actual screen time showing it.
1. Cyclops – X-Men: The Last Stand
Even casual fans of the X-Men know that, along with Wolverine, Cyclops is pretty much the de facto leader of the group and one of the most important character in the series.
So when Scott Summers dies in the third film of the original trilogy, you’d expect it to be an epic, stupefyingly heroic moment. But no, that’s not the case. In fact, it’s the exact opposite; Cyclops’ death couldn’t be less heroic or epic if you asked your cat to write the scene with no prompting.
Distraught over the apparent death of his fiancee and teammate, Jean Grey, Cyclops walks out to Alkali Lake, where she heroically sacrificed herself at the end of the previous film. There, he comes face to face with the suddenly not-dead Jean Grey, and the two suck face for a brief, passionate moment, before Jean goes all Dark Phoenix on him and starts disintegrating him.
Cut to Professor X sensing something amiss and sending Wolverine and Storm to check on the situation, only to find Cyclops’ glasses. Poof. That’s all, folks. What…the…f–k? Just…why?
Apparently there was an issue with the actor portraying Cyclops, James Marsden, taking a part in Superman Returns, which you might recognise as a competing superhero movie, owned by a different studio. Basically, his character’s cheap death in the first act was a petty retribution for crossing the dividing line between franchises.
Which other great characters were suddenly killed off? Share any we missed down in the comments.
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