When it comes to what makes a great film, there are a number of different factors. To some degree what exactly makes the audience love one film over another can be quite different. For instance, there are some people who love to have the entire story wrapped up in a neat little bow like Armageddon, where everyone who was watching the movie knows exactly how it ends. The planet is saved, those who saved it are heroes and everyone goes about their lives as if nothing happened. Other times, people want to play a bit of a guessing game when it comes to just how the story really came to an end.
Science fiction, more than any other genre tends to leave at least a little ambiguity at the end of its films, if people want to take to the logical conclusion. Consider something like Independence Day, where the invading aliens are fought off. Sure, the people of earth won that fight, but what if there were more aliens that decided to come back with bigger and better ships (sort of like Independence Day 2.) Then there are of course science fiction films that are intentionally ambiguous. The point of the flick is really to make people keep guessing about what just happened and how. Those films can be among the best of the genre because they have people leaving the theater discussing what they think really went down.
Total Recall
This movie might be a bit of a surprise to people who saw the film, because at first glance, Total Recall makes sure and ties everything up. Quaid seems to save the people of Mars and releases the oxygen, thereby defeating the evil corporation that had been controlling that planet. However, there is a bit of a twist here that teases the audience rather subtly. The entire point of the Total Rekall technology is that people don't really know what's fake and what's real. That goes especially for Quaid who at one point, thought he was living an entirely different life.
The movie is one of those sort of "dangers of technology" movies that was Black Mirror before Black Mirror came along. At one point, when Quaid thinks he's saved everyone, he has a thought that briefly shows. The idea is that he wonders whether he really won, or if this is all part of him being plugged into a machine.
Annihilation
Based on the 2014 novel of the same name, Annihilation stars Natalie Portman as an army veteran scientist named Lena who has been investigating a phenomenon known as The Shimmer. This Shimmer is a zone that popped up near the place where a meteorite crashed and it appears that that meteor brought alien life with it.
This isn't the typical go-in, fight the aliens, kill them, and get-out sort of movie. While it does appear as though Lena is able to blow up the
Shimmer and make it go away, she also goes back to what she thought was her husband understanding that it might actually be an alien clone of the man she thought he was. Annihilation leaves audiences wondering if The Shimmer is going to start over again and spread through the world, or whether the danger is really over.
Blade Runner
Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner centers on a cop named Deckard who is a “blade runner” that seeks out and “retires” (i.e. kills) replicants. Replicants are cyborg-like creations that look like humans but are actually machines. Over the course of the movie, there are all kinds of existential discussions that go on in the flick as the movie wants people to really wonder what "being human" is really all about.
This science-fiction film is well known for its ambivalent ending. Deckard, who is played by Harrison Ford is very good at his job. He's also someone who seems relatively unbothered by what it is he is doing. For those reasons and other clues that are left throughout Blade Runner, the question that audiences arrive at when the movie comes to an end, is whether or not he might be a replicant that is actually chasing down other replicants.
The Thing
The Thing is one of the best science-fiction horror movies out there thanks to the idea that this alien life form is able to transform into any living creature it wants. It's also quite claustrophobic considering that it involves a bunch of people that are all at a remote arctic station. One by one The Thing replaces people and kills others until there are just two people left alive.
Where the movie hits its crowning achievement is that at the end of the film, it's impossible to know who exactly the audience is supposed to root for. While there is a chance that The Thing has been wiped out, there's also some ambivalence about whether or not it was truly wiped out or whether it's impersonating one of the last two survivors. However, it ends before it answers that question or tells people who of the last two is actually the creature.
Inception
One of the all-time great science fiction movies with an ambivalent or mind-boggling end of all time, Inception definitely leaves the audience wondering what happens after the final credits roll. Throughout the film, the audience is told that all the people who go into other people's dreams have methods they use in order to make sure that they are really out back in the real world. For Leonardo DiCaprio's character, his contraption is a top that eventually stops spinning and falls over onto its side.
At the end of Inception, it seems as though everyone is getting a very happy ending. However, the end seems like it might be just a bit too happy. DiCaprio's character seems to understand this might all be too good to be true as well. He ends up spinning the top and then walks off to be with his family. As the movie closes, the top is still spinning, making people wonder if it never stops, or if it stops just as the movie goes to black.