A version of this post published on September 3, 2021 on Uproxx, but is no longer on the internet. With this one I did, let's say, tidy it up a little bit. In 2021, we were still very much feeling the affects of the pandemic and I edited a lot of that out because, really, who wants to relive that. I do not. But this piece was born out of the fact I was watching so many older movies when I stuck inside with nothing else to do. Then, when I returned to new movies, it was a shock to the system because they just never end. Now, this is different than being long. Older movies are also long. But movies today have a tendency to not end even though the plot is over. And since this originally published it's only gotten worse.

Here's an example. I really enjoyed Joe Carnahan's The Rip. Despite being a Netflix movie, I actually did see this with a crowd at its premiere. When the movie ended after 90 minutes, culminating with the villains being revealed and caught in an elaborate trap, the crowd went nuts. And I was even thinking to myself, hell yeah, that was a great ending. Now, the problem turned out to be The Rip inexplicably kept going for 30 more minutes after the The Rip ended. The Rip still clocks in at just under two hours long but feels three hours long. This has nothing to do with actual length and has everything to do with our brains knowing the plot is over, so why are we still sitting here? I assume the answer in this case is to increase the total minutes spent watching The Rip, a metric Netflix uses to judge success. This is not a great development for movies. But it's not just streamers, theatrical only films do this, too. Anyway, here is an updated version of the original piece:

In Praise Of Movies That Just End (Because They Used To Know When To End)

Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece, is just under three and a half hours long. But it doesn’t feel long. And this is something I’ve been noticing more and more over the last year and a half – to the point I’ve been having trouble getting back on the same wavelength with modern movies. Because older movies used to “just end.” The plot ended and the credits would roll.