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wikipedia wrote:A deus ex machina (Latin for "god out of the machine"; plural: dei ex machina) is a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object.

I thought everyone has one of these "WTF" moments, and it would be intersting to share them, so here it goes...

Example: Dragon Ball movie, "Legendary Super Sayan" (though it happens in each and every one): Take Broly, who is a nigh-on invincible super-powered killing machine who is unstoppable. He beats all the characters twice the hard they've ever been beaten (and over again), only to be killed by the main character (yes, that'll be Son Goku) with a Super Dragon Punch thanks to what little energy his beaten up friends gave him (and he could barely stand).

So basically, I'm proposing a discussion on the worst situations you've seen, when a character gets out of a seemingly impossible situation "just because".

In more recent films maybe it would be sensible to add a spoiler tag, just in case other readers don't want to have the end of Inception or whatever spoilt for them.

Fire away!

WoW, fighting the Lichking. actually, its a pair of them.

Babylon 5

James Cameron's Avatar

Every movie where the government is able to conveniently cover up a horrible tragedy or destructive event without explanation so that the plot can move on without having to address it.

schadenfreude wrote:James Cameron's Avatar

+1 on this. I was like "..so what, nuke them from orbit then strip mine the planet" to which my mate said "your evil"

The eagles in Tolkein's works.

Those eagles did have good timing...

Well, at least he didn't cop out and use them to fly into Mordor with.

The Hobbit is a strange book and not really consistant with LotR. Gandalf is portrayed as being significantly weaker in the Hobbit.

Just flys over Mt. Doom and drops the ring in, thats the way to do it!

Serenity

Saving Private Ryan.

When they were on the bridge and Tom Hanks was shooting at the Tiger with a pistol. You knew something was going to happen; maybe the bridge would be blown up, maybe another sticky bomb, or maybe a lucky bazooka shot. No, we had a P-51 fly out of the sky and shoot the hell out of it.

Because Tom wasn't shooting the tank he was signaling the plane!

Frazzled wrote:The eagles in Tolkein's works.

Not really, all the eagles did was fight off the remaining fell beasts after the witch king was already dead.

A proper "Deus Ex Machina" needs to single handedly make the entire central struggle of a storyline irrelevant.

The Dead Men of Dunharrow were the Deus Ex Machina of Return of the King, and the ents were the Deus Ex Machina of The Two Towers.

Lets see

Fight Club: Blows out only the bad part of his brain! Really?

Matrix: She wakes him up from the dead with a kiss! Is Keanu sleeping beauty?

Saving Private Ryan: P-51 blows up a Tiger......with what? 6 .50 cal machine guns? I'm sorry but that is not gonna dent a Tiger and no it didn't drop a bomb. WWII bombing runs were not very accurate.

Lets not even talk about Independence day.

As far as Tolkien's eagles, they are a plot hole, not a deus ex machina. Had they just flew in and dropped the ring in the volcano the movies are irrelevant. Since the didn't its a plot hole......Why didn't they?

The crane in Toy Story 3. You are crying as the gang is about to die, the those god-damned green aliens swoop down with a crane, and save them.

What? It's a great movie.

Andrew1975 wrote:

Fight Club: Blows out only the bad part of his brain! Really?

Talk about missing the point completely. The narrator only ends up shooting his jaw. He never actually blows out part of his brain. It's supposed to be symbolic. Up until that point in the movie, everything he had done had been in reaction to something else. By taking his life into his own hands, he shows that he no longer needs Tyler Durden.

chowderhead13 wrote:The crane in Toy Story 3. You are crying as the gang is about to die, the those god-damned green aliens swoop down with a crane, and save them.

What? It's a great movie.

If you were watching when they landed at the dump, you'd notice that the aliens went off to find the claw machine. And it's not like there was no build-up -- the aliens had been obsessing about claw machines since the first movie, and were 'saved' in a similar way in the first film. If anything, it's a rusty Chekhov's gun that took 15 years to go off.


My vote goes to The Odyssey. Yes, that Odyssey. Everyone gets home nice and happy, but pretty much the entire town wants Odyssius and his family dead. What happens? The Gods make everyone happy again. Seriously. What. The. feth. People talk about it like it's one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever, but the ending absolutely kills it. Yes, I know, Deux Ex Machina was a common tool in ancient Greek theatre and writing, but that doesn't excuse it.

Fight Club=no, he didn't touch his brain with the bullet it only injured his jaw. By shooting part of his jaw off he was able to reintegrate Tyler Durden back into his psyche, and no longer had a 2nd personality.

Matrix=no he was altering the code in her avatar.

Saving Private Ryan=no. It was a war where reinforcements came to save their bacon.

A real Deus Ex Machina needs to be where some all powerful force that could have solved the problem without any help from the protagonists in the first place decides to get off it's butt at the end of the film and squash the antagonists and/or fix all the problems. Like the planet Pandora James Cameron's Avatar.

Fight Club=no, he didn't touch his brain with the bullet it only injured his jaw. By shooting part of his jaw off he was able to reintegrate Tyler Durden back into his psyche, and no longer had a 2nd personality.

Matrix=no he was altering the code in her avatar.

Saving Private Ryan=no. It was a war where reinforcements came to save their bacon.

A real Deus Ex Machina needs to be where some all powerful force that could have solved the problem without any help from the protagonists in the first place decides to get off it's butt at the end of the film and squash the antagonists and/or fix all the problems. Like the planet Pandora James Cameron's Avatar.

So he shoots his jaw and that breaks tylers hold......ok.....wait what? Read the book, it's much better.

Actually, she kisses him and bring him back to life. Not the other way around.

The P-51 blows up the tiger, not the reinforcements. P-51's could not do anything to a Tiger Tank with it's guns. I dont think it would be dropping highly inaccurate bombs in the middle of combat. The tiger would have killed private ryan.

All these endings are ridiculous and insulting. Hollywood fairy tale crap.

Actually there is a great description of what a deus ex machina is in the beginning of the post. It's basically when something comes out of left field and solves the problem because some writer has pigeonholed themselves into a situation that even they can't figure a solution for. Hence a fighter with 6 .50 cal guns blowing up a tiger tank to save private Ryan. Ryan then looks at Miller and says "look p-51 tank hunters."

I've seen footage of p-51s blowing up moving trains, fine, but not a Tiger, no way.

Andrew1975 wrote:Actually, she kisses him and bring him back to life. Not the other way around.

The kiss was symbolic, it didn't actually resurrect him.

Fafnir wrote:
My vote goes to The Odyssey. Yes, that Odyssey. Everyone gets home nice and happy, but pretty much the entire town wants Odyssius and his family dead. What happens? The Gods make everyone happy again. Seriously. What. The. feth. People talk about it like it's one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever, but the ending absolutely kills it. Yes, I know, Deux Ex Machina was a common tool in ancient Greek theatre and writing, but that doesn't excuse it.

Nah, that was awesome. Athena's been building up his wiliness the entire time! Either
that, or Homer's audience got sick of monsters and just wanted a straight up espionage
to shoot-em-up action sequence.

My vote goes to Medea. She goes through all this internal grief, kills her children, and
then gets teleported somewhere safe? Ha-ha Jason, you're a bastard?

Greeks and their GD cranes...

The ending to Peter F Hamilton's 'Night's Dawn' trilogy. The galaxy's gone to crap, there's no possible way for humanity to survive ... and the hero finds a mysterious machine which instantly fixes everything just by essentially him thinking about it.

Blech. I appreciate he painted himself into a corner over the course of the trilogy but, c'mon ...

Amaya wrote:
Serenity

Spoiler:

Mal won his fight against the Operative because it conveniently turns out that an old war injury protected him from a nerve strike the Operative uses to paralyze his opponents

I though that had already been mentioned in passing earlier on in the film it didn't come completely out of the blue which stops it being a deus ex machina.

There are some pretty poor examples in the new Doctor Who series, where the set up for the season finale has been solved effectively with the wave of a magic wand. The end of the first series had Rose 'look into the Tardis' which inexplicably made her a god-like being who then wiped the daleks from history and undid all the killing and damage done to Earth by them. Convenient, eh?

Andrew1975 wrote:Lets see

Fight Club: Blows out only the bad part of his brain! Really?

Matrix: She wakes him up from the dead with a kiss! Is Keanu sleeping beauty?

Saving Private Ryan: P-51 blows up a Tiger......with what? 6 .50 cal machine guns? I'm sorry but that is not gonna dent a Tiger and no it didn't drop a bomb. WWII bombing runs were not very accurate.

A number of P51s were built with four, British 20mm Hispani-Suiza cannons in case the 0.5-inch MG was inadequate.

Four Hispano-Suizas would have made a big mess of the roof armour on any tank in WW2, that's why the British used Typhoons and Tempests for ground attack.

I haven't seen the film so I don't know how the plane is depicted.

Can't believe no-one has mentioned fething Aslan from Narnia!

Aslan is virtually the god of Narnia. He is invincible, can command the elements, the trees, the rivers. He is a one man (lion?) army.

What does he do?

In the first film he LETS himself be killed (I know, Christian parody, blah blah).

In the second he sits there in the woods doing NOTHING until the girl finds him, teaching her about faith.

In both films, his inaction cost hundreds of lives which could have easily been saved with his limitless powers...

Generally, Doctor Who is pretty bad for the Deus Ex Machina superscience endings.
Especially the season enders, but it happens in other episodes too.

World War II - America joins the war.

Can't believe no one's mentioned ST:TNG. There's about 5 seasons worth of of DEM.

that ship in FInal Fantasy 8 that saves Squall and Rinoa (I donno how to spell it, I hate the damn game)

gorgon wrote:Can't believe no one's mentioned ST:TNG. There's about 5 seasons worth of of DEM.

Trufax!