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Movies Told Backwards

Bomb#20 said:
hurtinbuckaroo said:
Raiders of the Lost Ark: a large cast of characters goes to great lengths to take a box from a government warehouse and bury it in Egypt.
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But that's not how Raiders goes. It goes like this...

A guy starts with nothing. Then after a cast of characters goes to great lengths, the guy has a priceless treasure. Then after a cast of characters goes to great lengths, the guy has nothing again. Then after a cast of characters goes to great lengths, the guy has a completely different priceless treasure. Then after a cast of characters goes to great lengths, the guy has nothing again.

Point being, Raiders is ineligible according to the thread's rule: "these movies are quite different if taken backwards".
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Temple of Doom - Archaeologist returns stones to a cardiologist, then uses telekinesis to help him return stolen artifact.
 
The Odyssey
Warrior-king leaves his wife and son to journey alone to the Trojan War. Along the way, he rescues a growing force of warriors from monsters, witches, giants, and angry and/or trickster gods. Reaches Troy just in time to help rebuild the city.
 
Trading Places
A gang of four thieves decides to pull one last job, but for good motives, rescuing two brothers from destitution.
This 'Robin Hood' con succeeds, leaving the brothers well heeled, but the gang is torn apart. By the end of the con, one is homeless, one's working as a whore, one finishes his days as a servant to the one grifter who insinuated himself into the brothers' success.
 
Risky Business
High School teen finds out he's accepted at an Ivy League school. Plans out a series of trades to pay for it. The trades are so complicated as to become A Caper.

He sells the house furnishings to get cash.
Restores a wrecked car for more cash.
Uses a houseful of prostitutes to get the furnishings back.
Uses a single prostitute to get the houseful of prostitutes.
Wins the single prostitute in a car race.
Before that, borrows the prostitute to get his virginity back.
Uses a cross-dressing prostitute to double down on his virginity.
Then welcomes his parents home to a house scrubbed of any evidence of illegal, immoral, or exploitive activities.
Ferris Beuller couldn't have done better.
 
Elixir said:
Groundhog Day

A fast-moving saga of an even faster moving progression of dementia, as a newscaster tries the same thing over and over and over, and gets worse and worse and worse at everything.
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Wonderful person tragically unlives the same day over and over until he is left a selfish and self-centered jerk.
 
John Wick
In the aftermath of a biiiiiig game of Mannequin, the game master moves thru New York, releasing people from their frozen state one at a time. The 'blood-red mannequin stain' is removed by special guns, knives, swords, and a pencil. At the end, he finds that his wife really likes being a mannaquin and refuses to get back up.

John Wick 2
The Game goes international.

John Wick 3
John's going pro as a Game Master. A referee from The Council (of professional Mannequin players) judges his skill, starting with releasing himself from the freeze. Ends as the last players are unfrozen inside of a time limit.
 
Wizard of Oz - Girl uses a trance to enter a different world and then creates an evil witch. She heads to munchkin land with her friends who she starts, one by one, driving away. She is eventually caught up to by the good witch who steals her magic shoes and uses a tornado to send her back where she came from.
 
Hatari - Animals from zoos and circuses around the world are energetically repatriated on the African Savannah. John Wayne divorces his French Reporter wife who still hangs around the compound for a while, until his second-in-command is healed by powdered rhino horn...which is dug out of his leg and reattached to the rhino.
 
To Be Or Not To Be
Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft as Polish entertainers in Britain near the start of WWII. They gather a group of like-minder fellow-Poles, all actors and singers, escape to Poland. There, they take over a theater conveniently named after the leads, drive the Nazis out of Warsaw, then out of Poland. Celebrate by singing Sweet Georgia Brown, in Polish.
 
Snow White - A breakup with a Prince leads a woman to fall into a coma. She is saved by a witch. The woman then proceeds to make a mess of a home belonging to small dwarfs, who eventually kick her out.

The Matrix - A man betrays his trainer by giving him up to the enemy in a surreal computer driven alternate reality. He is awarded by the matrix by being hooked into the simulation. At the end he wakes up to find out it was all a dream.

Curse of the Wererabbit - A wererabbit eases angry farmers by throwing up vegetables in their garden.

Duck Soup - Warring nations agree to a cease-fire. Leader of nation then resigns.

Airplane - A flight of terribly sick passengers from Chicago experience a miracle and are cured. Celebrate by eating fish for dinner. Amongst all of this, a man is able to overcome his addictions, however, a couple (a pilot and stewardess) breaks up, as he quits his job mid-flight.
 
Thinner
A really skinny lawyer is cursed with obesity by a Romani pieman. He gains weight rapidly, far in excess of what's possible by his food intake, until he's just obese.
Finally, the curse is removed by the man who laid it. He's still obese, but now it's entirely his diet and lack of exercise to blame. In celebration, the fat slob goes out and runs over the Romani's daughter.
 
Night of the Living Dead - Really ugly people do some repair work on an old house, run away from some slightly less ugly people, and then bury themselves in a cemetery.
 
Salem's Lot

There's just too many vampires in Salem. Vampire Master sets his soulless minons to sucking the vampirism out of the lesser monsters, one at a time.

The fewer vampires there are, the less the cleansed remember their crimes or even believe that vampires exist.
Finally, the Master regains complete control of his formerly distributed vampiric powers, broods in a creepy old house for a while, then leaves town.
 
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Vampire Queen miraculously saves a gymnasium from destruction, but due to not getting her due for such an act, starts bringing vampires to life with the assistance of her teacher.

LotR Return of the King - After shoo'ing away Orcs, King leaves.

All About Eve - Story about the fall of a young emerging star and the rise of an older star.

Some Like It Hot - A pair of male musicians try to deal with the trauma of one's breakup of with his bimbo girlfriend and brutal murder of a gangster while being a member of an all-women band. They leave the band after a train trip to Chicago, where they witness a large scale murder... and join a new band that just formed up after the police left to presumably investigate said mass murder.

The Apartment - A card game with woman on New Years Eve ends badly and she runs off to be with another guy. Same woman then returns to his apartment and suffers from a serious case hypersomnia. It takes days, but eventually she takes some medicine that makes her feel better and then goes back and sees the guy she left the game to see. It all drives the protagonist to madness and he deals with it by working long hours at the office.

The Shawshank Redemption - Man breaks into prison, slowly dismantles their library program, and upon release returns home to find his wife was killed.
 
The Poseidon Adventure
Thrill seekers enter a capsized cruise ship, using it as a huge, water-logged, luxury corn-maze in a race to the ballroom on the bottom. Along the way, others lost in the maze join the group. When the group finally descends as far as they can get without a submersible, their reward is that the whole thing resets like a game of Jumanji. They enjoy a luxyry cruise back to port.
 
Cast Away:

A homewrecker called Chuck after flirting with a lady in a pickup truck kisses a married woman named kelly before she returned to her husband and child. Chuck then boards a cargo ship to hop on a life raft in the middle of the ocean in search of a talking soccer ball. With tears of Joy Chuck finds his soccerball friend and they arrive on an island where their relationship deteriorates. Chuck abandons his soccerball friend on the beach in search of a better soccer ball while helping a cargo ship get back its lost cargo. Chuck having not found a new soccer ball, boards the cargo ship and returns home, where he got a job working for the cargo company, and Kelly, who no longer had children or husband for some mysterious reason becomes his girlfriend.

The ending leaves people both wondering if he will abandon Kelly like the soccer ball and if he has a fetish for cargo ships.
 
2001: A Space Odyssey
A baby space god sees Earth and gets interested. Builds a little simulacrum of Earth as a sort of human beta tester. Tries human food, sleep, death, and psychodelic drugs. Finds himself on a spaceship with other space gods. One picked a human to manifest as, one picked a computer.
They eventually decide to go to Earth together. Ahead of them, humans prepare a reception on the moon. Then they move the reception to orbit. Then they subcontract the reception to primitive African man-apes.
 
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