I recently watched Knowing on DVD (Nicholas Cage uses an old note full of numbers to predict all the horrible disasters in all the world's history) and it provides a perfect example of what I will from now on call a "fart ending." Imagine someone reading a child a bedtime story and when he came to the ending instead of reading the last page, he just tosses the book aside, turns around and farts right in the kid's face. That's what the end of this movie is like. The writers couldn't think of a good way to conclude their story, so they had everyone fart directly into the camera and called it a wrap.

Here's a basic run down of the movie. Creepy little girl predicts every horrible disaster that will happen all over the world between that point onward and writes down a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper that express the date, the number of people who will die and the location by latitude and longitude. Fifty years later years later it gets into the hands of Nicolas Cage playing an astronomer and single father. He discovers the secrets behind the numbers and sets out to try and prevent the last three events listed. After some story progression I don't want to get into he finds out the final event is the apocalypse caused by a solar large enough to engulf the first four planets in our solar system. All the while he keeps getting stalked by some weird guys who look like cross between the Tall Man and Spike from Buffy and apparently want to take his kid for some reason. When we get near the finale we find the big twist ending is… the creepy guys are aliens. They were aliens who believed Nicolas Cage's son and the granddaughter of the creepy girl who wrote all the numbers (Don't ask) are among the chosen ones to be taken away to a far off planet where they'll wait until the end of the world is over end return to repopulate the whole planet.

How can everyone involved in this think that idea was acceptable?

At no point in the whole film do they give any indication that there are any sci fi elements to this story. The whole thing is supposed to be about kids with psychic powers and religious undertones. How does the biblical foreshadowing of our world reaching it's final days finish with aliens pulling a Noah's arc without any proper segway? Don't tell me they were angles. They flew away in some giant spaceship made out of crystals. Angles don't need crystal spaceships. Don't start talking about Scientology. I will take an ax to your head if you do. There's nothing wrong with a twist ending as long as it's done right. It needs to be unexpected but makes sense. The main plot and the conclusion needs to have some logical connection. A non-sensible cop out ending can only work if it's meant to be funny. Otherwise, you can't pull nothing out of nothing and expect the audience to go with it.

This is not an ending. This is a fart.