D*MNIT Donnie Darko, last time.

[FS]

ok, ok, before you rip my head off. A couple of days ago Donnie Darko was on TV and I just had to watch it a second time. It's not underrated. It's not known to a select few people. It's certainly not i-get-knocked-down-but-i-get-up-again cult. 80% of the Internet thinks they're smarter, better people for having seen it, and they're probably idiots.

I enjoyed the movie for the most part. I thought the characters were likeable and funny and the more bizarre scenes were handled well. But I want to know, once and for all, if the ending makes any damn sense as it is, if you need some extra information (which, of course, you shouldn't) to make sense of it, or whether it's really just self-indulgent smoke people are somehow blowing up their own asses.

Everytime the movie gets discussed, all you end up with is a thread full of people either saying it sucked or people putting their nose in the air and telling other people they don't understand its many facets and layers, without saying WHAT they don't understand.


NOW. What I basically don't get about the ending. I assume that Donnie zipping back to the moment the plane engine fell on his house is something he learned from the book about time travel. But what is the purpose of his death? Does it somehow close the wormhole or whatever hovering over his house, eventually becoming the vortex you see over the town at the end, which possibly destroys the world? And if yes, how? What's Frank's purpose? Him calling Donnie out of bed merely sets the events in motion that get him killed, and possibly triggers the end of the world.

I've looked into the little webgame on donniedarko.com, and while it's amusing for the same reasons the movie is, it barely helped me make sense of the ending.

OK, now hold back the condescension or the need to say the movie sucked, and just help me out here.

(THEN I'll have the thread locked, deleted and dropped from a plane over the ocean, I promise)