This article contains full spoilers for The Running Man.

During the climax of the new movie The Running Man, runner Ben Richards gets his stomach sliced aboard an airplane. It seemed bad on screen, but trust us that every single person who has read the 1982 Stephen King novel of the same name started squirming in their seats. That’s because King, writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, devotes many, many words in the novel’s climax to describing how Richard’s entrails keep spilling out, dragging on the floor and getting caught on the furniture.

Despite the nastiness of his wound, the Ben Richards of the movie, played by Glen Powell, doesn’t really have to contend with his innards becoming outtards. While hardly the most important issue, this shift highlights one of the problems with Edgar Wright‘s update on The Running Man, especially its ending. The new movie has no interest in the nasty parts of the story, trying to sell us hope when anger is required.

Two Types of Terrible End

Credited to Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright, the screenplay for the new Running Man more or less follows King’s novel, certainly more so than the 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (who does get a cameo as the picture on New Dollars, this world’s valuable currency). That similarity continues through the end of the story, in which Richards kidnaps a middle-class woman called Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones onscreen) and commandeers a jet plane by pretending that he has explosives.

Once on board, network executive Killian (Josh Brolin in the movie) reveals that he knows that Richards doesn’t have a bomb because he didn’t set off any alarms. But instead of blowing up the plane immediately, Killian offers to hire Richards as the new hunter, replacing his current star Evan McCone (Lee Pace). And it’s here that Wright and King deviate.

In the novel, Killian tells Richards that his wife Sheila and daughter Cathy have died in an accident that had nothing to do with the network. The news breaks Richards, and though he tells Killian that he accepts the new job, he then goes on to kill McCone and the pilots. After forcing Amelia to use a parachute to jump out of the plane, Richards drives it into the Games Building. The last thing Killian sees, the book tells us, is Richards staring at him through the cockpit window, a middle finger extended.

In the new movie, when Richards refuses the offer, Killian shows him footage of McCone and his Hunters killing Shelia (Jayme Lawson) and Cathy. The enraged Richards then kills McCone, who we learn is a former runner who took Killian’s offer, and forces Amelia out of the plane. After McCone’s death, Killian repeats his offer and even plays doctored footage of Richards as new network hero Hunter 6. When Richards still refuses, Killian airs a deepfake of Richards threatening to fly the plane into the network building and then blows it up with a missile.

Bleak as that sounds, its not the end of Wright’s movie. Instead video from Richards’ ally Bradley (Daniel Ezra) appears. In costume as the rebel leader the Apostle, Bradley shows how Richards escaped and that the real conversation between he and Killian has been recovered. Not only does this realization spark a revolution, driven by chants of “Richards Lives!,” but a follow-up scene finds Shelia and Cathy alive and shopping at Whole Foods-like store when they see a masked Richards standing across the street.

Yes, Wright took the gut-spilling nihilistic ending of the novel and replaced it with gauzy feel-good nonsense combined with revolutionary hope.

False Hope in Hollywood

The new movie’s hopeful ending is a major change from King’s novel, but it’s just the most obvious part of a more subtle distinction. Wright and Bacall want to tell a rousing story abut the little people rising up against the system while King’s novel has no hope for humanity.

Anger drives King’s version of Richards and keeps him going not just through the challenges posed by Killian and the network, but also by his fellow man. The more rich you are, the stronger the class consciousness in King’s novel. His Evan McCone is not a scared survivor of past games, but a pampered strong man who gets bested by Richards because he confuses his social standing for overall superiority. King’s Amelia spends most of the novel refusing to believe Richards’s account of the network and government’s actions, and only helps him out of sheer exhaustion, not because of a change in perspective. Richards manages to destroy Killian and the Games Building, but it costs him his life and, one senses, creates no systemic change.

But the movie imagines Richards as someone always trying to help others, and they reciprocate by usually trying to help him. That different take on human goodness is perhaps most clear in the movie’s standout moment, in which Richards fights against cops alongside Elton Perrakis (Michael Cera). King describes Elton as a morbidly obese and pathetic man who contends with his overbearing racist mother.

In the movie, Cera plays Elton as a slight spitfire who laments the loss of his mother’s mind. The movie has sympathy for Mrs. Parrakis (Sandra Dickinson) when she reports Richards to the authorities, because she’s in the throes of dementia, exacerbated by watching the FreeVee. Moreover, Elton’s ready for a fight, leading to an ecstatic sequence in which he shouts ACAB slogans while taking down the fascist thugs.

King allows readers no such pleasure. Mrs. Parrakis is just a bitter, angry woman who calls the police because she blames poor people like Richards and Black people like Elton’s friend Bradley for ruining the country and putting her in such dire straits. She, like almost every other character in the novel, doesn’t see other oppressed people as her allies.

Maybe because the new film believes in the mobilization of the proletariat—or more likely because it’s a Hollywood blockbuster made by Paramount Pictures—the new Running Man refuses to demonize anyone beyond a few big bads. If we could just stop them, if the people could just see the truth and get together, then we can all live happily ever after, just like Cathy and Shelia. Ben can even be a big damn hero without going boom.

Richards Lives?

At this point, though, we need to channel our inner Apostle, jump out and shout, “Hold up!” Yes, the narrative of The Running Man explicitly states that the happy ending is the real ending. But there’s potentially another way to read the final scenes.

Right after Richards rejects Killian’s Hunter 6 offer, he’s given a chance to address the nation. Looking directly at the camera, and thus directly at the audience, Richards explains that the network controls everything that we see, that the truth cannot be found on a screen. “Turn it off,” he commands the real and fictional audiences.

From there, we get the ending described above: Killian airs footage of the plane being destroyed, a revolution against the network, Shelia and Cathy go shopping. It’s exactly what a Hollywood movie thinks we want to see. But hasn’t this movie been constantly telling us that big corporations hide the truth by tailoring images? Hasn’t the film told us that we cannot trust what we see? Doesn’t the Apostle break the fourth wall right after the plane’s explosion to tell us that everything we’re seeing is fake? And didn’t Richards look right at us and tell us that we need to turn it off because everything onscreen is a lie?

If that’s the case, then the unbelievably happy ending on screen belies a conclusion even more despairing than the one imagined by King. No matter what Richards does, the network remains in control. Not only does it give us images of Shelia and Cathy as happy capitalists, but it also harnesses all the revolutionary furor caused by Richard’s rebellion. Read this way, The Running Man has a metatextual ending that’s self-aware and disheartening in a way that no Hollywood film has attempted since The Matrix Reloaded.

Running from the Hard Truth

Of course, this metatextual reading goes against the explicit story in the film. And one need only glance at the largely negative response to the movie’s ending forming online to see that most read the ending straight and find it extremely dissatisfying, and rightly so. Strangely, it’s easy to see why even a filmmaker like Edgar Wright, who has done smart work in the past, would put such a saccharine ending over the one written by King. Oppression and inequality have only grown more pronounced in the real world, expanding as screens allow us to see more, but to also dismiss what we don’t like as “fake news.” Perhaps Wright and Bacall thought we needed more hope than anger in this moment?

But the hope offered by the closing of The Running Man is cheap, unearned, and unsatisfying. Perhaps what we really need is the anger of King’s book, the willingness to turn a dyspeptic eye toward the world and acknowledge all the messiness that it involves. Let us see all the gory guts of the world, even if it makes us squirm.

The Running Man is now playing in theaters.