No Ontological Inertia / Film

No Ontological Inertia Film Examples

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Animated

• Disney's Aladdin
  • Jafar uses his magical staff to hypnotize the Sultan. When the staff is broken by Aladdin, the hypnotic effect is instantly neutralized.
  • Genie moves the palace to higher elevation per Jafar's orders. When Jafar is defeated, the palace instantly and magically moves back to its original position. The fact that defeating Jafar reversed Genie's actions makes this case particularly absurd, especially since the Genie could have voluntarily fixed all that once he was freed.
  • The changes Jafar made using his power as a sorcerer were undone when he became a genie. The rug (which had been unraveled) was re-woven, Abu changed from a mechanical monkey back into a real one, and so on.
  • Also, based on the characters' comments Aladdin's prince wish apparently has to be recast by the end.
  • Aladdin: The Return of Jafar: After Jafar's death at the end, all the destruction he caused as a Genie is reversed, with the lava pit closing back up, the palace getting restored, and Carpet reintegrated after getting shattered.
• DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. When the genie is given humanity and thus de-powered, Dijon (who had been transformed into a pig from a wish by the Big Bad) is restored to normal.
• Frozen's self-awareness about Disney tropes leads this one to be Played for Drama. The villain believes that killing Elsa will undo the Endless Winter she created, and there's simply no way of knowing whether or not he's right. Also, when Elsa figures out how to thaw her kingdom with love, flowers and plants that should have been permanently damaged by the frost spring back to full bloom.
  • In Frozen II, Elsa dies turning into an ice statue. Olaf, a sentient Snowlem created by her, dies soon after her. They both get better, although Olaf's rebirth is not automatic and requires Elsa to rebuild him.
• In Home (2015), Oh's invite will take roughly 40 hours to reach the Gorg, yet cancelling the invite immediately stops the signal even though it was mere seconds from reaching them.
• Near the climax of the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo pours ridiculous amounts of molten copper from a cauldron onto the soldiers in the square below. A little later, Frollo dies by falling into it. Then, when the protagonists come out of the cathedral at the end of the movie, the boiling metal is gone and the square is full of people.
• In The Lion King (1994), Scar's death immediately brings rain back to the Pridelands and repairs a completely devastated ecosystem in what appears to be a few months. (This may be an instance of the Fisher King, where the beauty of a kingdom is tied to the health of its sovereign.)
• The Little Mermaid (1989). After Ursula was killed, all of the merpeople she had changed into polyps returned to their true form. Justified, though, as it was heavily implied that each merperson was held in said state under Magically-Binding Contract to Ursula. Upon her death, all contracts were made null and void.
• Sleeping Beauty: Zigzagged with Maleficent. Her death causes the thorns she summoned earlier to disappear, but does not undo the curse put on Aurora. Phillip still has to kiss her for that to happen. Maybe justified in that conditional curses tend to have a self-sustaining equilibrium, while the thorns were an artificial contract that had to be maintained. Supported by the live-action Maleficent where Maleficent herself couldn't remove the curse when she had regrets due to the Exact Words that nothing but true love’s kiss could break the curse.
• The Swan Princess makes heavy use of this trope; in the original film, Rothbart curses Odette to transform into a swan every night the moon is out, before simply deciding to have her die when he sabotages Derek's vow of love to her. Derek eventually slays Rothbart in his Great Animal form, and Odette is not only revived but the curse is also lifted. The third film takes it even farther, when Zelda uses the power of the Forbidden Arts to kill Odette, which was only possible with the notes to the spells that Derek neglected to destroy. After killing Zelda, Derek finally destroys the notes, and Odette is magically revived once more.
• Wonder Woman Blood Lines: Killing Medusa turns all her stone victims back to flesh; but only the victims who weren't smashed to pieces while stone. Reversed with Medusa herself, seemingly due to being cloned from a stone fragment of herself, upon being killed her remains turn into stone.

Live-Action

• Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks. When Miss Price loses her concentration after an explosion, all of the animated suits of armor and uniforms collapse to the ground.
• In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, E.T. revives a pot of wilting flowers early in the film. After E.T. gets sick, Michael notices the flowers wilting again, and realizes that E.T. died. Later on, Elliot sees the flowers reviving again, meaning that E.T. came back to life.
• Justified in The Faculty. After Zeke examines one of the parasites, he notices that it doesn't have all the necessary organs to sustain itself independently, and concludes (correctly) that there must be an alien queen with a telepathic link to all of its "offspring." Killing it would kill all the parasites, returning everyone to their normal selves.
• In Flash Gordon, the moon was only a few seconds away from crashing into the Earth when Ming was killed, instantly restoring everything to normal. Ontological inertia wasn't even necessary at this point - normal physical inertia, or even the Earth's gravity, should have allowed the moon to keep moving for at least a few more seconds. Not to mention that Ming was using a machine to move the moon, so even without ontological inertia someone must have turned it off before Ming even hit the ground. However, it's possible that the countdown was to the point where the moon was too far gone to stop, rather than the actual collision.
  • Word of God says the countdown was for the point of no return, where nothing would prevent the Moon from colliding.
• In The Forsaken, vampirism as a virus transmitted by the titular eight master vampires, each with their own unique strain. The protagonists of the film were infected by the virus and are seeking to destroy one of the Forsaken, so they can be cured. At the end they succeed, but one of the heroes remains infected as it turns out that was not the original vampire who infected him, so his search still continues.
• Fright Night (1985). The vampire Jerry Dandrige changes Amy into a vampire by biting her. When Jerry is destroyed, Amy becomes human again.
• Fright Night 2: New Blood: Amy was turned by Gerri into a vampire, then later turns Charley herself. Once they manage to kill Gerri, both of them turn back into humans.
• In Geostorm, when the weather machine is rebooted, all of the adverse weather it caused instantly subsides. Most comically, the flood in Dubai is portrayed as literally going down a giant drain.
• Ghoulies has an extreme example: after Malcom is killed, all the people killed by him and his ghoulies come back to life for no apparent reason.
• In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Slughorn mentions he had a pet fish that Harry's mother created with magic. When he got up one morning and found it had turned back into a flower petal, he knew she was dead.
• Hocus Pocus: After the witches are disintegrated, the curses they had laid on various characters end.
• In Dario Argento's Inferno (1980), the central apartment building collapses after a follower of its demonic master accidentally starts a fire. (In Suspiria, the building bursts into flame after Helena Markos is stabbed, but that's more of a Load-Bearing Boss.) The Nurse, aka the Mother of Darkness, could have been, like her sister, Helena Markos (aka the Mother of Sighs) a Load-Bearing Boss, if it wasn't for the fires getting it before her. In both cases, the house is an extension of the Mother who lives there. The same happened to the third and final sister, The Mother of Tears,hence there is an in-universe logic to it.
• In The Avengers, once Iron Man redirected a nuclear missile to the Chitauri base just on the other side of the inter-dimensional bridge from which the Chitauri invaders came to Earth, the alien invading army immediately shut down and were defeated since they were evidently controlled by the base.
  • Averted in the sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron - every copy of Ultron must be individually destroyed, or he'll keep coming back.
  • Also averted in Avengers: Infinity War when Doctor Strange warns Ebony Maw that it's very difficult to reverse the spell of a dead wizard.
  • In Avengers: Endgame, As Tony Stark dies from injuries due to using the Infinity Stones, the lights on his Iron Man suit last exactly as long as he does, shutting down when he dies.
• In The Last Witch Hunter, the witches' curses stop working when their authors are killed.
  • After Belial's death, 36th Dolan's deathly stupor is lifted and he comes back to normal.
  • Witch Queen's defeat takes down the entire swarm of Plague Flies, and the disease they carry stops working.
• The League Of Gentlemen Apocalypse is a meta-example of this trope. The League of Gentlemen characters invade the real world when their world starts to collapse as their creators have moved on to a new project.
• The Locals: When Grant's smashes Bill's skull, Bill's body collapses, immediately putrefies, and buries itself.
• Lord of Illusions. After Nix is destroyed for good, his late follower Philip Swann who died minutes before him is stripped to the bone as Nix was the source of Swann's magic, and the hole in the Earth he created also closes back up.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • In The Two Towers, once Saruman's magic hold on King Theoden is released, the King is instantly rejuvenated from his withered form. This not only includes his hair and beard spontaneously changing color, but actually growing shorter again. A Wizard Did It. Literally. The magic doesn't just end, Gandalf actively throws Saruman out, so one can assume he did some fixing in the process (or even completely negated the magic, as this is also when he reveals publicly that he is now a White Wizard like Saruman).
  • In The Return of the King the destruction of the Ring causes everything Sauron built to fall apart or explode.
• Lampshaded/brought up as a plot point in The Lost Boys. David, the leader of the vampire biker gang, is killed so that half-turned vampires Michael, Star and Laddie will revert to fully human, but Michael specifically points out that he doesn't feel any different and that nothing has changed. Turns out to be played straight in the end, with the death of the real head vampire Max, who had seemed to be just a harmless middle-aged video store owner. As soon as he gets killed, Michael and the others immediately change back.
• In Magma: Volcanic Disaster, once the hero removes the underlying problem causing the eruptions (by setting off more eruptions underwater with nuclear weapons, despite nuclear weapon testing being the cause of the problem), all the volcanoes stop erupting, the lava recedes, and all fires are put out.
• In The Mask, Loki-Ipkiss gets a piece of his tie shot off, which instantly reverts to a piece of his pajamas.
• Combined with No Fourth Wall in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the Black Beast of Arrrrrgh ceases to exist after the animator suffers a fatal heart attack.
• The Mummy Returns: Subversion. It appears that the Scorpion King dying causes the Army of Anubis to turn to dust, but it's actually that they've been banished to the underworld by O'Connell, who gained control of them when he killed the Scorpion King.
• The climax of 1995's The Net would seem to indicate that since an evil computer program that has erased all of Sandra Bullock's identity records, deleting that program will automagically restore all her records. (This is comparable to deleting your copy of OpenOffice to restore all your documents to their original condition, or un-Photoshopping your pictures by removing Photoshop.)
• At the end of The Neverending Story, once Bastian has given the Childlike Empress a new name and made his first wish (seemingly to ride the luckdragon Falkor through the clouds), Fantasia goes right back to its old state before the Nothing destroyed most of it. Atreyu's horse Artax even comes back to life, and he had drowned in the Swamps of Sadness, not been pulled into the Nothing.
  Bastian: Falkor, it's like the Nothing never was!
• The virus pandemic in Outbreak. Once the protagonist has found and isolated the antibody from the monkey's blood serum, by the next scene there's enough antiserum for all infected (how?). Once injected into the dying people, it instantly cures them and everything shortly thereafter has returned to normal, with no lasting ill effects. This was a flesh-eating virus. So, once the antidote is delivered, all damage is instantly healed; including skin lesions and internal organ damage.
• Selectively applied (or so it would seem) at the end of Weird Science. When "Lisa" vanishes, everything that she has directly or indirectly altered in this level of reality returns to the way it was before - except for Wyatt's grandparents, who are never shown awakening from their suspended animation and so still must be lifeless statues in Wyatt's family's closet. Then again, Lisa does reappear at the end of the movie without explanation, so either this is a Zig-Zagging Trope.
• This is attempted in Rebirth of Mothra 3, in which Mothra Leo goes back to the Cretaceous to kill King Ghidorah’s Cretaceous form so his stronger Modern-Type form in the present is vanquished. While it seems as if Leo trounces the King, albeit suffering horrible injuries that would have killed him had he not been cocooned by the Primitive Mothras until the present day, Ontological Inertia ensues when a piece of Cretaceous King Ghidorah’s tail burrows into the ground to spend the ensuing 65 million years regenerating, meaning that KG is alive and well in the present... until Mothra Leo awakens in his new Armor form, and finally puts KG down for good.
• Vampirism works this way in Suck— killing a vampire turns everyone he sired and everyone they sired back into humans.
• La Forge, who has been blind since birth, gets his natural vision back in Star Trek: Insurrection thanks to the Baku planet's regenerative properties. But the healing effects turn out to be temporary, as in the next movie he is back to his implants. It's not made clear whether this is because the planet's effects have no ontological inertia (it makes sense that its de-aging properties wouldn't, but healed injuries are another matter) or a consequence of whatever birth defect caused La Forge's blindness to begin with.
• In Super Mario Bros. (1993), as soon as Koopa is defeated, the King turns back into a humanoid without needing to be re-evolved.
• Toyed with in Transcendence. The changes Will's nanomachines did to people seem to revert at the end (i.e., the Hybrids appear to revert to their pre-treatment selves), but their efforts to clean up the environment (air and water cleaned to pre-industrial levels) are implied to have remained.
• Twice-Told Tales: In "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", the effects of the youth-giving water wear off after Alex kills Carl. Sylvia is reduced to a desiccated skeleton, Carl's body returns to its original age, and Alex reverts to his true age. Alex returns to the crypt to find more of the water, but it no longer flows.
• A major plot point in Underworld: Evolution, as the first vampire, Markus managed to convince the other vampires that killing him would destroy all of them, and killing his brother William (the first lycan) would destroy all lycans—thus depriving them of their slaves. When Selene hears about this a thousand years or so later, she immediately sees it for the lie it is, but the one telling it to her notes that Victor believed it enough to not risk it.
• A rare biological "science" form of this trope occurs in Van Helsing. When he removes Mr Hyde's arm, it shrivels back to the arm of Doctor Jekyll as soon as it hits the ground. In the same film, killing Dracula kills all of the baby vampire things he made as well. As shown in the opening scene, any supernatural creature that is killed returns to its previously mortal form upon death, including Dracula's wives.
• Diana's reasoning in Wonder Woman (2017) assumes this trope to be in effect: Ares is responsible for corrupting humanity and making them go to war; therefore, once she kills Ares, the Great War will end and peace will return. She's heartbroken when she finally realizes that warfare is humanity's initiative, not Ares'. Ares does exist, but he merely inspires people, rather than controls them.
• X-Men Film Series
  • In X-Men, when Wolverine's powers of healing are drained by Rogue, he ends up regaining every injury he's suffered over the course of the last two days.
  • In The Wolverine, despite Ichirō having absorbed enough of Logan's healing factor to return to his 20s, he reverts immediately upon his connection with Logan being broken.
• In Howard the Duck, the Dark Overlord shoots rays at Phil and Beverly that start slowly disintegrating them. When Howard blasts the Dark Overlord away two minutes later, the energy of his rays disappears and Phil and Beverly's disintegration process stops, reverting them to normal.
• The Dark Crystal: If a Skeksis dies or is wounded, the corresponding Mystic suffers identically, and vice versa.

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