Extraction’s Ending Explained: Did The Netflix Movie’s Hero Survive?
Warning: if you haven’t seen the Netflix movie read no further. Spoilers follow because this is Extraction’s ending explained…
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Extraction has been a huge hit for Netflix, such a huge hit that they’re already going to work on a sequel. But with the way the movie ends, it’s hard to tell what really happened. Did our hero survive? What’s going on here with Extraction’s ending? We’ve got the answers.
Below we’ll dig into the truth about what happened at the end of Extraction and show you all the clues the movie’s filmmakers left to help you figure out. Warning: if you haven’t seen the Netflix movie read no further. Spoilers follow because this is Extraction’s ending explained…
What Happened In Extraction’s Ending
Extraction ends with Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) throwing himself off a bridge. At the time Tyler throws himself off the bridge he’s badly wounded and seems to be on the verge of death anyway. He’s just been shot through the neck by a sniper and he’s oozing blood from numerous other wounds.
We see Tyler hit the water and sink, and then we don’t see him again. However, in the Netflix movie’s final moments we watch Ovi at a swimming pool and see a blurry figure in the distance watching over him. That figure looks a lot like Tyler Rake, but it’s impossible to tell and the Extraction ending doesn’t explain it.
Meanwhile Nik Khan sneaks into a bathroom and assassinates the man responsible for kidnapping Ovi in the first place. It’s a job that, you’d assume, Tyler would have done himself if he were alive to do it.
Why Was Extraction’s Ending Ambiguous?
So Extraction’s ending leaves a lot to be explained. But the movie’s filmmakers had a good reason for leaving things vague.
When asked about it, Chris Hemsworth who stars in and produces the film, offered this explanation about Extraction‘s ending decision: “The idea to sort of keep it ambiguous, you know, based on different audience responses in the testing and so on about kind of what they believe would have happened or wanted to happen. And we shot a few different versions of the ending just as a sort of a backup. And I’m thankful for that, that Sam insisted on doing that just to cover all bases, you know?”
Extraction director Sam Hargrave added his reasoning saying, “Because there was a split reaction amongst audiences, we tried to satisfy both sides. Hopefully if you as an audience member loved the character, want to see more then you will see one result of that final image. You’ll see Tyler there. If you felt like his story is completed through sacrifice, you might see someone different standing there. So hopefully it was satisfying even though people might have a question, but maybe they get talking to their friends saying, ‘Hey, go see this movie cause I want to talk to you about the ending’. It was purposefully ambiguous.”
Explaining Why Tyler Rake Threw Himself Off That Bridge
So why did the Extraction ending have Tyler throw himself off that bridge anyway? He was still upright and moving (slowly) and safety was just a short run away with no bad guys between Rake and rescue.
It all boils down to Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal ), who he’s been protecting all along. Ovi wants to run to Tyler in order to help him but both Tyler and his female partner Nik Khan (Golshifteh Farahani) believe that allowing the kid to go any further would be a death sentence for him, since the other side of the bridge is swarming with rapidly advancing killers.
It’s also pretty likely that Tyler thought he was a dead man walking. The events of Extraction have left him shot up so badly that, given there’s no medical attention anywhere around, his odds of survival no matter what the situation were pretty slim. Tyler Rake seems to be in the ending moments of his life, whether or not he falls off the bridge.
Did Tyler Rake Survive Extraction?
So Tyler seemed like he was on the verge of death when he fell into the river. But did he survive? Extraction’s ending seems to strongly hint that he did. And it lays the groundwork for his survival right from the beginning.
Our first introduction to Tyler in Extraction features him diving off an extremely high cliff into a lake, where he sits on the bottom holding his breath for an unusually long period of time. The Netflix movie establishes from the outset that this is a man used to diving into deep water and it demonstrates he has an usual ability to hold his breath.
Then there’s Extraction’s ending, which shows Ovi duplicating Tyler’s diving stunt and jumping into a pool to sit on the bottom to hold his breath in much the same way we saw Tyler do earlier in the movie. Who could have taught him that, but Tyler?
Then when Ovi emerges from the pool he sees this blurry figure…
It’s impossible to make out who it is, but the figure’s shape resembles that of Chris Hemsworth. It’s also clearly a white man, a white man in India at a pool where everyone else has darker brown skin. Did Ovi just happen to hire another white guy to protect him? Its seems pretty unlikely that it could be anyone other than Tyler Rake.
Extraction’s ending goes a step further in hinting at Tyler’s survival by delivering end credits that look like this…
The background is an underwater setting which calls back to Tyler Rake’s initial diving stunt earlier in the film. It’s as if the filmmakers are overtly trying to remind us that we saw that way back when the Netflix movie began.
The only evidence against the idea that Tyler somehow survived is the really bad state he was in when he fell off the bridge and the fact that it was his partner Nik who assassinated the rival gang leader in the bathroom and not him. Those, however, feel like red herrings.
Especially given that we know Extraction 2 is happening I think it’s safe to assume that when Extraction ends Tyler Rake is alive and still hard at work protecting Ovi.
