A Film to Ponder (and if you want answers read this)

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 2002)

"Donnie Darko" is destined for cult classic status. Any film which can so boldly confuse an audience and leave such an open ending is bound for this. In these respects it is very similar to "The Usual Suspects" which also had a confusing plot and an ending so full of holes it resembled a cheese grater. But the great thing about this is that the film remains with you for several days later and keeps you thinking, which is surely what film making is essentially about, or should be anyway.
The film spans several genres (teen movie, sci fi, horror) and while many films would fail to hold it all together first time writer-director, Richard Kelly, succeeds admirably. However, Kelly has sense enough not to ruin the film by providing the audience with a perfectly packaged ending with everything nicely tied up. This film is supposed to make you think and is supposed to be open to interpretation - I bet even Kelly hasn't got a concrete idea of what is going on.
**SPOILERS**
My take on the ending is thus:
The Frank character is part of Donnie's imagination but subconsciously is based on a real life person he knows - the James Duval character. Donnie has the ability to see into the future the same way the crazy old lady can - when we see her looking in her mail box she is looking for the letter Donnie will send to her later in the film.
When they are in the cinema and Frank takes his rabbit mask off he has lost an eye, at the time we are led to believe this is because Donnie stabbed him while looking in the mirror but it is because in the future Donnie will shoot him in the eye.
The reason Donnie suddenly finds himself asleep in his bedroom at the end of the film is that he has used a wormhole to travel back in time to the moment the jet engine landed on the house. At the start Donnie leaves the house at night and sleeps in the hills and on the golf course. Ultimately this saves his life when the jet engine falls on the house - his family say if he had been there he'd be dead. Donnie subconsciously foresaw the future and told himself (through Frank) to leave the house that night.

The jet engine fell through a wormhole in the future, the same plane we see Donnie's mother and sister on at the end which is about to crash. The whole idea is that we live in a parallel universe - while the Darko family are asleep in the house in one dimension in the past, they are also on the crashing plane in the future. The same way that as I am writing this article now I am also sitting on the toilet two weeks ago, riding my bike ten years ago, sitting at school 20 years ago, sitting on my potty 24 years ago and doing something else 10 years from now in the future.
Get it? No. You see Donnie realises he should have died when the jet engine fell on the house; the fact that he didn't has had a huge effect on the future i.e. the Patrick Swayze character gets arrested, thus the teacher can't take the girls on the trip and Donnie's mother has to and she ends up dying in the plane crash. In order to prevent his mother and sister's deaths Donnie travels back in time to sacrifice himself. When Frank (Donnie's own subconscious) says the world is going to end he means for Donnie, Donnie's world will end because his mother and sister will die. That is why he's smiling at the end, even though he knows he is going to die, because he will be saving the lives of his mother and sister.
Yes it's that simple.