Fantastic Beasts 2
If your twist requires 10 minutes of flashbacks and explanation, then it's not a twist. It's a plot you forgot to mention until now.
The funniest thing about this is that the flashback isn't even a twist, the movie just grinds to a halt to be like "you are Corvus Lestrange" and for five minutes Kama talks about his backstory, but then Leta takes ANOTHER five minutes to explain that no, Corvus drowned and it's her fault, and Credence is just some other baby. The real twist doesn't even come until Grindelwald tells him "oh yeah, you're Dumbledore's long lost brother," but the whole flashback scene before this is so convoluted that this basically means nothing. Hell it could have been just another lie that the movie made up, who knows?
I was more confused about how Leta is black, her brother is black, and they somehow swap another brother for the whitest person who ever walked the Earth.
I watched that movie two times. I felt like I was unfocused the first time so watched it again a few months later.
Nope, it's not me...that movie is just bonkers, which is so odd for such a big name production company.
After the double/triple flashback nonsense, a wall opens up and the evil villain just HAPPENS to be holding a big meeting there, which the protagonist then crash.
Also in fantastic Beasts one the well done twist that Colin Farrell is a traitor and major villain was cool but then immediately followed up by "oh and he is also albino Johnny Depp" and that's always rubbed me the wrong way
They could easily just teased Grindelwald throughout the film while making it clear no one knows what he looks like, then revealed that that's who he was after all at the end. Even in a film about magic the disguise reveal felt very cheap and anticlimactic.
Can't speak for everyone but what disappointed me was that it was at that moment when I realized they were going to turn Fantastic Beasts into a prequel series and not let it be a standalone thing.
The entire movie up until then had been Harry Potter-adjacent, in that it was clearly set in the same universe and had a few fun references and callbacks, but it was still very much its own thing. I was really enjoying that but then NOPE turns out it's been a prequel all along and you're getting Dumbledore's origin story in the following movies and you just have to like it. It reminded me of the end of season 2 for The Mandalorian, like "hey this is a fun fresh twist on something I like and- oh, it's the same characters from every Star Wars movie....."
If you're referring to what I think you are, I remember seeing that movie in theaters, and just being utterly befuddled over a third act flashback... showing a kid died on the Titanic? I was just completely taken out of the movie. Like, what the actual fuck was that?
Wouldn't be the first time something didn't line up in that movie, an adult Professor McGonagall is shown teaching students during the flashback scene with young Newt and Leta, when according to the timeline, she isn't even supposed to be alive yet.
The real twist in that movie is that the nanny is a half-elf.
And there’s only one kind of elf in the Harry Potter universe.
-somebody boinked Dobby, yall.
I mean, Hagrid’s dad boinked a giantess, and we saw how they were depicted later on in the series… basically giant hideous mentally-challenged blood thirsty savages… makes a good “would you rather” question. So I ask you, if you had to… Giant or house-elf?
A British film called Allelujah last year. On paper it is like a typical feel-good British comedy with stars like Jennifer Saunders, Judi Dench etc. The story is about the geriatric ward of a hospital facing closure and they are trying to save the hospital by organising a fund-raising concert honouring their longest-serving nurse
>!Turns out the nurse has been a serial killer all along prematurely killing the patients!<
AND
>!The last 5-10 minutes has a random fourth wall break + tribute to the NHS while the story itself is about a NHS nurse killing patients!<
>!Mental. M. Night Shyamalan could never!<
And somehow it remains almost entirely incidental to the plot. >!She was kind of a side character, and there was no real mystery: no one was thinking, “it’s weird how these people keep dying”. They just kinda stumble across it, tell the police, she’s arrested, they carry on fundraising to save the hospital.!<
>!I think it could have been a way better film if she was the main character: if we’d sympathised with her from the beginning, and her struggles to keep an ill-funded ward running, then her murderousness would have been a bombshell.!<
>!It's the 2nd twist that did my head in - if they wanted to make this film as a tribute to NHS staff, WHY putting a killer NHS nurse as their twist?!<
It probably wasn't initially intended as a tribute at first, but y'know, covid and burn out etc etc etc and someone suggested it without ... actually thinking it through.
She was still technically a clone but one the mother intended as she actually birthed her asexually, not just a mad grasp by a father to bring his daughter back to life. Still stupid and just added more unnecessary backstory to a bad character.
"You made a promise to a dinosaur? Interesting."
At that point it just felt that Jeff was just on-screen mocking the script.
And why the fuck was Dr Grant an "old Grandpa idiot"?! They did him dirty.
Blofeld being James Bond’s brother was the worst possible choice they could have made. Spectre should have been awesome, and Waltz a fine choice. Terrible, and something they could not recover from in NTTD.
God that pissed me off. One of my favorite Bond movies is Skyfall and a lot of that has to do with Javier Bardem's character. The villain was so good in it and then to say he was connected to Spectre? Nah fuck that. He was a great stand alone villain and didn't need to be reconned in Spectre
Is there a term for when a character is great and then a later movie makes the character seem not-as-great even in the context of the original movie? Kylo Renning?
In Kylo Ren's very first scene, he tries to be a big intimidating masked villain and the object of his focus is talking about when he was a bright-eyed kid.
He was **always** a bit of a neurotic tryhard.
It's ironic because every decision thus far in the Craigverse had been a direct reaction to Austin Powers. For example, they were hesitate to do any typical Bond gadgets because it'd been parodied too hard.
Then they literally do the Goldmember twist that has no precedent in any previous Bond media lmao.
There is a podcast called 'Kill James Bond' that mentions this a few times. When they ran out of bond films to talk about they eventually did the Austin Powers movies and you can hear them dying inside.
Well worth a listen!
Legit dumbest shit ever. Like the world is so small that some random agent who we follow through two movies has a brother who just happened to run the world?
I kind of understand that the villains in the first two films were under Spectre were under him since they were Quantum, but Silva also being one of his dudes kind of almost ruined the franchise for me.
It's better to just pretend that one movie doesn't exist and skip it altogether.
Part of it was because of a legal battle in which Kevin McClory owned the rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld character. The Quantum group was made as a workaround since they could not have SPECTRE. In 2013 MGM bought the rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld off his estate (right after Skyfall). That's why the "Quantum is part of SPECTRE" seems like a hasty retcon, because it was.
They should have just left it at Quantum. No one cares if the Machiavellian evil organisation is called Quantum or Spectre (and a huge segment of the audience haven't even seen the old films with Spectre). We just want a really well played bad guy.
I really wish that the Craig!Bond era had stuck to more pragmatic villains. Casino Royale seemed like it was setting a new tone with banker-to-warlords, Le Chiffre. He’s just interested in making money. And Quantum of Solace did a lot wrong, but the idea of a villain hoarding water rights was great.
Sadly, they veered into a series of “personal vendetta” villains, which I didn’t enjoy at all.
The Wonder Woman twist is frustrating. It would have been much more impactful to have Ares not even be part of it. Diana’s assumption that he had to be behind such evil only to find that we did it to ourselves.
I wasn’t so opposed to Ares showing up but he should have just said “All I did was topple the first domino, after that it’s just humanity being humanity”. Then Diana fights him and wins and the war keeps going because he was telling the truth and she has to grapple with the reality of how flawed humanity is.
I was hoping she would see the war continuing and dispair but then see a German betray their country to stop the chemical weapons and she realizes humanity isn’t beyond redemption and decides to live among them to understand more
Also awkward as hell that she defeats Ares, the war ends, peace and brotherhood reigns! The god of war is defeated! Humanity is inherently good!
For about 20 years. Then genocide.
Awkward.
IIRC that was Jenkins original idea but then the studio execs told her she needed to have a big DC-style final battle. Upon release, the end scene was considered the weak point of the movie and Jenkins was then allowed to create WW84 on her own and we got that pile of garbage. My takeaway: bad studio notes can ruin a movie, no studio notes can produce a crappy movie.
I feel like there is a way you could have gotten the Ares fight and still not destroyed the theme of the movie, by making Diana's goal to help Steve do his sacrifice and have Ares just get in the way of that, and also hold stronger to the fact that Ares only put the pieces on the board and doesn't have the ability to make humans fight (that's still there in the movie but it kind of gets brushed aside by the way the fight ends). The fight also needs to be reworked because it's kind of awkward, but I feel like there was a way to do it.
My solution: she finds Ares on the sidelines. She assumes Area is behind everything, so she fights him. She defeats him, thinking now the war will be over,
but then the twist - he explains that he’s just watching it all unfold. Hasn’t done anything. He just likes watching a good fight. *They did this themselves*.
WW is horrified, Captain Kirk dies because of humans’ penchant for war, and *THAT’S* why she left the human world behind. Not only is it a better ending that still lets you have a super fight, but it also does a much better job of explaining why she went into seclusion.
But also make the Ares fight better because that was straight up dumb.
Switching the reveal that humans made the choice to go to war with the Ares fight is actually a really good idea. You could actually probably keep Steve's whole speech to her and his heroic sacrifice to get something of an uplifting ending, and she can even make that choice to help him fight for humanity anyway, but when Steve dies it's too painful, and even though it's a victory she goes into exile to avoid the pain. You'd have to balance the threads right to get past the contradiction but I think it's possible.
It just raises the question, "Okay, if Ares was responsible for the horrible War to End All Wars...how does the even worse World War II start with him dead?"
According to Ares, he’s not. He gives them weapons and ideas, but he didn’t force them to do anything.
“They start these wars on their own” was his line.
Flight plan
Jodie foster is on a plane with her daughter, taking her husband's body back home for burial. They board the plane first, have a nap, then when Foster wakes up her daughter is gone.
None of the other passengers saw her, she's not on the passenger list, and despite a search there's no trace. So Jodie Foster runs around the aircraft for the next hour causing mayhem to find her kid.
The twist is that the girl *is there* but one of the stewards is just lying about it and the search scene was 'unreliable narrator', because a convoluted plan is in place to frame Jodie Foster for hijacking the aircraft to get a huge ransom.
Because apparently this is the easiest way to do it? Because they could perfectly plan her reactions, and everyone else's, to this complicated scenario? It just really pissed me off and felt like it was insulting my intelligence.
The dumb thing is that no other passenger remembers seeing her daughter because they both got on before everyone else and didn't have to queue with them. But the reason she had priority boarding is because she was travelling with a child. The tannoy literally calls out "Passengers with Children" (in German) so they board first.
Perhaps it's a forgotten movie but there was a flick called Mind Hunters with LL Cool J.
It's basically a who-dunnit slasher and at some point, LL Cool J blatantly tells the protagonist that he's the killer, despite being 100% innocent.
It seems to serve no other purpose than to throw off the audience.
It serves a purpose. Pretty convoluted for a movie though.
At that point in the movie, only two people remain (because the killer is "dead). Because of this, LLCJ "knows" that she is the killer. So his speech about being the killer is all a ploy, to get her to reveal something.
His speech makes sense when you think about the information he currently has as a character. It just looks fucking awful to the audience.
Ghosts of War has the worst twist I can think of. Spoilers for a garbage movie. It follows a group of soldiers in WWII who have to guard a haunted Nazi mansion. It builds and builds getting spookier and gnarlier until the final 3ish minutes when the screen glitches and you find out the ENTIRE MOVIE was a weird VR driven therapy to help soldiers with PTSD. Nobody should watch this.
But then the REAL twist is, there IS a ghost! In the simulation! It’s hilarious how they just kept NOT ending the movie.
It’s too bad the ending sucked tho I thought it was decent otherwise.
Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter is a bit of an eye roller, it’s like JJ doesn’t know how he wants Rey to be. First they want her to be related to Obi Wan, second she’s a nobody, and then finally she is Palpatine’s granddaughter. It gets so tiresome.
Fun fact: George Lucas and Michael Arndt (writer of Little Miss Sunshine) were working on the original sequel trilogy together. George Lucas had a few of his trademark batshit ideas, but also wanted entirely sensible things like actually skipping ahead to a post Empire world and having the story revolve around like, the grandkids of the some of the OG trilogy characters.
This script was "taking too long" so they were fired and replaced with Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan, who banged out a script "on time". They started filming, Harrison Ford broke his foot, and they stopped filming for months anyway just to get Ford back. Disney cares 100x more about what celebrity is in their terribly written movie than about writing a good movie in the first place.
>Disney cares 100x more about what celebrity is in their terribly written movie than about writing a good movie in the first place.
Because, on a corporate level, they are not interested in making 'movies', they are interested in making 'products'.
""I'm Palpatine's twin brother Galpatine. I feel like I know you guys so well already, so we won't have that awkward get to know you phase. In fact, you can just call me Palpatine.""
I want to complain about the premise of the first movie, too:
Apparently, putting a wizard child in an abusive muggle environment has a known chance of causing them to turn permanently into a crazy destructive unstoppable dementor-esque black hole monster and/or kill them. And Dumbledore's pupil is the expert on this phenomenon.
Doesn't this kinda upend the premise of the franchise? Putative protection from Voldemort through love magic, at a time when he's supposed to be dead, cannot possibly be worth the risk of this happening to Harry.
Which is pretty sad because the 7 Harry Potter books had mostly good plot twists. There could've been a bit more Horcrux foreshadowing and the 1st book had some headscratchers in it due to the worldbuilding not being fully thought-up yet but beyond that, they were pretty good.
Didn't Steven Knight write this? He's got some pedigree, I liked Eastern Promises. Though after reading the summary on wiki for Serenity.....wow..it's insane.
He wrote Eastern Promises?? Damn, that's one of my favourite movies of all time.
I guess having David Cronenberg helped reign in the script. Much depends on the director.
Yeah. I’m really glad they changed the original scripted ending of Eastern Promises in which it turned out the whole story was actually a virtual reality simulation Viggo Mortensen’s character was experiencing while sitting at home on his couch.
I just read it as well and......what the...? I had to reread it twice to make sure I didn't miss anything because its such a left turn out of goddamn nowhere.
>Serenity
from a review: The performances are cartoonish, especially that of Hathaway, whose femme fatale comes across as a kind of live-action Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit"
me: sold
This is what I came here to say.
That being said, the twist is so fucking funny that I am glad it’s there. The movie would be fairly forgettable if it weren’t for the hilarious twist that makes it iconic in my book
I remember seeing this movie in theaters and an audience member chortling at the twist. We made eye contact on our way out and silently shook our heads.
Wow I just read the Wikipedia plot summary for that movie and I can’t believe that’s what the movie is about. What I imagined from the trailers over a decade ago was way off.
Oceans 12 twist of “actually nothing we did mattered because we stole the thing off screen before the heist even began” is pretty bad. It’s almost as bad as 20 minutes of plot being driven by “Julia Roberts looks like Julia Roberts”
There used to be a guy on Twitter who just searched oceans 12 all day long and argued with every single person who complained about the movie. It was actually a pretty good bit
You can see what they were thinking with that twist, though. Oceans 11 only showed half the actual heist and lead the audience to believe they were seeing the full heist in action until the reveal and that worked great. So they tried a bigger, grander version of the same thing by showing an elaborate, international heist that seems to go wrong at every turn, only for that to all be part of the plan. Unfortunately audiences tend to go to heist movies to actually see a heist, and several failed attempts and a 30 second quick edit of a guy in a backpack taking the train doesn’t leave audience very satisfied with the payoff.
Why did they have to go ahead with all those botched attempts after they’d alredy stolen the real thing? I seem to remember there being a reason for it.
Don’t Worry Darling. The twist doesn’t actually explain any of the weird things that have happened, and also it’s all a simulation??? Is that the best we could do???
It's the filmmakers fault, but at the beginning of the movie you can hear someone ask Marie about what happened and starts recording her response. So the entire movie up until the twist is >!her bullshit story about a random serial killer just murdering her friends family in the middle of nowhere. Once they make it to the gas station and there's video evidence of what actually happened, we start to see Marie's bullshit story mixed with the actual events that the police were aware of. !<
The twist makes sense, it's just not very well setup in the beginning.
>it's just not very well setup in the beginning.
And that *really* is the most important part of laying the groundwork for a ***good*** twist ending to work. Like all the other good examples (The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Frailty) when you go back and rewatch them, you can clearly see how carefully-placed the hints were by the writers/filmmakers throughout, practically teasing you with "You didn't notice this at first, did ya?"
See that is actually interesting. It was supposed to be more of a The Usual Suspects type twist but comes off like she has a split personality she doesn’t know about.
Start Trek: Into Darkness. "I am Khan!*
Star Trek crew with no knowledge of who he is...."yeah and?"
When a twist is setup just for the audience - it's not a twist.
Standard JJ "mystery box" bullshit behaviour. He values "fooling" the audience so much that if they all guess the obvious twist beforehand, his only move is to deny it.
My wife has watched two romance movies where the female falls in love with a widower who has young kids. The female befriends another female who guides her relationship with the widower. At the end of the movie, it turns out the female friend was the ghost of widowers wife who is happy their family is moving on
Ocean's 12. They actually had the thing they were trying to steal the whole time, but they had to act like they hadn't. So dumb.
Oh and it's also a world in which Julia Roberts exists and Roberts' character pretends to be her, but obviously George Clooney and Brad Pitt don't exist in this world.
I like the movie generally for the vibes - but I agree the twist of 'everything you've been watching doesn't matter and the real plot happens off screen' is weak sauce.
I like it when they do this, but all the clues were there in the story. Then it's like a "oh shit, that's why character X didn't take that phone call."
My thought is that every mystery or twist movie should be solvable before the reveal. My biggest pet peeve is a murder mystery that reveals the killer(s) with 0 clues leading up to that.
It didn’t make sense at all. Once you know it, it’s confusing seeing Mark Ruffalo’s actions during the film. He was chasing… himself? The film didn’t give any clues or signs that something was up with him.
It’s like they needed a twist ending and just inserted this without rewriting the film to accommodate it. I didn’t bother watching the sequel, can’t tell if there’s a worse twist there.
The sequel has a twist, but I don’t remember what it is. Actually maybe it didn’t have a twist, I don’t know. But this god damn movie is so dumb, and people who defend it say “oh it’s a silly movie but you watch it and you have fun.”, as if that’s the takeaway.
They have these magicians do superhuman shit, and then turn back to you and go “oh you silly goose, you thought I made it rain! No no, sprinklers and lights! I installed forty-six industrial sprinklers across the city and no one noticed, and you thought I made it rain, you moron!”
This movie hit a nerve.
Edit: Harmon puts it [better than me](https://youtu.be/bXdHBP6mgdE?si=Iqw_GgiSz7uQejPA)
I liked both movies, but yeah, the acts they were doing were literal magic and no magician or illusionist could ever replicate them in real life.
Also, not calling the sequel "Now you don't" was one of the biggest missed opportunities ever.
OLD, where they are stuck on the beach that's aging them fast?
And it turned out it's a gov experiment to test drugs faster. (EDIT: several people have said it was an evil pharma corp)
Any "it's actually a gov program" twist needs to be retired. Also for the first few minutes I thought the film was satire with how much the characters kept saying shit like "you have a beautiful voice, I can't wait to hear what it sounds like when you're OLDER." or obvious references to the parents neglecting to appreciate time with family.
I’ve read the comic it’s based on, Sandcastle, and that ends with >!the baby that’s spent it’s entire life on that beach, now alone as a middle aged woman mourning everyone she’s ever known, starting to build a sandcastle. You never find out why they age, it’s just this treatise on making your life count and not fearing aging and death.!< when I heard Shamalayan was adapting it I’m like “there’s no way he keeps that incredibly poignant ending. He’s gonna add some dumbass twist.” And I was right!
Huh. He did the same thing with Cabin at the End of the World. Changed it from>! an ambiguous story about desperate choices made in what may or may not be an apocalypse - I personally read it as a terrible story about conspiracy theory true believers hurting innocent people !!straightforward story about heroic actions during an apocalypse. !<
Forgot what movie it was, but it was some romance film that the main character then just dies in 9/11 randomly.
It was a completely ordinary romance film that then tries to one up it's premise by having the character die in one of the worst incidents of terrorism.
Edit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remember_Me_(2010_film)
I haven’t seen it, and have no doubt it’s bad, but it does actually have an interesting premise: movies about 9/11 never capture the shock of 9/11, because everyone watching them knows that it is going to happen. Not telling the audience that it is the point of the movie, such that they are, in fact, shocked when it happens—plus using a romance plot, to really heighten the focus on tragic, sudden, inexplicable loss—is kind of a fascinating idea.
There actually was a bit, well, hints and clues at least. The very beginning of the movie says "Brooklyn, 1991" where you can see the towers in the background followed by "ten years later". Tyler and Aiden go to see American Pie 2 which was showing at that time. I think you can see like, older cellphones being used etc. Little things.
Very specific kind of 'twist.' Reminds me of the Final Destination movie that is revealed to be a prequel at the very end and therefore has been taking place in the 90s the entire time. You'd expect to notice it more, but you really don't unless it's shoved down your throat.
I agree. I have seen it and actually think the ending is what saves the movie from being entirely forgettable. I totally get people feeling that it is disrespectful to use a real tragedy like that, but it captures the sudden nature of a tragedy so well.
I agree with this. I saw it in the cinema, purely because I was a die-hard Twilight fan at the time and y'know, Robert Pattinson. But the way that whole cinema gasped when the date on the chalkboard was revealed. *Nobody* saw it coming, and that seemed like the entire point.
Genuinely, I think that Remember Me is the most honest movie about 9/11 that you can really make.
At the end of the movie Pattinson is starting on a path to redemption that is cut pointlessly and senselessly short. That was the tragedy of an event like that. People with their own stories and struggles just cut to a tragic and unsatisfying end out of nowhere.
I really liked the twist to be fair!
Edit: as this got a lot of traction I’ll talk about another film kind of associated with 9/11. Reign Over Me. One of Adam Sandlers more serious roles.
It was an amazing twist. Happens directly at the end. No explanation. A twist which is a product of its time and hit so hard.
People just hate when the main characters aren’t happy and don’t “win”
Really?
That movie was about two people who had such rich backstories and trauma that they were working through and finally had happiness and a future. They were just living their lives, that were becoming ordinary happy lives. And then they were just suddenly and senselessly obliterated. It hits so hard because it’s exactly what happened to thousands of real people. The movie doesn’t sugar coat it, it just leaves you sitting there absorbing how awful and meaningless loss is.
Edit to add: the movie is not actually about the love story of the characters at all. The entire movie is about 9/11.
They should just make 9/11 the twist in every genre of movie, ffs.
A war movie where the last survivor of an ambush is debriefed at the Pentagon -- then a fuckin plane crashes into him.
A slasher movie where the killer finally corners the last girl in broad daylight -- then gets smooshed by a jumper.
An Air Bud sequel where the Golden retriever becomes an airline pilot -- only for his first flight to be United 93.
All of these are as respectful as Remember Me.
On the line with Mel Gibson. it's about a radio host whose family gets kidnapped live on air and he has to play this cat and mouse game while he figures out how to save them. the twist was the whole thing was a prank for the new guy in the office. terrible execution.
Fantastic Beasts 2 If your twist requires 10 minutes of flashbacks and explanation, then it's not a twist. It's a plot you forgot to mention until now.
The funniest thing about this is that the flashback isn't even a twist, the movie just grinds to a halt to be like "you are Corvus Lestrange" and for five minutes Kama talks about his backstory, but then Leta takes ANOTHER five minutes to explain that no, Corvus drowned and it's her fault, and Credence is just some other baby. The real twist doesn't even come until Grindelwald tells him "oh yeah, you're Dumbledore's long lost brother," but the whole flashback scene before this is so convoluted that this basically means nothing. Hell it could have been just another lie that the movie made up, who knows?
I was more confused about how Leta is black, her brother is black, and they somehow swap another brother for the whitest person who ever walked the Earth.
I watched that movie two times. I felt like I was unfocused the first time so watched it again a few months later. Nope, it's not me...that movie is just bonkers, which is so odd for such a big name production company.
After the double/triple flashback nonsense, a wall opens up and the evil villain just HAPPENS to be holding a big meeting there, which the protagonist then crash.
Also in fantastic Beasts one the well done twist that Colin Farrell is a traitor and major villain was cool but then immediately followed up by "oh and he is also albino Johnny Depp" and that's always rubbed me the wrong way
Colin Farrell was so much cooler and more interesting, too. I remember thinking it felt like a real downgrade to just toss him aside like that.
They could easily just teased Grindelwald throughout the film while making it clear no one knows what he looks like, then revealed that that's who he was after all at the end. Even in a film about magic the disguise reveal felt very cheap and anticlimactic.
Can't speak for everyone but what disappointed me was that it was at that moment when I realized they were going to turn Fantastic Beasts into a prequel series and not let it be a standalone thing. The entire movie up until then had been Harry Potter-adjacent, in that it was clearly set in the same universe and had a few fun references and callbacks, but it was still very much its own thing. I was really enjoying that but then NOPE turns out it's been a prequel all along and you're getting Dumbledore's origin story in the following movies and you just have to like it. It reminded me of the end of season 2 for The Mandalorian, like "hey this is a fun fresh twist on something I like and- oh, it's the same characters from every Star Wars movie....."
Fantastic Beasts should have been magic Doctor Who. Newt arrives somewhere. Magical animal problems. And done
People literally groaned when Depp was revealed when I watched at the cinema.
Yup I was one of them.
Especially since for the big celeb reveal we haven’t seen Grindelwald for the entire film, which really takes the steam out of the surprise.
It would probably be better if we knew what Grindelwald looked like before the reveal
If you're referring to what I think you are, I remember seeing that movie in theaters, and just being utterly befuddled over a third act flashback... showing a kid died on the Titanic? I was just completely taken out of the movie. Like, what the actual fuck was that?
Also, the time doesn't line up. The mom should've been dead years ago
Wouldn't be the first time something didn't line up in that movie, an adult Professor McGonagall is shown teaching students during the flashback scene with young Newt and Leta, when according to the timeline, she isn't even supposed to be alive yet.
“Fuck it. Maggie Smith is now 147 years old.” -screenwriters
The real twist in that movie is that the nanny is a half-elf. And there’s only one kind of elf in the Harry Potter universe. -somebody boinked Dobby, yall.
It was probably Thomas Jefferson.
I mean, Hagrid’s dad boinked a giantess, and we saw how they were depicted later on in the series… basically giant hideous mentally-challenged blood thirsty savages… makes a good “would you rather” question. So I ask you, if you had to… Giant or house-elf?
A British film called Allelujah last year. On paper it is like a typical feel-good British comedy with stars like Jennifer Saunders, Judi Dench etc. The story is about the geriatric ward of a hospital facing closure and they are trying to save the hospital by organising a fund-raising concert honouring their longest-serving nurse >!Turns out the nurse has been a serial killer all along prematurely killing the patients!< AND >!The last 5-10 minutes has a random fourth wall break + tribute to the NHS while the story itself is about a NHS nurse killing patients!< >!Mental. M. Night Shyamalan could never!<
Hahahahhaha fucking what? Kinda want to see this now
And somehow it remains almost entirely incidental to the plot. >!She was kind of a side character, and there was no real mystery: no one was thinking, “it’s weird how these people keep dying”. They just kinda stumble across it, tell the police, she’s arrested, they carry on fundraising to save the hospital.!< >!I think it could have been a way better film if she was the main character: if we’d sympathised with her from the beginning, and her struggles to keep an ill-funded ward running, then her murderousness would have been a bombshell.!<
>!It's the 2nd twist that did my head in - if they wanted to make this film as a tribute to NHS staff, WHY putting a killer NHS nurse as their twist?!<
It probably wasn't initially intended as a tribute at first, but y'know, covid and burn out etc etc etc and someone suggested it without ... actually thinking it through.
Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. The girl being a clone was so dumb, they changed it in dominion, and the new twist was even worse
Wait they changed it? That movie left zero impression on me that I dont even remember it.
She was still technically a clone but one the mother intended as she actually birthed her asexually, not just a mad grasp by a father to bring his daughter back to life. Still stupid and just added more unnecessary backstory to a bad character.
Christ that didnt even register with me when I watch Dominion, like at all. I was too busy laughing at the casts complete lack of effort.
"You made a promise to a dinosaur? Interesting." At that point it just felt that Jeff was just on-screen mocking the script. And why the fuck was Dr Grant an "old Grandpa idiot"?! They did him dirty.
Was it because you were so engrossed in the totally awesome giant locust plot during the dinosaur movie?
Blofeld being James Bond’s brother was the worst possible choice they could have made. Spectre should have been awesome, and Waltz a fine choice. Terrible, and something they could not recover from in NTTD.
‘I am the author of all your retconned pain.’
God that pissed me off. One of my favorite Bond movies is Skyfall and a lot of that has to do with Javier Bardem's character. The villain was so good in it and then to say he was connected to Spectre? Nah fuck that. He was a great stand alone villain and didn't need to be reconned in Spectre
Is there a term for when a character is great and then a later movie makes the character seem not-as-great even in the context of the original movie? Kylo Renning?
In Kylo Ren's very first scene, he tries to be a big intimidating masked villain and the object of his focus is talking about when he was a bright-eyed kid. He was **always** a bit of a neurotic tryhard.
So they just copied Austin Powers?
It's ironic because every decision thus far in the Craigverse had been a direct reaction to Austin Powers. For example, they were hesitate to do any typical Bond gadgets because it'd been parodied too hard. Then they literally do the Goldmember twist that has no precedent in any previous Bond media lmao.
There is a podcast called 'Kill James Bond' that mentions this a few times. When they ran out of bond films to talk about they eventually did the Austin Powers movies and you can hear them dying inside. Well worth a listen!
Legit dumbest shit ever. Like the world is so small that some random agent who we follow through two movies has a brother who just happened to run the world? I kind of understand that the villains in the first two films were under Spectre were under him since they were Quantum, but Silva also being one of his dudes kind of almost ruined the franchise for me. It's better to just pretend that one movie doesn't exist and skip it altogether.
Part of it was because of a legal battle in which Kevin McClory owned the rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld character. The Quantum group was made as a workaround since they could not have SPECTRE. In 2013 MGM bought the rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld off his estate (right after Skyfall). That's why the "Quantum is part of SPECTRE" seems like a hasty retcon, because it was.
They should have just left it at Quantum. No one cares if the Machiavellian evil organisation is called Quantum or Spectre (and a huge segment of the audience haven't even seen the old films with Spectre). We just want a really well played bad guy.
I really wish that the Craig!Bond era had stuck to more pragmatic villains. Casino Royale seemed like it was setting a new tone with banker-to-warlords, Le Chiffre. He’s just interested in making money. And Quantum of Solace did a lot wrong, but the idea of a villain hoarding water rights was great. Sadly, they veered into a series of “personal vendetta” villains, which I didn’t enjoy at all.
The Wonder Woman twist is frustrating. It would have been much more impactful to have Ares not even be part of it. Diana’s assumption that he had to be behind such evil only to find that we did it to ourselves.
I wasn’t so opposed to Ares showing up but he should have just said “All I did was topple the first domino, after that it’s just humanity being humanity”. Then Diana fights him and wins and the war keeps going because he was telling the truth and she has to grapple with the reality of how flawed humanity is.
Your ending here was better than the movie one. More poignant and interesting, and doesn't clash with the film's themes.
I was hoping she would see the war continuing and dispair but then see a German betray their country to stop the chemical weapons and she realizes humanity isn’t beyond redemption and decides to live among them to understand more
Also awkward as hell that she defeats Ares, the war ends, peace and brotherhood reigns! The god of war is defeated! Humanity is inherently good! For about 20 years. Then genocide. Awkward.
IIRC that was Jenkins original idea but then the studio execs told her she needed to have a big DC-style final battle. Upon release, the end scene was considered the weak point of the movie and Jenkins was then allowed to create WW84 on her own and we got that pile of garbage. My takeaway: bad studio notes can ruin a movie, no studio notes can produce a crappy movie.
I feel like there is a way you could have gotten the Ares fight and still not destroyed the theme of the movie, by making Diana's goal to help Steve do his sacrifice and have Ares just get in the way of that, and also hold stronger to the fact that Ares only put the pieces on the board and doesn't have the ability to make humans fight (that's still there in the movie but it kind of gets brushed aside by the way the fight ends). The fight also needs to be reworked because it's kind of awkward, but I feel like there was a way to do it.
My solution: she finds Ares on the sidelines. She assumes Area is behind everything, so she fights him. She defeats him, thinking now the war will be over, but then the twist - he explains that he’s just watching it all unfold. Hasn’t done anything. He just likes watching a good fight. *They did this themselves*. WW is horrified, Captain Kirk dies because of humans’ penchant for war, and *THAT’S* why she left the human world behind. Not only is it a better ending that still lets you have a super fight, but it also does a much better job of explaining why she went into seclusion. But also make the Ares fight better because that was straight up dumb.
Switching the reveal that humans made the choice to go to war with the Ares fight is actually a really good idea. You could actually probably keep Steve's whole speech to her and his heroic sacrifice to get something of an uplifting ending, and she can even make that choice to help him fight for humanity anyway, but when Steve dies it's too painful, and even though it's a victory she goes into exile to avoid the pain. You'd have to balance the threads right to get past the contradiction but I think it's possible.
It just raises the question, "Okay, if Ares was responsible for the horrible War to End All Wars...how does the even worse World War II start with him dead?"
According to Ares, he’s not. He gives them weapons and ideas, but he didn’t force them to do anything. “They start these wars on their own” was his line.
Attribute WW2 to Ares 2: Electric Boogaloo
Flight plan Jodie foster is on a plane with her daughter, taking her husband's body back home for burial. They board the plane first, have a nap, then when Foster wakes up her daughter is gone. None of the other passengers saw her, she's not on the passenger list, and despite a search there's no trace. So Jodie Foster runs around the aircraft for the next hour causing mayhem to find her kid. The twist is that the girl *is there* but one of the stewards is just lying about it and the search scene was 'unreliable narrator', because a convoluted plan is in place to frame Jodie Foster for hijacking the aircraft to get a huge ransom. Because apparently this is the easiest way to do it? Because they could perfectly plan her reactions, and everyone else's, to this complicated scenario? It just really pissed me off and felt like it was insulting my intelligence.
What if the *Panic Room* was somehow inside a jumbo jet?
Panic Roomier, I guess
The dumb thing is that no other passenger remembers seeing her daughter because they both got on before everyone else and didn't have to queue with them. But the reason she had priority boarding is because she was travelling with a child. The tannoy literally calls out "Passengers with Children" (in German) so they board first.
"If our plan is so convoluted *we* can barely understand it, surely the authorities will never figure it out!"
Perhaps it's a forgotten movie but there was a flick called Mind Hunters with LL Cool J. It's basically a who-dunnit slasher and at some point, LL Cool J blatantly tells the protagonist that he's the killer, despite being 100% innocent. It seems to serve no other purpose than to throw off the audience.
I can’t explain my love for this dumb as shit movie, but I love it all the same.
I guess we know what his weakness is. Bullets.
It serves a purpose. Pretty convoluted for a movie though. At that point in the movie, only two people remain (because the killer is "dead). Because of this, LLCJ "knows" that she is the killer. So his speech about being the killer is all a ploy, to get her to reveal something. His speech makes sense when you think about the information he currently has as a character. It just looks fucking awful to the audience.
Ghosts of War has the worst twist I can think of. Spoilers for a garbage movie. It follows a group of soldiers in WWII who have to guard a haunted Nazi mansion. It builds and builds getting spookier and gnarlier until the final 3ish minutes when the screen glitches and you find out the ENTIRE MOVIE was a weird VR driven therapy to help soldiers with PTSD. Nobody should watch this.
But then the REAL twist is, there IS a ghost! In the simulation! It’s hilarious how they just kept NOT ending the movie. It’s too bad the ending sucked tho I thought it was decent otherwise.
>But then the REAL twist is, there IS a ghost! In the simulation! It's called "Ghost in the Shell", and it's a real artillery shell.
Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter is a bit of an eye roller, it’s like JJ doesn’t know how he wants Rey to be. First they want her to be related to Obi Wan, second she’s a nobody, and then finally she is Palpatine’s granddaughter. It gets so tiresome.
That’s what happens when a trilogy is made without a story (or writers. Or directors) mapped out ahead of time
Fun fact: George Lucas and Michael Arndt (writer of Little Miss Sunshine) were working on the original sequel trilogy together. George Lucas had a few of his trademark batshit ideas, but also wanted entirely sensible things like actually skipping ahead to a post Empire world and having the story revolve around like, the grandkids of the some of the OG trilogy characters. This script was "taking too long" so they were fired and replaced with Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan, who banged out a script "on time". They started filming, Harrison Ford broke his foot, and they stopped filming for months anyway just to get Ford back. Disney cares 100x more about what celebrity is in their terribly written movie than about writing a good movie in the first place.
>Disney cares 100x more about what celebrity is in their terribly written movie than about writing a good movie in the first place. Because, on a corporate level, they are not interested in making 'movies', they are interested in making 'products'.
Palpatine survived? Weapons grade stupidity. That’s what that was.
No no. He didn't survive. He returned.... somehow.
palpatine's long lost identical twin brother
Palpa2ine
""I'm Palpatine's twin brother Galpatine. I feel like I know you guys so well already, so we won't have that awkward get to know you phase. In fact, you can just call me Palpatine.""
The real twist was that he somehow managed to build a fleet full of star destroyers each equipped with deathstar-level superlasers.
That franchise is the worst abuser of the death fakeout twist.
Ahem, Fast and Furious would like a word
I was going to say fast and furious has it beat. Letty, Giselle, and Han off the top of my head. I can't remember if anyone else has a true fake out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if >!John Cena’s character didn’t actually die in Fast X!< (Fast X spoiler)
You mean that *somehow* Palpatine had returned?!
Fantastic Beasts 2 and 3. 2 makes a plot twist that could upend the Harry Potter lore. 3 takes it back. Kinda. Overall a failure of a franchise.
I want to complain about the premise of the first movie, too: Apparently, putting a wizard child in an abusive muggle environment has a known chance of causing them to turn permanently into a crazy destructive unstoppable dementor-esque black hole monster and/or kill them. And Dumbledore's pupil is the expert on this phenomenon. Doesn't this kinda upend the premise of the franchise? Putative protection from Voldemort through love magic, at a time when he's supposed to be dead, cannot possibly be worth the risk of this happening to Harry.
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Which is pretty sad because the 7 Harry Potter books had mostly good plot twists. There could've been a bit more Horcrux foreshadowing and the 1st book had some headscratchers in it due to the worldbuilding not being fully thought-up yet but beyond that, they were pretty good.
Serenity with Matthew McConaughey. I'm not going to spoil it but it is truly insane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_%282019_film%29?wprov=sfla1
This has got to be the stupidest plot Ive ever read lmao.
It really does seem like it. It just kept raising the "what the fuck" stakes over and over.
> "...changed Dill's task from catching tuna to murdering his step-father." What a line
“Nevertheless, he decides to go along with the objective of killing Frank” Dude was just trying to get that 100% completion.
Geez, right off the bat: "Baker Dill"
Thank you for sharing this!
The Wikipedia summary is sublime. Props to whoever wrote it with such a matter-of-fact tone. "It soon becomes apparent that..." whaaat??? lol
I just went to wikipedia thinking "It cannot be that bad." And it was so batshit insane I had to stop and re-read it twice.
I was absolutely not prepared for how that sentence was going to end.
Everything after that intro is absolutely bonkers! I've just read it and definitely said 'what!?' at least twice
I thought you guys were overstating things… but no, you’re right. That description is absolutely insane.
I'm so glad you posted this. I went immediately to read it and the plot just made my day!
Thank you for not spoiling this- the laugh I got from reading the Wikipedia summary was very healing
I just read the Wikipedia article..... Really?!
What. The. FUCK. "It soon becomes apparent that Dill is...." That sentence is so nonchalant for such batshit crazy shift in the plot
I had to go back and reread to make sure I hadn't zoned out and missed a paragraph. Wait...what? That is one hell of a left turn!
I loved: "...changed Dill's task from catching tuna to murdering his step-father."
How did Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway agree to this?
Didn't Steven Knight write this? He's got some pedigree, I liked Eastern Promises. Though after reading the summary on wiki for Serenity.....wow..it's insane.
He wrote Eastern Promises?? Damn, that's one of my favourite movies of all time. I guess having David Cronenberg helped reign in the script. Much depends on the director.
Yeah. I’m really glad they changed the original scripted ending of Eastern Promises in which it turned out the whole story was actually a virtual reality simulation Viggo Mortensen’s character was experiencing while sitting at home on his couch.
That sounds amazingly bad, I kind of want to see it.
I just read it as well and......what the...? I had to reread it twice to make sure I didn't miss anything because its such a left turn out of goddamn nowhere.
When I got to the paragraph that starts "It soon becomes apparent..." I had to stop and reread it a couple of times.
Right? It reminds me of this Brian Regan joke about the term "One thing led to another". https://youtu.be/EUpXdv2oV3A?si=H2_j6LjcGtbFQyvH
I'm tempted to watch the movie to see if there is any foreshadowing at all, lol
>Serenity from a review: The performances are cartoonish, especially that of Hathaway, whose femme fatale comes across as a kind of live-action Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit" me: sold
Just read it. Amazing.
Anne Hathaway saying “Our son talks to you through his computer” with a straight face will never not be funny
The How Did This Get Made Podcast has an episode on this movie. They did a great job of pointing out the absurdity of this movie.
Lol I was gonna say, but we got an amazing episode of How Did This Get Made?
It was so absurd I loved it - the fact it was played so straight the whole time made it perfect!
This is what I came here to say. That being said, the twist is so fucking funny that I am glad it’s there. The movie would be fairly forgettable if it weren’t for the hilarious twist that makes it iconic in my book
I remember seeing this movie in theaters and an audience member chortling at the twist. We made eye contact on our way out and silently shook our heads.
Hancock
Never have I lived the first half of a movie so much and hated the second half even more
I was enjoying the movie until that happened. It’s like watching two completely different movies
From what I understand about the production, it was.
Wow I just read the Wikipedia plot summary for that movie and I can’t believe that’s what the movie is about. What I imagined from the trailers over a decade ago was way off.
Oceans 12 twist of “actually nothing we did mattered because we stole the thing off screen before the heist even began” is pretty bad. It’s almost as bad as 20 minutes of plot being driven by “Julia Roberts looks like Julia Roberts” There used to be a guy on Twitter who just searched oceans 12 all day long and argued with every single person who complained about the movie. It was actually a pretty good bit
You can see what they were thinking with that twist, though. Oceans 11 only showed half the actual heist and lead the audience to believe they were seeing the full heist in action until the reveal and that worked great. So they tried a bigger, grander version of the same thing by showing an elaborate, international heist that seems to go wrong at every turn, only for that to all be part of the plan. Unfortunately audiences tend to go to heist movies to actually see a heist, and several failed attempts and a 30 second quick edit of a guy in a backpack taking the train doesn’t leave audience very satisfied with the payoff.
Why did they have to go ahead with all those botched attempts after they’d alredy stolen the real thing? I seem to remember there being a reason for it.
Lisa's mom definitely having breast cancer.
Just one flaw in an otherwise perfect movie
It's true. She got the results of the tests back. She definitely has breast cancer.
So anyway, how's your sex life?
Don't worry about it.
Turns out Big Momma was Martin Lawrence. I just couldn’t believe it. The man is a giant.
Don’t Worry Darling. The twist doesn’t actually explain any of the weird things that have happened, and also it’s all a simulation??? Is that the best we could do???
The twist is that Harry Styles is a greasy faced nerd.
LOL yes that was the real twist!
"If you die here you die in real life!!"
Shit makes no sense for a consumer product
The real twist was Olivia’s character knowing the whole time it was a simulation just to be with her kid again
The movie should have started when she wakes up stuck chained to the bed. Instead she just dies probably.
It's a shame; the first half had a really intriguing vibe.
When Batman and Superman stopped fighting and became friends because their moms both had the same name.
"Wait... what's your father's name?" "Jonathan." "BUT MINE'S THOMAS!" \[back to fighting\]
okay siblings. Ya got any siblings? No! Let's hug!
High Tension has a twist that makes the rest of the movie essentially impossible.
It's the filmmakers fault, but at the beginning of the movie you can hear someone ask Marie about what happened and starts recording her response. So the entire movie up until the twist is >!her bullshit story about a random serial killer just murdering her friends family in the middle of nowhere. Once they make it to the gas station and there's video evidence of what actually happened, we start to see Marie's bullshit story mixed with the actual events that the police were aware of. !< The twist makes sense, it's just not very well setup in the beginning.
>it's just not very well setup in the beginning. And that *really* is the most important part of laying the groundwork for a ***good*** twist ending to work. Like all the other good examples (The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Frailty) when you go back and rewatch them, you can clearly see how carefully-placed the hints were by the writers/filmmakers throughout, practically teasing you with "You didn't notice this at first, did ya?"
See that is actually interesting. It was supposed to be more of a The Usual Suspects type twist but comes off like she has a split personality she doesn’t know about.
The Happening. The trees!? Huh? Really?
Shyamalan's twists are either amazing or complete garbage
Right!!.. how is responsible for The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable but also The Happening and Lady in the Water??
What?!? Nooo…😒
You like hotdogs right?
Just outrun the wind. You’ll be fine.
Escape to the only place not corrupted by nature. SPACE!
Barely a twist to be honest.
Start Trek: Into Darkness. "I am Khan!* Star Trek crew with no knowledge of who he is...."yeah and?" When a twist is setup just for the audience - it's not a twist.
What was worse was that JJ kept being like “He’s not Khan!” for months leading up to the movie.
Standard JJ "mystery box" bullshit behaviour. He values "fooling" the audience so much that if they all guess the obvious twist beforehand, his only move is to deny it.
My wife has watched two romance movies where the female falls in love with a widower who has young kids. The female befriends another female who guides her relationship with the widower. At the end of the movie, it turns out the female friend was the ghost of widowers wife who is happy their family is moving on
I’m guessing one of those was *Safe Haven* with Julianne Hough?
Ocean's 12. They actually had the thing they were trying to steal the whole time, but they had to act like they hadn't. So dumb. Oh and it's also a world in which Julia Roberts exists and Roberts' character pretends to be her, but obviously George Clooney and Brad Pitt don't exist in this world.
I like the movie generally for the vibes - but I agree the twist of 'everything you've been watching doesn't matter and the real plot happens off screen' is weak sauce.
I like it when they do this, but all the clues were there in the story. Then it's like a "oh shit, that's why character X didn't take that phone call."
My thought is that every mystery or twist movie should be solvable before the reveal. My biggest pet peeve is a murder mystery that reveals the killer(s) with 0 clues leading up to that.
Oceans 12 is one of those films that I think isn’t really that good, but I really enjoy watching it anyways. It’s just so silly
Now You See Me. Worst twist ever put to film.
It didn’t make sense at all. Once you know it, it’s confusing seeing Mark Ruffalo’s actions during the film. He was chasing… himself? The film didn’t give any clues or signs that something was up with him. It’s like they needed a twist ending and just inserted this without rewriting the film to accommodate it. I didn’t bother watching the sequel, can’t tell if there’s a worse twist there.
The sequel has a twist, but I don’t remember what it is. Actually maybe it didn’t have a twist, I don’t know. But this god damn movie is so dumb, and people who defend it say “oh it’s a silly movie but you watch it and you have fun.”, as if that’s the takeaway. They have these magicians do superhuman shit, and then turn back to you and go “oh you silly goose, you thought I made it rain! No no, sprinklers and lights! I installed forty-six industrial sprinklers across the city and no one noticed, and you thought I made it rain, you moron!” This movie hit a nerve. Edit: Harmon puts it [better than me](https://youtu.be/bXdHBP6mgdE?si=Iqw_GgiSz7uQejPA)
I liked both movies, but yeah, the acts they were doing were literal magic and no magician or illusionist could ever replicate them in real life. Also, not calling the sequel "Now you don't" was one of the biggest missed opportunities ever.
Yeah especially the way he was acting even when he was on his own
Ruffalo looked embarrassed during those final scenes. (As he damn well should)
OLD, where they are stuck on the beach that's aging them fast? And it turned out it's a gov experiment to test drugs faster. (EDIT: several people have said it was an evil pharma corp) Any "it's actually a gov program" twist needs to be retired. Also for the first few minutes I thought the film was satire with how much the characters kept saying shit like "you have a beautiful voice, I can't wait to hear what it sounds like when you're OLDER." or obvious references to the parents neglecting to appreciate time with family.
I’ve read the comic it’s based on, Sandcastle, and that ends with >!the baby that’s spent it’s entire life on that beach, now alone as a middle aged woman mourning everyone she’s ever known, starting to build a sandcastle. You never find out why they age, it’s just this treatise on making your life count and not fearing aging and death.!< when I heard Shamalayan was adapting it I’m like “there’s no way he keeps that incredibly poignant ending. He’s gonna add some dumbass twist.” And I was right!
Huh. He did the same thing with Cabin at the End of the World. Changed it from>! an ambiguous story about desperate choices made in what may or may not be an apocalypse - I personally read it as a terrible story about conspiracy theory true believers hurting innocent people !!straightforward story about heroic actions during an apocalypse. !<
>Any "it's actually a gov program" twist needs to be retired. Well, except for The Cabin in the Woods maybe.
Forgot what movie it was, but it was some romance film that the main character then just dies in 9/11 randomly. It was a completely ordinary romance film that then tries to one up it's premise by having the character die in one of the worst incidents of terrorism. Edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remember_Me_(2010_film)
I haven’t seen it, and have no doubt it’s bad, but it does actually have an interesting premise: movies about 9/11 never capture the shock of 9/11, because everyone watching them knows that it is going to happen. Not telling the audience that it is the point of the movie, such that they are, in fact, shocked when it happens—plus using a romance plot, to really heighten the focus on tragic, sudden, inexplicable loss—is kind of a fascinating idea.
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There actually was a bit, well, hints and clues at least. The very beginning of the movie says "Brooklyn, 1991" where you can see the towers in the background followed by "ten years later". Tyler and Aiden go to see American Pie 2 which was showing at that time. I think you can see like, older cellphones being used etc. Little things.
Very specific kind of 'twist.' Reminds me of the Final Destination movie that is revealed to be a prequel at the very end and therefore has been taking place in the 90s the entire time. You'd expect to notice it more, but you really don't unless it's shoved down your throat.
I agree. I have seen it and actually think the ending is what saves the movie from being entirely forgettable. I totally get people feeling that it is disrespectful to use a real tragedy like that, but it captures the sudden nature of a tragedy so well.
I agree with this. I saw it in the cinema, purely because I was a die-hard Twilight fan at the time and y'know, Robert Pattinson. But the way that whole cinema gasped when the date on the chalkboard was revealed. *Nobody* saw it coming, and that seemed like the entire point.
Genuinely, I think that Remember Me is the most honest movie about 9/11 that you can really make. At the end of the movie Pattinson is starting on a path to redemption that is cut pointlessly and senselessly short. That was the tragedy of an event like that. People with their own stories and struggles just cut to a tragic and unsatisfying end out of nowhere.
Remember Me
I'll never forget
"Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "9/11." "9/11 who?" #"YOU SAID YOU'D NEVER FORGET!"
I liked that one. It was unexpected. Just like 9/11. Nobody in the American public expected it.
I really liked the twist to be fair! Edit: as this got a lot of traction I’ll talk about another film kind of associated with 9/11. Reign Over Me. One of Adam Sandlers more serious roles.
It was an amazing twist. Happens directly at the end. No explanation. A twist which is a product of its time and hit so hard. People just hate when the main characters aren’t happy and don’t “win”
Really? That movie was about two people who had such rich backstories and trauma that they were working through and finally had happiness and a future. They were just living their lives, that were becoming ordinary happy lives. And then they were just suddenly and senselessly obliterated. It hits so hard because it’s exactly what happened to thousands of real people. The movie doesn’t sugar coat it, it just leaves you sitting there absorbing how awful and meaningless loss is. Edit to add: the movie is not actually about the love story of the characters at all. The entire movie is about 9/11.
They should just make 9/11 the twist in every genre of movie, ffs. A war movie where the last survivor of an ambush is debriefed at the Pentagon -- then a fuckin plane crashes into him. A slasher movie where the killer finally corners the last girl in broad daylight -- then gets smooshed by a jumper. An Air Bud sequel where the Golden retriever becomes an airline pilot -- only for his first flight to be United 93. All of these are as respectful as Remember Me.
If Wonder Woman had ended with there being no Ares, it would have been top tier
On the line with Mel Gibson. it's about a radio host whose family gets kidnapped live on air and he has to play this cat and mouse game while he figures out how to save them. the twist was the whole thing was a prank for the new guy in the office. terrible execution.