Don’t you feel so clever when you figure out a movie’s twist before it happens, and also a little left out that everyone else was blown away and you weren’t?
Sixth Sense - I had this one pegged half way through the film. Admittedly, people were telling me that it had the most amazing ending ever, so I was actively searching for a potential twist while watching it.
The Usual Suspects - All of our plot driving info is coming from one source… gee, I wonder who Kaiser Sose could be? :rolleyes:
I opened this thread to mention the Usual Suspects, for the reason you state, but also “It’s the person you’d never suspect.” I was watching it with my brother and sister who had seen it before and I predicted the whole thing and it really ticked them off.
Near the beginning of Silence of the Lambs when they’re reviewing information on Buffalo Bill’s victims, they say something like “The first victim wasn’t found until after the other two.” I’ve read enough murder mysteries that, when I heard this, I said right away, “The killer knew the first victim.”
Much later on, Clarice realizes this like it’s a big surprise. It always annoyed me that the idea never even occurred to these supposed expert crime investigators before that.
With everyone hinting about the big surprise twist in The Sixth Sense, it was spoiled for me before I saw it. No one ever said exactly what the twist was, but they said enough that I figured it out.
If TV counts, a lot of the twists in The Twilight Zone were fairly easy to spot, e.g., the only survivors of a world war turn out to be named “Adam” and “Eve.” But the, given the format of the show, you were always expecting some kind of twist.
It seems I already guessed one of the big plot twists in the current Superman movie, just from a brief mention of a plot point in one of the reviews I read, and the statement that there was one suprise in the movie:
I still haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve gathered:
Supes is the father of Lois Lane’s son. I am guessing the kid is sickly because there is kryptonite in the house for some reason
Sixth Sense - in a heartbeat. It helps that I’ve been reading ‘twist’ stories all my life (Saki, John Collier, Fredric Brown, etc) so I’ve come across practically every variation on the theme that there is. As soon as the camera blacked out on Willis after the assault, I could see what was coming.
Usual Suspects. Clever. That one got past me.
The Others. Saw that one coming. I’d read a story by William Peter Blatty, the Exorcist author, a couple of years ago, with almost exactly the same twist, (Elsewhere, in the collection 999).
BTW you can test yourself on the twist endings of ten movies in this Guardian quiz.
I didn’t get the twist to TSS until the very end, even though I knew there was a big twist. However, because I knew there was a twist, I could tell when it occured – as soon as the camera blacked out and the next scene was captioned “9 months later”, I’m like “hey, what happened in those 9 months? Did he survive? Ahhh, whatever the answer is must be the twist.”
But the movie was engrossing enough that I didn’t dwell on it throughout, or it’s possible I might have gotten it.
I could tell that when Cabiria met her future husband that he was going to screw her over. This was because a similar thing happened in Lilja 4 Ever, so I started to suspect betrayal when I noticed the similarities in their plots.
So you like Saki? He could have a whole thread of his own! I have a cat named Tobermory, for his cat character of the same name. “Shredni Vashtar” is one of the best short stories ever, up there in my personal top ten list.
I figured out the ending of The Usual Suspects about a minute before it happened on screen. I felt really smart.
There a scene in Broadcast News where we see an interview that Tom Grunick (William Hurt) has conducted, including shots of his tearful reactions to what he’s hearing. The climax hinges on the fact that Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) is dismayed to find out that those reaction shots were taken just after the real interview and spliced in. What the hell? When I saw the earlier scene, I just assumed it was done that way. I can’t believe that a network news producer would be surprised to find out how an interview was filmed.
Angels and Insects, but to be fair, with the structure of the film I’m pretty sure that the audience is supposed to get the big secret and just be waiting for all hell to break loose when the protagonist finally twigs. There’s at least one “surprise, he’s going to find out now… oh wait, not quite yet!” moment.
The Matrix. Not a twist towards the end of the story (like most movies), but towards the beginning, with the whole “What is the Matrix?” thing when Neo learns that the Matrix is a computer simulation he was immersed in.
Well duh! Maybe I read way too much science fiction, but I thought that was pretty obvious. Given the lead up they had:(“follow the white rabbit”, getting “bugged” by the agents, and then the "red pill/blue pill discussion with Morpheus, then waking up plugged in to the tank-o-goop, and being on the ship (especially that his eyes hurt because “he’s never used them before”)I was shocked when some of my friends didn’t realize what the Matrix was until Morpheus explicitly said so.