We’ll have to agree to disagree on this. In the vast majority of time travel stories or movies, the hero manages to save the world/himself/the girl/something in a way that alters the time line. So that’s the clear, expected norm. I guess if you’ve never read/seen a time travel story/movie, you might not have that expectation. But I simply cannot believe that someone with the experience of Mr. Gilliam was not reasonably familiar with the genre, and therefore would himself know that expectation. Therefore, I cannot believe that he would go down the path where, in his mind, fulfilling that expectation would be a twist.
So I can believe nothing other than that he (and the writers) took the approach that most viewers would be expecting the typical time-line altering, saving something ending, and therefore that their intention was that their twist would be to not go where most viewers were expecting. In other words, exactly as the OP asked, the twist was that there was no twist.
You can say that just because I “guessed” the ending doesn’t mean it wasn’t a twist, but I say that just because you didn’t see it coming doesn’t mean that it was a twist.
To be technical about it, the film started when Universal got the rights to redo La Jetée as a full-length film. So a good chunk of the basic plot structure is not entirely those writers’ creation.
Considering that most heist movies seem to involve an endless string of twists nowadays, it was kind of refreshing to get to the end of The Taking of Pelham 123 using the most direct and predictable route possible.
Right up to the end, I was expecting some kind of double-cross, it-was-some-other-guy-all-along, Usual-Suspects sort of insanity… but no, the bad guys were still the bad guys, the good guys were the good guys. Which I guess is kind of a twist in and of itself.
The movie Frailty qualifies, I think. There are two twists at the end. One is a standard twist, but the other qualifies for the OP’s requirement that the twist be that there is no twist:
Throughout the movie, we assume Bill Paxton’s character is insane, killing people he (delusionally) thinks are demons. Only at the end, we find out they really were demons. A non-twist twist.
The definition of “twist” is not simply that the characters in the movie are wrong or surprised. The definition of “twist” is that the film is constructed in such a way to portray to the audience that something is true – so true that it should just be taken for granted – but then near the end demonstrates that it is quite false. A twist can phrased like this: “The movie gave to the audience as a given X, and then at the end revealed that X was not true.” If you can’t phrase it like that, it’s not a real twist.
Shutter Island is a classic twist. It’s a clear given that Leo is an investigator. It’s not the case that we, the audience, know the truth and other characters in the movie don’t. It’s not the case that the audience is presented with the puzzle of Leo’s true identity. The movie flat out wants the audience to take for granted that Leo is an investigator. So you can say, “Shutter Island gave to the audience as a given that Leo is an investigator, and then at the end revealed that Leo was actually an inmate.” (and I’m not spoiler boxing this because the title of this thread states clearly “open spoilers”.)
In Twelve Monkeys, that they got the wrong guy is not a twist, because it’s just something that the characters got wrong; the movie never portrayed it as a given. Same with thinking they’d stopped it. The characters got it wrong, but the movie never gave it to the audience as a given.
A true twist to Twelve Monkeys would have been (to take a horribly cliched example, just for illustration) if Bruce woke up and the whole going back in time thing was a dream; the Earth is still nearly wiped out, no one has any way of fixing or reversing it, and Bruce’s helplessness made him dream up a solution. So: “Twelve Monkeys gave to the audience as a given that Bruce’s character is back in time, and then at the end revealed that he was only dreaming.”
So if you hold that Twelve Monkeys had a twist ending, how would you fill in the “X”: “Twelve Monkeys gave to the audience as a given X, and then at the end revealed that X was not true.” I just don’t see anything that can go there.
Unbreakable had no twist. Revealing at the end that the bad guy was one of the main characters is ubiquitous in movies. Unless you want to argue that all those movies have M. Night Shyamalan-style twists, you can’t legitimately call that a twist. It certainly doesn’t make you stop and rethink the whole movie like in The Sixth Sense. At most it makes you think “yeah, that makes sense.”
If he made Unbreakable first, I guarantee you not one single movie review would have mentioned that there was a twist at all. As opposed to The Sixth Sense, where every review coyly referenced it. Because Unbreakable was the immediately followup, most people try to shoehorn a twist in there. There isn’t.
At no time are we lead to believe that Mr. Glass is the villain behind the scenes looking for “someone who balances the scales”. That reveal, while done poorly, is the very definition of a twist.
Sure it does. Instead of the train wreck being a horrible accident that someone survived was instead…
A plan orchestrated by Mr. Glass. And, in the spirit of the movie, a much more fitting comic book origin of a hero inadvertantly being created by his nemesis.
But there was no indication, ever, that the event that led to Bruce Willis discovering his true nature…
[spoiler]was caused by someone. We’re led to believe that Sam Jackson just happens to look intenly at natural disasters and accidents. At no point is it iever implied that anyone was ever behind any of these “accidents”/disasters. So in that way, it IS a twist.
It’s not so much finding out Lex Luthor is the villain in Smallville, as it is finding out that Mr/Smith was the villain and caused the diaster in Deep Impact.[/spoiler]
I was just watching the 2nd season of the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender and I was wondering if the following would qualify:
[spoiler] Throughout the season, the character Zuko, who hunted the Avatar & friends throughout the first series, is shown being mentored by his uncle Iroh to discover his “true nature”: the obvious expectation is that he will, in the last episode, switch sides and joint the heros.
However, in the last episode he decides to not switch sides - instead he joins the fight against the heros, leading to the Avatar’s apparent death and the imprisionment of his uncle.
This seems an example where a plot twist was expected (that the villian would switch over to good), but the real “twist” is that it doesn’t happen. [/spoiler]
I have no idea why you insist on your interpretation as the only true definition of a “twist.” The twist in the film is that Bruce Willis sees his own death, and indirectly causes the whole Twelve Monkeys=source of the plague thing that the scientists took their info from.
By your definition, there’s no difference between “twist” and “unexpected”. If that’s the way you use the term, fine, but that’s not the way most of the world uses it. Go google for some definitions. The way you use it, every murder mystery has a twist ending because you didn’t expect him to be the killer!
I agree with Ellis Dee about Unbreakable. By the same definition of “twist” that I use, for the same reason that Twelve Monkeys did not have a true twist ending, neither did Unbreakable. It was a surprise, it was unexpected, it was something that maybe you could never have predicted, but it wasn’t a twist.
I think a good way to show the difference between “twist” and “unexpected” is the first season of “24”. When it was revealed that Nina was a mole working with the bad guys, that was a twist because there had been no hint of that possibility given. Every indication that the audience had was that Nina was a loyal CTU employee. Suddenly, we find out she’s a mole, and the whole thing is in a new light. “Whoa, there’s a traitor in CTU! And it’s Nina!” Twist.
Compare that with the hypothetical case where, in the first episode, Jack goes to the CTU director and says, “A trusted informant gave me good reason to believe that there is a traitor here at CTU, but I don’t know who it is.” From then on, the audience is in on the game: Who’s the mole? Then, when it’s revealed to be Nina, you might go, “Whoa, I never expected the traitor to be Nina!” That’s unexpected, but not a twist.
If you see no difference between those two cases, then we clearly have no common understanding of “twist” from which to continue any discussion.
“Ice Station Zebra” contains various spies aboard a sub looking for a downed Evil Empire satellite.
One of the spies is a *Soviet defector, whom the British spy (Patrick McGoohan) assures Rock Hudson (sub skipper) can be trusted, because he’s on our side, now.
But someone aboard the sub is a saboteur, trying to sink the sub if necessary to keep the Americans from retrieving the Soviet satellite–a spy. . . but who???
Well, whaddaya know??? It really was the Commie all along.:smack:
(And unrelated to the OP, McGoohan commands every scene he’s in.)
IMHO, it’s not ‘revealing at the end that the bad guy was one of the main characters’; it’s* ‘revealing at the end that one of the main characters was a bad guy’*. Up until the big reveal, there’s no big looming unanswered question about who “killed all those people”. We’re simply led to believe that Elijah researches natural disasters while hoping to learn of a survivor who’s miraculously unharmed, as per an explanation that honestly isn’t meant to sound sinister the first time you hear it:
“If there is someone like me in the world, and I’m at one end of the spectrum – couldn’t there be someone the opposite of me, at the other end? A person who can’t be hurt like the rest of us. A kind of person they were talking about in those stories … Not only do you have the physical traits of a hero, down somewhere in there, you have the moral code of one too … However unreal it may seem, we are connected, you and I. We’re on the same curve, just on opposite ends.”
If you don’t think Unbreakable has a twist ending, then you are operating with some very constrained definition of “twist” that I think most people don’t share. The guy who purports to be helping Willis’s character find his true calling turns out to be a villainous arch-enemy. That’s not a twist? :dubious:
The twist at the end of Unbreakable is not that Mr. Glass was a villainous arch-enemy, it was that Willis’s character wasn’t a superhero, he just fell into the delusions of someone looking to find meaning in a terrible tragedy of a life. The movie built up a story of a real life plausible super hero, only to show that it was just a delusion.
One watches the movie and sees Bruce Willis being mentored by SLJ, who is portrayed as a sympathetic figure (the scene with his mother, the scene where he gets upset at the comic store). You then get to the end, which casts all his past actions towards Bruce in a completely different context… and that’s not a twist?
ETA: And it seems as if Strassia got another meaning from the film, one which is also “twisty”.
