I was just about to complain about the exact same thing, so I’ll just add a lame “seconded” - with an added helping of “no, Kyla, you don’t come off as an asshole”.
I gave my definition and test for “twist”, and why Twelve Monkeys doesn’t fit it while Shutter Island does. Did you miss that post? I do agree that Unbreakable skirts close to the grey area between “twist” and “surprise”, but I still hold that it’s more to the latter than the former.
I have offered up my definition of twist. You and others seem to keep defining it by example, while saying that you don’t share my definition. Could you, perhaps, offer an actual definition of the term “twist” that you use? One that clearly applies to Twelve Monkeys and Unbreakable, but does not apply to a standard murder mystery? Other than by the few examples here, I honestly have no idea how you define it, or how (or if) you distinguish between “twist” and “surprise”. Continuing to try to discuss a term whose very definition has not been agreed on is rather pointless.
(“The Earth is round.” “No it’s not.” “Yes it is.” “The Earth is a bit pear-shaped. ‘Round’ means exactly circular.” “No, ‘round’ means not having any straight edges.” “Well, the Earth certainly doesn’t have any straight edges.” “So it’s round.” “By that definition, sure.” “And by the strict ‘circular’ definition, it’s not.” “So we’re in violent agreement, then?”)
Point taken, my use of the spoiler box was pretty idiotic, on review.
Um, how would you know all that? I certainly don’t recall any of that being clear early in the film.
Maybe, a sudden surprising reveal which has not been a mystery that it is the mission of the protagonists or movie itself to solve. This definitely puts Unbreakable deep into twist territory. The movie did not make the disasters into a mystery, or the identity of a secret villain. They were just suddenly revealed without the viewers having known they were even issues.
Or in other words, a revelation that is surprising not only for it’s content, but also for it’s existence. An answer when we didn’t even know the question.
Twelve Monkeys maybe not so much. Certainly the whole childhood memory dream thing was presented as a mystery, so getting a reveal on that is not a shocker, even if the answer itself might have surprised some people. The true origin of the virus gets closer, but still no dice, because the origin of the virus was always presented as being somewhat mysterious, even if there was a prime suspect.
This is incoherent. I remain uncertain as to whether you even remember/understand what happened in Twelve Monkeys.
That is not the standard definition of a plot twist, it’s a needlessly complicated definition you’ve invented yourself. A plot twist is simply an unexpected (to the audience) development in the plot. The OED defines a plot twist as “an unexpected turn of events in a work of fiction, etc.”
There are at least two significant twists in Twelve Monkeys. The first is that the Army of the Twelve Monkeys actually had nothing to do with the virus. The second is the meaning of the recurring dream the Bruce Willis character has been having for years – that he had as a child seen his time-traveling adult self die. While it would be possible for a viewer to guess either of these things, I’m pretty sure most were surprised by them. They certainly weren’t spelled out from the beginning, as you suggested earlier.
*I’m not sure what you’re talking about with this “got the wrong guy” stuff. They identify the right guy in the end in Twelve Monkeys. Do you mean that the Brad Pitt character was the wrong guy? If so, then for most of the movie it does look like the Army of the Twelve Monkeys was involved in the release of the virus. At one point in the movie it even seems that the plot is headed for a twist where the Bruce Willis character gave the idea for the virus to the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, but either way the audience is lead to believe that the Army of the Twelve Monkeys was involved – an assumption supported by the very title of the film.
A twist in a film changes the context of what has gone before. If you watch a movie and key scenes have completely different meanings if you know a key fact that is revealed later, it is a twist because it twists the meaning of those scenes. An obvious example we can all agree in is the Sixth Sense scene in the restaurant with his wife. What you think is happening when you first see it is completed twisted by the knowledge that the doctor is dead.
Another way to look at is that a twist makes you realize that story you are being told is not the kind of story you thought it was. It changes the story arc, retroactively. Again in the Sixth Sense, you think you are watching a story about a man who failed at what he (and everyone else) thought he was good at try and redeem himself and get his life back. After the twist you realize that the story is about closure and moving on, not redemption and recovery.
So does Unbreakable fit that definition? Well what we learn at the end definitely changes the meaning of some scenes to me. The early scene with the young boy and his mother, the speeches by Samuel Jackson to Bruce Willis to give two examples. And as far as the type of story, before then I thought it was the story of a realistic superhero discovering his calling, but afterward it seemed it was the story of someone being pulled into the delusions of a psychopath.
To expand on this, it’s only once the protagonists get ready to go to the airport this starts to become obvious, since the Willis character that dies in the airport is made to look like the Pitt character.
Getting back to the OP, I don’t believe it’s ever been adapted as a film, but Agatha Christie’s The Hollow probably counts as a story where the twist is that there’s no twist.
A man is murdered while visiting friends in the country. His wife is found standing over the dead body with a gun in her hand. She claims she found the body and picked up the gun, and further investigation on the part of Hercule Poirot turns up several pieces of evidence suggesting that the wife was not involved. There’s a seemingly harmless supporting character with a difficult life who gets a lot of attention in the book, there are even a number of scenes from her perspective, but she has no apparent motive for committing murder.
As it turns out:
The wife was actually the killer. Several other characters tried to protect her by planting fake clues or tampering with the evidence, but the woman found standing over the corpse with a gun in her hand really was the one who did it. The “person you’d least suspect” wasn’t the killer and had nothing to do with the crime, she was just an innocent relation who happened to be present that day.
I think Zombieland might qualify, but possibly only weakly. When I watched it with a friend we both thought that
… a major character would die. He figured Tallahassee, I figured Little Rock.
The question here may have been our misinterpretation of the sort of movie it was. In retrospect, I’m not sure if it was the intention of the screenwriter to have a story like that, so it may not have been a conscious avoidance. Although a good point in my favor is
the scene of Tallahassee drawing all the zombies to himself - that looked like a classic ‘man with nothing to live for gives his life so the young couple can be together with no strings attached at the end of the movie’.
Thanks much, this perfectly and succinctly explains my complaint about how people crowbar in the twist label for all M. Night Shyamalan movies.
Sorry for quoting in full, but I couldn’t really pare it down. This train of thought pefectly mirrors my own, but it brings me to the exact opposite conclusion.
A twist changes the context of scenes, totally agreed. The restaurant scene in Sixth Sense is a great example, as is the “meeting” with the boy’s mother. On first view we think we’re watching action A but in hindsight we’re watching action B. The first time through we’re interpreting the action itself incorrectly.
By contrast, in Unbreakable none of the action is changed by the reveal. Mr. Glass is still helping Bruce Willis in the exact straightforward way we thought the first time around. The only thing that has changed is Mr. Glass’s motivation. That’s not a twist, that’s a murder mystery reveal. There is no scene to point to and say “I thought A was happening, but instead B was happening.” “A” was always happening; the action never changed context. Only the motivation.
Regardless of if we end up having to agree to disagree, I submit that my definition of a twist is what people think of when they think of the classic M. Night Shyamalan twist. My objection is that the only movie that had such a twist was The Sixth Sense. The Village is half-twisty like Unbreakable; the reveal doesn’t change our understanding of any actions in the movie. Everything is straightforwardly the same the second time you view it in both movies. Only in The Sixth Sense does the movie become something different on second viewing.
I’ll concede that I can see what the other side of the aisle means with Unbreakable, though I disagree. What annoys me is when people jump through tortured hoops to crowbar a twist into Signs, Lady in the Water, or The Happening. Those movies are as straightforward and un-twisty as it gets, so of course the fan-imposed twists are stupid.
Michael Haneke’s Funny Games might qualify, in the sense that whenever the victim(s) might overthrow the situation, they don’t. One of the sadistic teen is surprisingly killed by a rifle? The other teen winds it back with a remote control. In the last scene,
The tortured woman, taken on a boat to be killed, gets her hidden knife confiscated, and the killers sneer about it, and also sneer at us the audience, who we were expecting her to win against them.
So, this movie is a major “Fuck You, Hollywood”.
The movie Taken. A man’s daughter is kidnapped, and he goes and gets her back. That’s it.
What the hell, people? The thread title says OPEN SPOILERS, why is everyone using it? We’re overusing the spoiler tag, and it will wear out and break and then what will you do?
The original version of The Vanishing (Spoorloos) might qualify:
The audience expects the lead will turn the tables on the killer somehow, and that the killer will be punished. Instead, the man simply gets killed in exactly the same way as his previously-abducted girlfriend, and the killer rolls merrily along.
In the movie Titanic,
of course we expect all along that Jack and Rose will avert the collision with the iceberg, but… they don’t!
Just watched The Brothers Bloom and was sort of surprised that Penelope didn’t turn out to be running a massive con on Bloom and Stephen all along.
Fuuucckkkk! I never actually know what’s going on in a movie. No matter how hard I focus, or try to use my critical eye, looking for symbolism, or whatever. I never have a clue.
There’s just no way that this is in line with the way anyone currently uses the term. It can equally be applied to any standard murder mystery: “I was SURE that Lamie was the murderer. When it turned out that Roadfood was the real killer, that was SO unexpected! I NEVER saw that coming! What a twist!” If twist equals unexpected, then twist really has no meaning of its own.
Again, that the Army of the Twelve Monkeys had nothing to do with the virus just isn’t a twist. Unexpected, surprising (at least, apparently, to some), but “twist” only if twist is the same as unexpected. Same argument for the dream.
I still strongly stick by what I said at first, Twelve Monkeys just didn’t have any twists, no matter how unexpected any of the reveals might have been.
Well…part of it might be the delusions of a psychopath, but it’s clear the Bruce Willis does have something special about him. He surived a fucking train wreck, for God’s sake, with not even a single scratch! And the two scenes with him lifting weights. He is lifting several times what he should be able to.
These are both good definitions, thanks. I don’t really disagree with them and, personally, I don’t see either as being particularly far off from what I’ve been saying. Maybe mine has been a bit narrower, but I admit I’ve been grasping at trying to get the right words. But hey, in another recent thread I took exception to someone who maintained that Shutter Island did not really have a twist ending. So there 
And again, I just don’t see anything in Twelve Monkeys that fits either of these definitions. Bruce’s mission was to find out about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. So the reveal that it’s actually just a red herring doesn’t quite fit “a sudden surprising reveal which has not been a mystery that it is the mission of the protagonists”. There was a mystery about the Army from the beginning, so even if the resolution of that mystery was really surprising (to some), it wasn’t a twist.
Same with his childhood memory. The question “what is really happening in that memory, and/or what does it mean?” was there from the beginning. Getting the answers, even when those answers include the amazing (to some) surprise that his adult self is involved, isn’t “A twist in a film [that] changes the context of what has gone before”. We got answers to the questions, but no context change.