I cheered out loud at the Endgame reveal with Cap. I saw the movie on opening night and didn’t see it coming, but it made me stupidly happy (and I realized I should have seen it coming).
One that made me jump was in Jurassic Park, where Dr. Sattler is so happy to have found Samuel L. Jackson, only to have his severed arm come falling out and land on her.
Brad Pitt discovered while hiding in the closet in Burn after Reading
The first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Just sat there in utter horror. First movie that really showed the horrors of war. At the end of the movie everyone just sat there in silence not knowing what to do. Then people slowly started to leave the theater again in complete silence except for the occasional sniff.
x 2006 years= quadrillions of miles from home. Like I said they’re far away.
I’m guessing humans blew up civilization with nukes. Radiation, lots of it from a war or higher intensity radiation from new and improved weapons, leading to lots of mutations…evolution. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider.
These astronauts were in some kind of suspended animation for 2006 years. Their muscles weren’t atrophied. How they were nourished, excreted, etc. I don’t know. They arrived in a vehicle capable of traveling at the speed of light. And met apes speaking English.
Sped up evolution? Sure, why not?
In the novel, Ulysse (renamed Taylor in the film) learns the apes’ language from Cornelius and Zira. Sure, that could have been done in the film—but it would have involved additional scenes, creating a fake language, etc., and likely would have been tedious for the audience. The filmmakers understood that most people wouldn’t notice or care if they simply ignored the whole issue.
“Aliens speaking English” is such a commonplace storytelling convention that audiences in 1968 wouldn’t have considered it a clue to anything, if they noticed it at all. The same thing happened almost every week on Star Trek.
Yeah and they so made it look like a Seagal flick in the trailers, certainly on purpose. Well played, Warner Bros.
I’d heard there was a big surprise in The Crying Game, but mistook an earlier surprise for the big one. So I was totally relaxed and unsuspecting when the real surprise happened.
I’d read the book, so that hand popping out in Carrie was a REAL shock. (that scene is not in the book)
JUSTICE LEAGUE: Superman, recently revived but still not in his right mind, is dazedly lashing out at people who of course don’t seem able to match his strength, and the whole thing is on the brink of getting pretty ugly. And so the Flash, perceiving the world in slooow motion, starts rushing over to lend a hand: so damn fast that everyone else there, including Superman, may as well be motionless statues.
Wait, did I say “including Superman” just then? Strike that part.
This is an obscure example, but it’s one of the rare times I was shocked by a movie: the 1975 British thriller Deadly Strangers.
The plot: Hayley Mills misses her train, and hitches a ride with a weird, twitchy guy who has mood swings and is evasive about his past. Throughout the film, we get glimpses of newspapers and hear snatches of radio broadcasts reporting that a homicidal maniac has escaped from a mental hospital. Hayley doesn’t notice any of that, and besides, she’s spunky and independent and isn’t scared of the guy.
The shock comes in the final minutes of the film, when we learn that HAYLEY MILLS IS THE ESCAPED MANIAC, and she murders the twitchy guy who gave her the ride. I did not see that coming.
That was some GREAT acting by Charles Hallahan.
The Phantom of the Opera (1925) – The Phantom’s face reveal, still shocking for the grotesque spectacle of a truly inhuman visage.
The Man Who Laughs (1927) – Another grotesque make-up job.
Outcast (1937) – After an emergency tracheotomy saving her son’s life, the dumb-as-nails mother ignorantly pulls out the breathing tube.
Went the Day Well? (1943) – A nice old woman invites a German soldier for sausage so she can throw salt in his face and axe him to death.
A Christmas Carol (1951) – The reveal on The Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come has long haunted me.
The Naked Kiss (1964) – Opening credits have a shocking reveal.
The Sword of Doom (1966) – Originally planned as a trilogy, only the first film was ever made, ending with maximum abruptness while a crazed Tatsuya Nakadai is in the midst of slicing-and-dicing his own allies.
Dead or Alive (1999) – The most incredible, unbelievable shocking ending in all cinema.
Welcome to the community, gmoney1!
Oh, I’d add the original Oldboy to this list. The ending is one of the biggest shocks I’ve ever had watching a film.
According to the book The Making of Star Trek, they deliberately made the decision that aliens speak English exactly because there was really no other practical way to deal with the issue. I think it was mentioned that this was already an established convention in stories with aliens.
They did come up with a “Universal Translator”, which was even less plausible than aliens speaking English everywhere. I only recall one episode (in TOS) that used it. It was so implausible, it even assigned a female personality to the alien (an incorporeal energy being) and gave it a female voice. (There was a different translator shown in “Arena”, the episode with the Gorn, that was provided by the Metrons.)
ETA: And there was another episode (maybe two) where the alien projected speech thoughts into the minds of the crew, where each crew member heard the speech thoughts in their own native language. Chekov heard it in Russian, Uhura heard it in Swahili.
The episode with the projected thoughts was “Spectre of the Gun,” which IIRC was the first one aired in the third season. In “Bread and Circuses,” it was explained that everyone spoke English because of “parallel planet development.”
In Enterprise (thirty-odd years later) it was heavily implied the “Universal Translator” worked by transmitting brain waves directly into one’s head, rather than through vocalization.
The episode with projected thoughts that I was thinking of was “Return to Tomorrow” in which Sargon telepathically sends “Greetings and Felicitations” (or some such message) which the crew each hear in their own native language.
The Salt Monster also manipulated the minds of the crew. Uhura sees the monster as a Black crew member that she doesn’t recognize, but he speaks to her in Swahili. Kirk, McCoy, and a Red Shirt all see the monster as different women, even simultaneously.
Did they also explain why the mouth movements matched the words that were translated?
24th century cinematic dubbing technology.