Meaning, movies that you kept waiting for the penny to drop…but pretty much either the title said it all or they played it straight and it’s your own skepticism that kept you from believing.
SPOILERS for movies with odd endings or sad ones I suppose
The Rapture
Miracle Mile
On the Beach (To the kid I was)
Does it work the other way? Where you are sure they’re making a better movie than the lazy ripoff it is looking like they are?
Like, Jacobs Ladder. I watch half the movie and keep asking myself, hey, they’re not really just doing a straight up version of Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, are they? Yes, yes they are.
Or Arlington Road, where it started out potentially good, but became a cheap knockoff of The Parallax View, except one that was completely ludicrous. What a waste of potential.
Owns the genre.
Wolf. Oh, c’mon, they were off to such a good start, they aren’t seriously going to turn this into another one of those stupid Superhero vs Evil Enemy With Similar But Better Powers, are they??
I’ve not seen any of the three movies you mention so can you elaborate on what you mean?
Winner, right here.
Shyamalan’s The Village also counted, for me. Not even a minute into it, and I leaned over to my wife and said, “I bet they’re in the present day.”
She’s never forgiven me for that.
Since people are posting the opposite, I called The Game pretty much completely as I was putting the disk into the DVD player.
I’ll take this.
The Rapture
It involves a possibly delusional woman who decides that the rapture is coming. Is she crazy? At the end of the movie - surprise! It did! Honestly, I did NOT see that coming. I never thought they’d go there. And as it turns out, she didn’t even get to go! She’s in hell, now.
Miracle Mile
A person intercepts a phone call that says the nukes are on the way and we all have 30 minutes to live. Then the call is cut off. Was that real? A hoax? What? Turns out it was true. The final shots are of the missiles arriving.
On The Beach
The film takes place after WWIII. Nukes have been dropped. Billions dead all over the world. The only place still habitable is southern Australia. Is this the end of humanity? Or can some survive? Is there hope? The answer is sadly, no. Not only does everyone die, Gregory Peck didn’t even spend his last days with Ava Gardner. Aye, that’s the real tragedy. There is still time!
For me, On the Beach is the most depressing of the three. I love it, but I can’t bear to watch it sometimes.
I am not sure if this is exactly what you are referring to, but I kept waiting for the twist or reveal in the Sam Rockwell film, Moon, but it never happened. It provided details slowly, but it was always WYSIWYG.
Knight And Day-
I was convinced there was going to be a twist or reveal, the events are a fantasy right? Come on this is too outlandish, there is a island shaped like a smiley face!
Nope no twist, the movie does not play up any ambiguity but I thought it would happen.
well, after it had been going long enough that I had an idea of what was going on, the Cabin in the Woods.
I felt sure there was going to be some unseen twist, or some way of avoiding The Inevitable besides the obvious downer ending. They DID surprise me, though, in going for an even Downer ending.
I remember seeing the trailer and telling my friends, “Well, they are obviously not in the present. There is no way the twist could be that obvious. It sounds like a Twilight Zone episode.”
I was stunned that the painfully obvious twist was the twist. Even when the twist occured, I half-expected it to be a hallucination or something. I still can’t believe it.
This unfortunately became the norm for Shyamalan movies. I guessed the twist at the very beginning of The Happening and said: “No, he’s not going to do THAT, is her?”
He did.
Seeking a Friend For the End of the World…
I was convinced that the titular “end of the world” would be averted, somehow. I was pleasantly surprised to see the world actually end.
Take Shelter
Guy has visions of impending doom. As his mother was nuts, he things he may be too. Starts building shelter for his family. In the end there is no disaster where he lives. (Movie is interesting character study on the nature of sanity). Goes on holidays with family to beach - Bam! apocalyptic super-storm on the horizon. Movie ends
Does Cool World count? It was an okay movie, right up to the end, then it fell flat on its face.
I refuse to see that again, as the ending was so bad. I remember being disappointed by that movie, and it’s about 18 years ago. I think it got made on the basis of getting movie stars to agree to it, not the script.
Well, this is about a song, but I think it’s on point.
Frank Turner is a singer/songwriter from England and a lot of his songs are informed by living on the cold, wet island that is Great Britain. And he’s just released a song called “The Next Storm” which ostensibly is about a string of really bad weather and how he doesn’t want to “Spend the rest of his life indoors, Waiting for the next storm.”
Now normally when you get a song like this, you get a clever last lyric where you realize that the singer isn’t just singing about the weather; he’s singing about the human condition or the state of his love life. In other words, the “next storm” is a metaphor. But no, in the case of this song, he’s singing about exactly what’s in the tin: how crappy the weather is in England.
Note: it’s not a bad song – I was just expecting something more meaty. Or metaphorier. Or meataphory.
“Dead End” https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CEEQtwIwA2oVChMIstDAzeX4xwIVBgmSCh1sTgo0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWOKRauvfkUU&usg=AFQjCNGUwcpCtGl0g6MqV7NgPpwnKcrDTw&sig2=MglY50oQ4OVS5JbfeFLUQA&bvm=bv.102537793,d.aWw one of the eeriest, coolest strangest movies I’ve seen in a long time. Last few minutes sucked dogs. Actually, the twist may have been better, but, the characters in the last few looked like such dork/dorkesses, and the script and their delivery was so lame, that they took it down about 11 notches.
Donnie Darko. I kept watching and thinking “Man, this is really complex. The reveal that explains it all is going to be awesome…okay, getting more weird…this is going to be a helluva twist…okay, we’re running out of movie here…okay, what the hell? They didn’t explain anything!”
What worse is that on the DVD there is an actual explanation of the whole weird timeloop thing and it’s basically a stupid idea badly explained. Movie fail.