I don’t mean movies where the plot is foreshadowed or predictable or by the numbers. I mean one where the characters literally tell you, in dialog, what’s going to happen in the rest of the movie.
I was watching Moulin Rouge the other evening, and I was delighted at The Pitch song, where they sing a song explaining exactly what’s going to happen in the movie. Another movie that did this recently (not in musical form) was The Interview.
What are others? Please, no plot spoilers (presumably, by the time you get to the appropriate scene in the movie, it’s going to spoil itself for you).
I suppose you could say that the original The Producers lays out the entire film within the first few minutes when Wilder’s Leo Blum tells Mostel’s Max Bialystock the whole premise. Not sure if they did this in the stage play or the film version of the play, I haven’t seen either.
The Grandson: Has it got any sports in it?
Grandpa: Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…
Sunset Blvd. begins with the narrator face down and fully dressed and dead in a swimming pool. (Not a spoiler because it is literally the first scene in the movie.)
American Beauty begins with a main character telling you he is going to be dead soon.
A novel but I’ll mention it anyway: in Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut told you but he explicitly what’s going to happen several times. (There is a movie version as well, but it is unwatchable. )
I haven’t seen it, but a complaint I’ve read about A Few Good Men is that Cruise’s character lays out a strategy for the final scene, which then plays out exactly as he describes.
“Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.”
The book John Dies In The End tells you. When I read the thread title, I thought of True Lies when Arnold’s character is given truth serum and tells them exactly what he’s going to do. But that was just one scene, not the whole movie.
Cutter: Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”."
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That’s a movie told in flashback, as was Citizen Kane. I don’t think they’re telling you what’s going to happen, just where the story ends up. You watch the movie to see how you get there.
It’s a really clever meta-narrative. The narrative is set up to mimic the structure of the illusions they’re performing, after a fashion. It’s pretty clever. I strongly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it.
The prophecy in the first Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movie. It wasn’t even a cryptic prophecy, it pretty much told the audience how the movie would end.
At the beginning of Machete Kills, there’s a trailer for the movie Machete Kills, that’s just so over the top and silly that you’re like, “Yeah right.”
Not a film, but in Game of Thrones, Bronn basically lays out how the battle between The Mountain and Prince Obberon is going to play out:
"I’d be a bloody fool if he didn’t frighten me. He’s freakish big and freakish strong. And quicker than you’d expect for a man of that size. Maybe I could take him, dance around until he’s so tired of hacking at me, he dropped his sword, get him off his feet somehow. But one misstep…[snaps fingers] and I’m dead."
