I figured that Dumbledore wasn’t actually dead.
I was expecting Revenge of the Sith to reveal that Palpatine was Anakin’s father and that he had been responsible for his being virginally conceived by the Force. They even seemed to be hinting at that in the first act of the movie where Palpatine tells the story of Darth Plagueis, but then it never got brought up again.
After Empire, I had expected that Darth Vader would turn out to be a clone of Luke’s father who had in fact murdered the original. Would have made a much better story, if you ask me.
I figured Walt Jr. was going to end up being the one to kill Walt.
The puppets in Team America: World Police had a fairly clear design difference between female and male. Spottswood’s driver Baxter, though, was presented as male but was physically similar to the female characters. For some reason Baxter disappeared midway through the movie and this was never explored.
I thought the same thing.
It has been years since I watched the sequels but doesn’t the Architect say exactly this? Zion is a safety valve to let the real Matrix continue to work.
The Matrix: I was sure that the twist was going to be that the Matrix had been built by benevolent robots basically following the 3 laws of robotics and trying to serve people by giving them a happy world, but there was some dispute between the AIs as to whether they were really doing the right thing. When Agent Smith and the other two agents had captured Morpheus, and he told them to leave the room so he could talk to Morpheus, I was certain that we were about to learn something awesome of that sort… and then it turned out the battery crap WAS supposed to be the truth.
Harry Potter: I was sure that the meeting between the muggle prime minister and the minister of magic was going to pay off somehow. In particular, I envisioned a final showdown between Harry and Voldemort in which the Horcruxes had been destroyed, so Voldemort was mortal, but he was still obviously a much more powerful wizard than Harry or anyone else. So he stops to monologue… and then blam, he’s shot through the head by an SAS sniper from 1000 yards away. Which would have paid off that earlier scene, and also revealed that he ended up punished by his own arrogance and scorn for muggles, his assumption that nothing muggle was ever worth even thinking about.
I thought for sure the BSG reboot would reveal that Starbuck’s father was the mysterious missing boxed Cylon, and that would explain why she was little miss special. Nope. The explanation was… uh angels or something? HEY LOOK OVER THERE, CAVEMEN!
In the original Ransom! (1956-- not the Mel Gibson movie; this one has Glenn Ford as the father) I was sure the uncle would turn out to be the kidnapper and, in fact, this is apparently so common a misbelief, I decided I’d better spoiler it.
A persistent rumor is that this was the original intended ending. But when a lot of people guessed this ending, the Wachowskis decided to rewrite their script in order to have a new unexpected ending for the series.
In Apollo 13, I was sure the spacecraft was going to crash and we’d be treated to a full ‘Heroes. We Will Go On’ inspirational speech.
But it’s history. (What hath Quentin Tarantino wrought?)
I think (hope) you’ve been whooshed.
I was certain that the Midichlorians would have some kind of significant role to play in the plot of the subsequent prequels, justifying their inclusion. And I still think that was originally the intention, but George Lucas ran away from mentioning them again after the backlash.
Same here. Once they enunciate the rule that The Terminator Could Duplicate Anything It Touched, this seemed to be a given. Apparently the scene having John Connor throw the piece of Terminator away was prompted by Cameron’s desire to have Connor interact with his adversary directly, at least once.
grude writes:
It was hard not to think this, especially since, otherwise, that scene is totally unexplained. I’m glad they didn’t go down that route, actually, because otherwise you end up wallowing in endless layers of “is this reality, or isn’t is?”, and that tends to become the whole story. Look at Inception, or eXistenZ, or The 13th Floor (which I thought did a good job with it). I’m glad that the Matrix films never got stuck in that “Is it Live…or is it Memorex” loop, and explored other implications of its VR universe. But I’d rather that scene didn’t exist to muck things up.
I was positive the ending was meant to be a spin on the play Huis Clos, where Hell is revealed to be a room where you’re stuck with three other people, and you make each other miserable for eternity. Both the final shot and Newman’s speel seemed like a reference to that.
But I’ve never seen anyone else mention this is the case, so I guess its all in my head.
Not a movie, but it’s similar, and I’ve mentioned it on this Board often enough.
In the Robert Heinlein juvenile novel Tunnel in the Sky, the survival course instructor tells the students to watch out for stobor. I missed it on my first reading (it was one of the first SF books I read), but on later readings it struck me that stobor is “robots” spelled backwards. If I hadn’t read the book before (and knew what “stobor” turned out to be), I’d have “figured out” that the Evil Things were “really” robots put there to test the kids. But they weren’t – Heinlein was laying a trap for the clever folks reading his book, who would make the wrong assumption from that clue.
Actually, I’ve always kind of thought that…
In the 1994 movie The Scout there’s a scene where the troubled ball player played by Brendan Fraser is watching *King Kong * on television. Near the end of the movie Brendan Fraser’s character undergoes some sort of a breakdown and climbs up on the roof of Yankee Stadium and the scout who recruited him (played by Albert Brooks) climbs up after him.
I totally expected him to come off the roof the same way King Kong did. What was the point of that foreshadowing?