I’ve enjoyed most of these “scenes where…” threads, so here’s a new one.
Now for my example, I’m going to describe a scene from the Buffy episode “Graduation Day, Part 2.” It’s probably my favorite moment of the entire series, and it’s meant to be a surprise, so I’m putting it in spoiler space and I advise you to not read it if you haven’t seen the episode yet and plan to.
[spoiler]The Mayor is going to Ascend into demon form when he finishes his speech at the Sunnydale High graduation ceremony. The good guys have known for a while that it’s coming, and we know that they’ve been preparing some sort of plan, but we don’t know what the plan is and we have no reason to expect anything particularly out of the ordinary (well, y’know, ordinary by Buffy standards).
So the Mayor winds up his speech and transforms into a giant snake-demon. Panic ensues in the crowd…
…and Buffy shouts “Now!” and the entire graduating class tears off their graduation robes to reveal weapons underneath, ready to fight.[/spoiler]
So I know there are more scenes like this that I can’t think of: scenes from books, movies or tv shows where, at the climactic confrontation with evil, the good guys suddenly reveal some secret plan or ace-in-the-hole that neither the bad guys nor the audience knew about, and precede to kick ass.
I hate scenes like that. Too deus ex machina. I think the scene at end of Independence Day where Goldblum and Smith are in the alien ship is like that, since they look like they’re screwed, but then it turns out they were just baiting the trap.
No, no - they were screwed, and they knew they were screwed. They were there to launch that nuke, but they were hoping to be on their way out before they did it.
This one comes to mind just cos’ I saw it on HBO15 (or whatever) a few nights ago.
In Snatch when the gypsies are waiting for Brick top outside the fight and lying in ambush of the shooters at their camp. My only complaint is that Brick top was killed quickly. What a vile piece of trash he was, eh?
Galaxy Quest, at the end, when Tim Allen faces off against the alien commander.
Robocop, where Dick Jones is convinced that he’s protected by Rule #3 (itself a “hidden weapon”, revealed halfway through the film), but there’s a clever way to defeat it.
What I like about the above examples is that they don’t come out of thin air, but are predictable from what precedes its revelation.
In the Richard Bachman/Stephen King novel, Rage, the narrator and main character nonchalantly drops a padlock (Titus, the helpful padlock) from his locker into his shirt pocket early in the book. Shortly thereafter he commandeers a classroom by shooting the teacher and locking the door. The police are called and surround the school, and eventually a sharpshooter gets a clean shot at the narrator. He fires …
and the bullet hits the steel of Titus, the helpful padlock, thus saving the character.
My jaw dropped when I read that, and I immediately went back and re-read the part where the character put the lock in his shirt pocket in the first place. I loved that.
Not exactly a secret weapon, though, huh?
Probably one of the classic scenes of this type would be Indiana Jones shooting the scimitar-wielding bad guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. A great follow-up to that scene was in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, when he reached for his gun to shoot the bad guy and it wasn’t there.
“Directive 4,” IIRC. I was an extra in that movie back in college - filmed on the futuristic streets of…Dallas!! Be sure and watch for the Hyatt Testicle (Reunion Tower) in the background of several shots…
Also, along the lines of not coming out of thin air, Aliens - I had forgotten all about that human crane loader thingy by the time Ripley used it at the end. “Let go of her you BITCH!!!”
Since Sauron mentioned a book, I’ll do the same with a scene I just read last night that was a pleasant surprise.
In Dan Simmons’ Hardcase, Joe Kurtz (the main character) is talking about Beretta handguns with a hit man, and he mentions that he once, twelve years before, did the stupidest, most sentimental thing he had ever done with his Beretta. But he doesn’t say what that was.
About five pages from the end of the book, we find out, as Kurtz is trapped, naked and helpless, by a man with a twelve-year-old vendetta against him. The man makes Kurtz dig up the corpse of his brother, buried long ago deep in a forest. Kurtz does it, and finds the hardsided suitcase he left there when he buried him. “What’s in there?” the man holding Kurtz asks? “Money,” is the response, and Kurtz opens the case, pulls out the Beretta he stashed in there, and shoots the guy five times.
How about the movie The Score. He comes up with a brilliant idea to get into the safe, even though it is believed to be break-in proof. Then when he does the job, he cuts a tiny hole in the safe, fills it with water, and blows the safe door open from the inside. I thought that was cool.
Well, I thought about nitpicking the “directive 3” mistake, but instead I’ll just nitpick your misquote.
Ripley’s line is “Get away from here, you bitch!”
There was an interesting movie a few years back called *Fresh* in which the 12 year-old protagonist sets up an elaborate revenge scheme that hinges on another character unthinkingly putting a handgun in exactly the right place at the right time; i.e. there is one major contrivance in an otherwise cool film.
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (fifth in the series): The evil humans from the bombed-out city have shelled the ape village, and moved in to find bodies littering the ground. As their leader is about to kill Caesar, Caesar shouts “Now! Fight like apes!” and we find out the “dead” apes were just faking.
