No, I mean Agatha Christie. Her story told the tale of a man who looks into a mirror and sees a vision of someone in the future committing murder. Over many years he tries to stop the vision from coming true, before discovering that in fact HE is the murderer.
Der Trihs writes:
> My memory’s very vague, including about the title. But there was a story about
> a government agent hunting down an android in his likeness, that was
> supposed to infiltrate his planet, then detonate a planet cracking bomb by
> speaking certain preprogrammed words. Finally, he corners and shoots the
> android, who lies on the ground, spurting blood, and not oil or sparks. And he
> says, “But if he’s the real one, then I’m” - and the explosion can be seen a
> million miles away.
I’m not sure, but I think that you’re talking about the 2002 film Impostor, which was based on a Philip K. Dick short story.
I remember a very similar story: the protagonist gets arrested as an artificial duplicate of someone and argues his innocence all the way to the moon. Finally exposed to the vacuum, he utters the immortal words above and the explosion is seen all the way from Alpha Centauri.
It’s more like the opposite here. The antagonist, the man with the glasses, turns out to be good in the end.
Sylar is pretty much evil and the main antagonist very early on.
You mean, there’s some way the ending makes sense? I just figured everybody went hysterical there at the end. There’s some interpretation that makes some kind of sense, even in a brain-damaged sort of way? What would it possibly be?
Really? I was completely misled then, by the fact that the movie showed an actual physical bad guy who is driving the truck while the good girl is in the back with the damsel.
That would at least explain the good girl’s curious inability to free the damsel from her bonds.
If I were looking at the story from a French art house perspective, I would say that the bad guy and the good girl were representations of the audience’s attitude toward the damsel: they simultaneously are digging on the damsel’s helplessness and vulnerability (that would be represented by the bad guy) and they want to rescue her at the same time (represented by the good girl). An interesting idea, too bad it was so clumsily executed. I mean … where did that truck come from?
When I chose this movie at Blockbuster, my husband looked at me with that sympathetic cautious look he gives sometimes. I told him, “Don’t worry. I will pay close attention, I will watch it twice, I will comprehend and interpret it all on my own, and I will not ask you a bunch of questions”. And that is just what I did. I thought. Until this thread. Once again I realize I am an idiot who didn’t understand anything.
I’ve seen it several times, and the quoted interpretation never occurred to me. I suspect it is just an interpretation. I see no reason to assume that Leonard is a bad guy. How could he be? He can’t remember what happens from one day to the next.
I’ll watch it again this weekend with an eye toward what **Lemur **said.
The Crossing Guard - A man convicted of killing a little girl in a drunk driving accident is let out of prison after 6 years and is confronted with the father of said girl. The father tells the convict he will kill him in one week in the name of revenge. I remember giving 100% of my sympathy to the father at the beginning of the movie only to be on the convicts side by the end.
Some of my favorite stories have the “bad guy” as the protagonist:
Grendel, by John Gardner: the monster is the narrator and rationalizes his consumption of humans and terrorizing them.
The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis: letters from a senior devil to a junior one, teaching him how to corrupt humans. The Enemy in this novel is God, not Satan.
Gertrude & Claudius, by John Irving, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard, both give the POVs of characters considered villains in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates: protagonist is a Jeffrey Dahmer-esque serial killer who gets away with it.
The Sopranos: Tony Soprano is probably a sociopath, but is definitely not a good guy anywhere but his own mind, possibly not even there. You think he might be destined for redemption, but… nope.
Rubystreak, note that in the books you cite, the protagonist turning out to be the bad guy is not a twist. It’s clear from the beginning that they are bad people.
Oooooh, of course, now I remember it. I thought you meant this.
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
Here’s what I remember:
A certain Lou Cyphre (Robert de Niro with a pointy beard and reeeeeally long fingernails) hires private detective Harry Angel to find disappeared person Johnny Something. During the investigation, people questioned by Harry Angel die right after Harry Angel has interrogated them.
Plot twist:
Lou Cyphre is - guess who? Johnny Something had sold his sold to Satan to achieve success. Then Johnny tried to avoid paying his debt by performing a magic ritual to hide his soul in someone else’s body - Harry Angel’s. Harry Angel is actually Johnny. In flashbacks we see that all the murders were committed by Harry / Johnny. Lou Cyphre knew this all along and the whole “investigation” was Lou’s plan to bring about Harry’s awareness of who Johnny really is.[/QUOTE
Angelheart is a brilliant movie,one of my all time favourites.
But back to the plot.
The Conversation with Gene Hackman.
Its about some bugging experts who become aware of a powerful older businessmans younger wife and one of his employees falling in love.
Hackman throughout the film feels sorry for the doomed lovers,knowing that the husband will have them both killed.
But at the end of the film the lovers brutally murder the husband.
Just watched the new Jet Li film, War, which has a nice, but not entirely unexpected twist at the end. The revenge driven FBI agent who has been obsessively chasing the super assasin to avenge the murder of his former partner (and the partner’s wife and 4 year old daughter), turns out to have been in the pay of the Yakusa boss who ordered the hit on the partner. Plus, the supposed super-assasin turns out to actually be the supposedly dead former partner, who knowing that someone on the inside of the FBI task force must have set him up, manages to kill the assasin (after his wife and daughter have been killed) and takes his place in order to get a chance to kill pretty much everyone else.
Arguably, the Bruce Willis character in What Lies Beneath qualifies.
That would be Harrison Ford.
Bruce Willis?
Is he a bad guy most of the time? No, he’s working with what he’s got, doing the best he can. For the brief moments when he has enough information to evaluate the authentic monstrosity of his situation, what he has done, what he will do again, he destroys the evidence that led to his knowledge.
Plus, in his normal pre-injury life he worked for an insurance company to help deny claims, justified or not. Of course he’s a bad guy!
That’s the part I don’t remember. Him realizing he has done monstrous things and deliberately concealing it.
I guess you’re joking, but if not, there’s no twist there.
Also arguably, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind.
However, it’s not really a “twist” per se.