The other day I watched Alien, and I noticed that there’s a big shift in the middle. You have a movie about an alien encounter, with a crew finding clues and then a medical emergency, commanded by the protagonist, brave captain Tom Skerrit and an antagonist in the form of annoying stick-by-the-rules, square officer nobody likes Sigourney Weaver.
And then Ian Holm’s secret is revealed and the movie becomes a classic monster hunt, with Ripley as the misunderstood kickass hero who had been right all along.
I think I’ve mentioned this on here before, but Devil’s Advocate. The first half is pure John Grisham - young lawyer with beautiful wife gets job with huge fancy law firm, enjoys the new life of luxury, starts to worry that something dodgy is going on behind the scenes… Basically, it’s The Firm. Then all of a sudden
there are succubi all over the place and Al Pacino is the devil and WTF?
I felt the same way about A Brief History of Violence, although the switch there isn’t as blatant. The first half is a tense, creepy, subtle exploration of identity and what defines it. Then all of a sudden someone thinks, ‘You know what? Fuck that deep shit’ and Viggo goes into superhuman mode and kicks ass till the movie ends.
RED (2010) started out as a gritty spy-paranoia thriller with people getting killed all over the place. Then about halfway through it changed into a light-hearted caper movie with only cartoon-type violence.
The first half of the movie is in a sort of pseudo-documentary format, and is quite anthropological and sociological in its coverage of the “prawns” and their captors.
In the second half, the documentary style disappears, and the story itself shifts to a sort of full-on battle-filled sci-fi adventure.
And the funny thing is, you almost don’t notice the transition until after the movie. It’s really well done, and i think the movie is fantastic.
Rat Pfink a Boo Boo is an interesting example, and a terrible movie. The first forty minutes are a completely serious crime drama (and not a good one). Then, suddenly, the lead and a minor character step into a closet and emerge in ridiculous costumes as Rat Pfink and Boo Boo. The rest of the movie is basically a ripoff of the '60s Batman series.
Not a movie, but S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse books start off with a good science-fiction plot, with people struggling to survive in a world that has changed. Then there are a couple of events that look sort of supernatural. Eventually, the King out of prophesy goes on a quest for a magic sword to help him defeat the demon-possessed undead villain and his army.
Not all of the examples there fit this topic (many are films with sequels that have the shift from the first, rather than the shift in the film itself) but some do.
[spoiler]The first five chapters or so make the book seem like it’s going to be an adventure / detective story about a religious cult and a giant squid. A very weird premise to be sure, but still in the land of the plausible.
The impression I had was that if there was anything supernatural that would turn up, it would be one or two elements at most. Kinda like an episode of the X-Files. A “Was that really a ghost or was it a hallucination?” kinda situation.
About six chapters in, out of the blue spells start flying, there’s witchery all over the place, and the reader suddenly finds himself transported to a hidden, magical, London. Very similar to the Harry Potter series, but much darker.[/spoiler]
The shift was quite abrupt. I had to reread the part where it first happened to make sure I was understanding the story properly.
Title: - Hollow Point
Artist: Chris Wood
There is a link to the song (with lyrics) on YouTube in the word ‘this’. It’s best listened to: A long description would only spoil it.
I just saw a movie called Forgetting the Girl that does a sort of switch, though it’s hard to call it that because it never fully establishes one way or the other. The initial ‘genre’ might be “romantic comedy with awkward guy trying to meet a girl”, but from the start here are darker and more dramatic elements to it. Even the ‘switch’, which is more of a turn, that it does make might not be what the audience is expecting.
I knew he wrote in the “weird fiction” genre, so I was definitely expecting weirdness. But because the first five chapters seemed to be set in our modern world, I wasn’t expecting the absolute zaniness that followed.
Then put it on spoiler tags. I don’t know about how others feel, but I consider it kind of rude to force people to watch a video or listen to something in order to understand what you’re talking about.
So you saw a movie that didn’t really have a switch, but if it did have a switch, you couldn’t call it a switch because it’s really more of a “turn” that the audience might or might not have expected in a movie that might or might not have been a romantic comedy. That’s fascinating!
An example of IMHO a very bad genre shift is the first book in Carrie Bebris’s Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mystery series, Pride and Prescience. This series is basically Jane Austen fanfiction, it has the hero and heroine of Pride and Prejudice encounter and solve various mysteries. It’s a pretty fun series if, like me, you like both Jane Austen and mysteries, but the first book has a twist that is basically “a wizard did it”. The villain has been using magic all along. :smack:
Until this point, the book has a realistic-seeming period setting and nearly all the characters are from Pride and Prejudice, a novel that as written by Jane Austen has no supernatural elements at all. (The zombies were added much later.) Then all of a sudden it turns out that the story is set in a world where magic is real and that all of the mysterious crimes committed during the story happened because the villain was using magic.
I saw a movie called Kill List tonight. I went in not knowing a thing. I hadn’t watched a trailer, I hadn’t even read a synopsis. I had just heard vague “go see it” posts on Twitter, so I went to see it. Holy mother of god! It’s like 3 movies in one.
I’m not going to spoil particulars, I’m just going to list the 3 different types, but since I went in without knowing anything, others might want to do that too, so I’m putting this in spoiler tags.
It starts out a mild domestic family drama, then turns into a horrifically violent and bloody crime drama, then turns into a shocking Wicker Man-ish type movie. It’s very very bizarre. It defines “WTF??” Needless to say, I loved it!
It’s hard to say what the overall genre will be while the series is still in progress. Stirling has hinted that the whole thing may be “technology so advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic”. The characters in the early books grew up in a technological society so they saw the mystery in technological terms, even if they didn’t know what the technology was. The current characters are a generation younger and have no personal experience with technology. So their default explanation for something they don’t understand is magic.