Works where you guessed the twist/major plot point/whatever before it happened [SPOILERS]

Cafe Society
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Spoilers, obviously. I admit, a LOT of times I take the shotgun approach to guessing twists, and get a lot (and equally as many misses), sometimes I’m joking and get it right, and sometimes I just find it that obvious. I guess this is a bit of a bragging thread (not just for me, for everyone), but what works did you guess the twist before it was revealed? The farther ahead, the better. It doesn’t have to be a “twist” per se in the usual meaning of the term, it can be any little plot point or whatever that the audience isn’t really supposed to know yet. Try to telegraph whatever movie/book/game/web series etc you’re spoiling as a courtesy, but otherwise open spoilers.

I guessed in the movie Avatar that the main blue chick was the chieftain’s daughter. This one was a case of joking, my girlfriend and I were joking about how it was a remake of Pocahontas and when the Na’vi let the girl escort him and allow him to live (I don’t recall the exact circumstances, it was really early on), I said “but I will only allow this because you are the chieftain’s daughter!” Yup, fast forward 5 minutes later…

Speaking of Avatars, in the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender, I pretty much guessed Zuko’s turn to good from like, the first season (hey, I never said they had to be unobvious guesses! Just ones that aren’t outright stated). Likewise, in Power Rangers RPM I guessed pretty much from the first mention of Dylon’s sister that Tanaya 7 fit the bill.

Sixth Sense I guessed the main character was dead about when the man came over to give the kid a house call. My mom was like “but… how did you?” I just said “well… he’s only worn clothes he touched before he got shot, it kind of abruptly cut after he got shot, and nobody ever pays any attention to him directly except the kid.”

The Others is probably my record, it’s a movie I’ve never even seen and I guessed the twist before it even came out by watching the trailer on TV in passing once. I don’t know what exactly it was, but it was patently obvious to me. I mean, I didn’t get the specifics, but the whole “the main family are really the ghosts” thing I guessed. I don’t know how I managed it, it wasn’t the shotgun approach, I only guessed once. Maybe it was the title “The Others” it was just BEGGING for a “WE’RE really the others” twist. It’s a title like “I Am Legend” (the book) or one of those intentionally clever little double entendres our culture loves to play with so much after “To Serve Man.” But something about the framing of the trailer, the title, I don’t know, SOMETHING made me guess the twist before it even came out, just by like, a one minute trailer.

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I called who the murderer was in Presumed Innocent when the coroner said the sperm in the murder victim were dead.
I guessed that Jaye Davidson was a man pretty early in The Crying Game.

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My best effort was watching The Bone Collector. I knew nothing about the movie and during the opening credits worked out how the movie would end and roughly who the bad guy would be. He was instantly obvious when he appeared.

Mind you I didn’t try to work it out - that’s no fun. I love being tricked by a movie.

It is all told in the news clippings. Rhyme is a quadriplegic. He ended the career of some cop by testifying against him. The climax must feature the crippled hero alone at home battling his nemesis. This nemesis must have a way to get to him that doesn’t involve being a cop. Cue the medical technician.

Another good one was All-American Murder, which I have rated as one of the worst movies I have seen on IMDB. My wife and I were watching it on TV and in the middle of it I got up to leave and told her that I now knew how it all worked out. She didn’t believe me, so I wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it up and gave it to her. I was right.

Again, I wasn’t trying to be clever, it just jumped out at me. Two of the main characters are talking while having a snack. He admires her watch and they have a too long conversation about it. Instantly I realised that the watch (with inscription) would be used to identify a body. Presumably an unidentifiable body, probably a horribly burnt body. But it wouldn’t be the body of the watch owner. Therefore…

This one is cheating but movies do come in to it.

A buch of us were sitting around on a break at work, talking about movies. We started to ponder how many movies had actually been made.

I said, “Do you think that number you sometimes see on the credits is the real number of movies made in Hollywood?”

One of the guys said, “Actually I was reading something recently and do you know which…”

And I said, “India.”

Everyone looked at me strangely but he was going to ask the question that I knew he was about to ask.

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With the Prestige, I figured out the film’s two twists well before the end. That Hugh Jackman was duplicating himself was obvious to me as a long-time science fiction fan; the fact that Christian Bale was actually twins became evident after I realized that the director was avoiding close-ups of his “assistant” (plus, the makeup didn’t hide Bale’s distinctive chin). The funny thing is, the fact that I saw the twists coming did nothing to detract from my enjoyment of the movie - it’s currently one of my favorite films of the past decade, and one I can watch again and again.

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The only one I’ve even guessed was **The Sixth Sense **and I made the guess when he was having dinner with his wife in the restaurant. I’m not sure how far through the movie that was.

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All I knew about Shutter Island going in to it was that there was a “big twist at the end”.

I had it picked in the opening few minutes.

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M Night Shyamalan’s The Village.

Never seen the movie, just the trailer. Saw someone talking about the twist (that it’s actually set in the present, and they deliberately act like it’s the past). My reaction was ‘But…it’s in the trailer!’ Which it actually isn’t, but it seemed so bloody obvious to me, I expected it to be revealed in the first few minutes of the film.

A few more, too (occasionally to the point where I’m counting down to the reveal), but that’s the only one I can remember offhand, because…well, guessing it from the trailer and thinking it so obvious that it couldn’t possibly be a twist takes the cake, so it kind of eclipses all the others.

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Not only can I not usually guess the big twist, I can’t think of a movie with a twist where I even knew that it was coming. But then, I try and go into a movie knowing as little about it as I can.

The only exception (off the top of my head) being The Crying Game since I saw it 7 or 8 years ago and gets referenced in pop culture so often.

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Did you ever see the 1992 movie Peter’s Friends? Stephen Fry is this rich guy who invites all his college friends (Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, etc.) to his mansion for the weekend. We’re supposed to learn what all has brought them together and the Big Secret that Peter has to reveal.

He’s gay and has HIV.

When he tells them, I was waiting for the actual secret. Because it was so very obvious from the beginning that the script may as well have been a pop-up book.

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I guessed the end of unbreakable early on.

Also, I’m putting it in here - I have the feeling that there will be sentient lizard/dinosaur people in the TV show Terra Nova… :smiley:

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This is always my point in these kind of threads. Knowing or suspecting that a twist is coming helps predict it. I saw Sixth Sense opening day and no one in the crowd had any idea that there was going to be a twist. This is what prevented the whole crowd from guessing it. It’s hard to believe now, but the movie opened as a generic supernatural thriller; the crowd I saw it with was not guessing…we were enjoying the ride.* And I think when you do not suspect the existence of a twist*, it is much harder to predict.

So the question becomes, what major movie twist did you all predict when you had zero idea any kind of twist was coming?

I can’t think of any major twist I saw coming without knowing a twist was going to be there. I guessed the Village, Shutter Island, Unbreakable, and many other movies, but I was already in “guessing mode” when I saw the movies.

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Oh, and I was the same. I told my wife, “No, it isn’t going to be in the present day. That’s way too lame and obviously what they want us to think.”

:end of movie:

“Are you kidding me?”

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I saw SHUTTER ISLAND’s twist coming, even with no “there’s a big twist coming” semi-spoiler – and I kinda figured most people did.

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Agatha Christie’s the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’d read a few Christie novels and so far I surmised that the best way to predict the ending was to choose the most random, far fetched thing. So I thought it would be really bizarre if it ended up being the narrator…which it did.

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It was, actually. Near the beginning of the film, a bunch of characters (including our main heroes) are gathered around something - maybe it’s a gravesite? Anyway, in the background you can clearly see a metal tower, like a phone tower or electric line tower. Yet all the townspeople are in period dress. When I saw this, I’m all, “Oh, it’s present day but they’re living like it’s the past, hey?”

Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised about the twist.

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And Shutter Island’s “twist” was immediately obvious. But I think people maybe haven’t picked up on the more subtle twist in Shutter Island. Namely, that

Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, while sane and in rational mind (instead of in the inspector delusion), would choose to undergo a lobotomy after realizing the truth about his wife and his life instead of working to regain solid mental health (as I think his doctor, Mark Ruffalo, was hoping). I think that that conscious choice was the twist (and was pretty heartrending), not the “the inspector’s really a patient” main storyline.

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I totally called it in the Usual Suspects. I was watching it on video with my brother and sister, both of whom had seen it in the theater. I said “oh, so the guy talking to the cops is Patrick Swayze, or Kaiser Sose or whatever.” It was the guy you’d least expect, like every other movie like that ever made.

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My wife and I both thought of what would be the “big revelation” to Oldboy very early on - about as early as possible. I still found it a great movie because obviously the characters involved don’t know - well, except for that guy - but it wasn’t the jaw-dropping ending for us as it seems it was for a lot of folks.

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I’m horrible for this and I don’t even try. I like to be hit by the twist. I was totally taken in by The Sixth Sense and The Others, but movies like Shutter Island, The Village, The Bone Collector, Kiss the Girls, The Uninvited…The twists were obvious, sometime in the first couple of minutes. It actually ruins the movie for me to know there’s a twist.

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I very rarely see “twists” endings coming, even when they’re (in retrospect) pretty obvious, and I almost never guess the culprit in a mystery, except when I’m beaten over the head with clues.

My wife, on the other hand, who really doesn’t care much for the mystery genre, ALWAYS figures out the guilty party immediately, and always sees “twists” coming an hour before I do.

It’s her only really annoying trait!