I, like almost everyone else in this thread, came to mention this. I had the basics down within 10 minutes, and spent the rest of the movie trying to pin down the details. Well, that, and to come up with an argument that this movie explains what really happened to Dom in Inception
As a kid, I was impressed with my dad’s prediction after we saw the Empire Strikes Back during its original run, when he informed me that Luke and Leia were siblings. Forward three years to find that his prediction was correct (and that he had forgotten it).
I tend to see films fairly late, so I knew the twists for the Usual Suspects and the Sixth Sense before seeing them. In the former, I enjoyed looking for hints about the twist. In the latter, I just ended up really disliking the film.
Although not an example of a successful guess, I remember seeing Dead Again with about a half-dozen friends while in college. We spent the film throwing theory after theory as to what would happen. There were probably over two dozen guesses and not one of them got a single major plot point correct.
I catch a lot of them. Like madmonk28 I usually figure it’s the Agatha Christie model, the least likely suspect did it. Sixth Sense caught me off guard. I knew something was up with the red stuff, but I had no idea what. With The Usual Suspects the key wasn’t the twist as much as revealing that the character was making up the names from the things he saw around him while he talked to the detective.
ETA: I see **Freudian Slit **mentions the Christie model also.
The “least likely suspect” is not always true. There is another Christie book where you could have guessed the narrator did it for the same reason, but it turns out to be a more likely suspect.
I’ve guessed the culprit in more than half the Agatha Christie novels I’ve read, but it doesn’t usually ruin the book and I don’t think I would count it for this thread.
The exception is Peril at End House, the worst mystery I have ever read.
Not only was the criminal completely transparent from the beginning, even the secrets of the side characters were obvious. I could have written the dénouement myself near the beginning of the (painfully long) book. “This character will be set up to look guilty, but will actually have done this, followed by this character doing this, and finally the culprit revealed with this motive.”
My first Christie was Curtain, where Poirot asks Hastings early on to deduce the killer’s identity; Hastings promptly explains that he has no other reason to suspect the guy and so picks the soft-spoken bird-watcher with no apparent motive solely because he’s the least likely suspect.
He’s right, but he’s wrong; it turns out to be someone even less likely…
I don’t have enough medical training to have much chance of figuring out ahead of time what the final diagnosis is going to be while watching House. But in the middle of watching the episode “Cane and Able,” it occurred to me that it might be chimerism. I remembered an episode of CSI where chimerism was the reason that they had so much difficulty pinning down the bad guy, and it seemed like it fit the House case as well.
I figured out the twist in Shutter Island while they were in the abandoned building. It didn’t ruin the rest of the movie for me though. Most of the time when i guess the ending it does wreck it for me, but I didn’t guess enough of the details in this one.
Julianne Moore was in a film several years ago called The Forgotten. I’d happened to see or hear a review of it which went along the lines of “Have you ever gotten a sinking feeling in your stomach that you knew what the twist in the movie’s plot was going to be and dismissed it thinking, nah, there’s no way they’d sink that low? This movie did.”
Well, a lot of twists are realy pretty obvious, I think, to an intelligent and experienced reader, and are perhaps intended to be so, but I was rather proud of myself for realizing early on in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (book) that
Sirius Black was going to turn out to be a good guy.
I mention this mainly because I was totally blindsided by the twists in the two earlier Potter books, and some of those in the later ones. Rowling does know how to do twists. All the same, I was pretty convinced before reading Deathly Hallows that
Snape was going to turn out to be a good guy too. I can’t, however, say I anticipated that Fred, of all people, would be the one to be killed; or all the stuff about who was the master of the elder wand, but than, I still don’t really understand that.
I’m terrible at calling twists much in advance, mainly because I don’t even think to try. I tend to just let myself get carried along by the plot, and only late in the movie (or TV show, or book) do I catch myself thinking “How are they being tricky here?” I guess the advantage is that my reactions can be more akin to genuine surprise, instead of clever smugness. I love being smug, but movies tend to bring out the innocent in me.
I do, however, consistently try to play the guessing game with episodes in the Law & Order franchise. I do pretty well then.
Yeah–I was hoping for some sort of double-twist. Sure enough, it turned out that the village was founded by a group of what I’d call total retards if I weren’t trying to avoid offending families of the developmentally delayed, but instead I’ll call inbred idiots. I wasn’t expecting that!
Example: got some scary rubber monsters costumes you use to keep the kids in line? Got a developmentally delayed guy who’s really strong and sometimes has psychotic episodes? Got a house? Why not lock up the psycho in the house with a spare rubber monster costume and see what happens? Then when people see a rubber monster killing dogs and such, you can be totally confused about why that’s happening.
Seriously, that part took me by complete surprise.
I’m not great at guessing what’s going to happen, but I enjoy shotgun-guessing anyway: when I’m wrong, I get to feel good about how the writer outwitted me, and when I’m right, I get to feel smug about how smart I am. It’s win-win.
I never guess these things before they happen for some reason.
My wife guesses them before she’s even seen the movie.
She saw a trailer for The Others several years ago, and matter-of-factly declared “The ghosts are actually real people, and the protagonists are the ghosts.” She wasn’t suggesting this, or revealing an epiphany. She was simply relaying a fact that lay bare to her from a cursory examination of the ad.
I guessed that one in the first few minutes when I saw the date on the tombstone. The camera just seemed to linger on it or focus on it more than needed.
I also figured out who Keyser Söze was about 2/3 of the way through The Usual Suspects.
I called The Others about 2/3 of the way through, too.
I worked with some sleazy people (both men and women) who used business trips as an excuse to fool around. In “Up in the Air” when George Clooney met the girl I noticed immediately he never asked her directly if she was single - and knew that would be an issue at some point.
I had no idea Sixth Sense had a twist when I first saw it but when Bruce Willis’ character was shot in the gut and the screen went black I instantly thought, the guy just died - it’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. It didn’t quite work out like the Bierce story but from that moment on I guessed Willis was dead and once the thought was there it became patently obvious that his character wasn’t having any interaction at all with the living other than the kid who sees dead people.
I only correctly half-guessed the twist for The Others. When I read a plot description that mentioned all the window blinds had to be kept closed because the children had a disease that rendered them sensitive to sunlight, I knew the kids were really ghosts. I didn’t expect Nicole Kidman’s character to have been dead all along as well.
[QUOTE=Mahaloth]
To be fair, I dismissed the twist in this one [Shutter Island] as too obvious as well. I was disappointed when it turned out to be the case.
[/QUOTE]
That’s what I felt about the movie. I was hoping that if they had to go with the obvious twist they should’ve had a second one (e.g., DiCaprio’s character turns out to be right about the CIA-sponsored brainwashing experiments going on at the hospital).
