I thought they weren’t trying to stop it at all, just get a hold of a sample of the virus before it had mutated, so that they could develop a vaccin and get on with life in their timezone?
A coupe of other really great and surprising moments:
The Odessa File – Jon Voigt confronts Nazi war criminal Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell) in his chateau. Based on a Frederick Forsythe novel, another really great twist you wouldn’t know is that the there really was a Nazi war criminal named Eduard Roschmann, and that his career and crimes as depicted in the book (and the film) are accurate.
A TV show – “Demon with a Glass Hand”, one of Harlan Ellison’s scripts for the original The Outer Limits, has a priceless twist when Trent (Robert Culp) asks the computer (i the form of a glass hand grafted onto his arm) how he can escape the alien Kyben that have him surrounded.
**The Great Waldo Pepper ** in which a rolicking comedy is turned into a truly tragic movie when one of the main characters is killed in an accident two-thirds of the way through the movie. When I saw it, the audience at first thought it was a joke and expected the character to get up and say something funny. When the audience realized that the character was actually dead, the up-to-then almost non-stop laughter stopped suddenly and there was a stunned silence that lasted the rest of the movie.
Hmmn, it might be worth a rewatch… Been a while…
It might well have been me reinterpreting it in a “Terminator/Time” is malleable context, when it was in a “Can’t change time” context, in which case correct.
Terminator … when the ‘destroyed’ Terminator stands up out of the burning wreckage. :eek:
Not a movie, a tv series, but I was shocked, shocked! by the last episode of Life on Mars.
Seeing as how the whole Bruce Willis life turns out to have been a gigantic time loop, it seemed likely to me that changing the past wasn’t going to happen.
Just MO, of course.
-Joe
Just a tip, but steer clear of **Hostel ** too. And Hostel 2. 
Yeah. I haven’t read the book - and the movie was marketed here in the UK as a Narnia-esque fantasy adventure. Took the kids along to see it, and was mightily surprised and disappointed - partly at the fact it wasn’t the kind of movie they sold us, and partly because it just sucks that she dies - just a big, pointless anticlimax - as far as we were all concerned (and indeed the rest of the audience, if their faces weren’t lying).
I was just a kid, but Deathtrap with Christopher Reeves and Michael Caine.
The moment when, after the wife’s murder, Reeves and Caine
kiss passionately and discuss how to handle the police,
the entire audience was dumbstruck. My mom says she even heard a little kid wail, “Not Superman!”
That’s precisely the movie I came in here to name. I thought I’d finally figured out the twist and was feeling smug, but the feeling lasted about 1 minute until the REAL twist came along. Holy. Crap.
Pan’s Labyrinth had me sobbing when I finally put the pieces together towards the end and realised what the first scene meant.
15 Minutes, despite being a pretty craptacular movie in most ways, totally threw me for a loop when you realise that Robert DeNiro’s character is really going to die and won’t be rescued in the nick of time, because one of the unspoken rules of Hollywood is that you don’t pointlessly kill off your leading man before the movie is even halfway through.
The Departed, near the end. You think everything’s been settled, Costigan has caught the rat and is taking him into custody. Then the elevator door opens.
You obviously mean the end of the second series. With it’s two endings I think it is just about the best conclusion to a series of all time.
I liked it for it’s originality, but I was genuinely disturbed at the choice Sam made. Still it is nice to be surprised for a change, instead of being fed some “stock” ending.
I hate horror movies, but considering this is a spoilerish thread, could someone give the one paragraph description of how this twist works? (If that’s possible and not too much trouble. It’s not a big deal.)
Good one. I wouldn’t have thought he would have had the chance to choose his own reality. How did that happen?
Yes. That gave me such a start that I pulled a muscle in my leg.
Would either of you guys be willing to spoil said ending for me? I’ve been thinking about searching out Life on Mars since I’ve heard so many good things about it, but I won’t bother if the end is just going to piss me off. (See: Forever Knight, Newhart, The Dark Tower series, etc.)
The one I wanted to mention wasn’t a twist at the end of the movie, but rather a realy “whoa” moment in the middle of the movie. The movie is Deep Blue Sea, which is actually kind of a crappy movie. It’s biggest star is Sam Jackson, andhe gives a typical Sam Jackson speech, full of emotion and anger, about how they are going to stick together and get through it, when a shark jumps up and eats him…the star of the movie, just like that. Even though it is pretty rdiculous, it still is a “WTF!” moment.
[SPOILER]The main part of the movie takes place in a creepy underground chamber (asylum bathroom?): two men are chained to each part of the room. On the floor is a dead body, aparantly in a pool of its own blood.
The lights periodically go out, and when they come back on, the deranged, sadistic killer has left cryptic clues and mindfuck-devices for them, among them a promise that whichever of them kills the other will be set free.
During the movie, we see shots of the apparant killer going about other buisiness, turning out the lights, making phone calls etc. However, by the end, it turns out that this killer was a patsy: he was a random guy who had been given a slow working poison, and a detailed set of instructions to follow if he wanted to be given an antidote.
After a particularly grisly bit of buisiness involwing the eponymous saw, the dead body suddenly stands up :eek: The killer had been playing dead on the floor all along, no doubt getting off on the ever increasing despair in the room.[/SPOILER]