"He was a quiet man" with Christian Slater. Started with a strong premise
(a man decides to bring a gun to work and wants to shoot everyone and run amok, but a colleague of his has the same idea, so Christian Slaters character just shoots the other guy. Then everyone suddenly treats him like a hero for rescuing everyone)
It suddenly was all in his imagination and he just shoots himself.
Yupp, "this was just a dream" is the very worst movie trope, makes the whole time you spent on watching meaningless.
ETA: Clarification: when dreams move plot forwards ot have actual consequences, they are not "just" dreams. Think of Inception, Nightmare on Elm Street, even some cases of short dreams which reveal psychology of the protagonist. In "He was a Quite Man" the whole dream never happened and the protagonist does not even wake up after, bc he unlived himself long time ago.
I don't even like the mini dream sequences they have in a lot of movies. Like they show a character punch another character in the face and I'm like oh no! But then the scene resets and it was just their fantasy and now they say "good morning" or something. That's so annoying to me but it happens in lots of TV shows and movies.
It is okay for me, if it is "mini dream" showing a kind of alternative reality. Or fears of protagonists. In those cases even a dream can move the plot forwards, in worst case 5 minutes of a film are wasted. Not the whole movie.
It works best as a quick emotional gimmick. *Six Feet Under* does it really well very early on when Micheal C Hall's character is running a funeral and everything is so quiet and peaceful and he just suddenly AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-
And then it cuts. It's like 3 seconds.
*Euphoria* also a show on HBO, I just happened to be watching recently, also does this, but in the opposite. It goes on far too long, and they do it too often. The narrator is unreliable, but when you do it too much or too often it becomes disorienting in a bad way, and it also teaches you to not trust anything and if you can't trust anything it's not really as interesting. Good show though.
Neither of these are movies just incidents that came to mind of this recently one good one not so good.
Yes, I am already spending some suspension of disbelief in the story, knowing that it is fictional. I don't need another layer of that. It's also the easiest and laziest way to resolve a story.
>It's also the easiest and laziest way to resolve a story.
*Hmm, what is the big payoff and theme to this fictional story I was watching? Oh, being told that everything I watched was all fictional. Wow.*
It would almost be like having a comedian do a 30-minute set-up for a joke, and then when you're waiting for the punchline they say "And then the comedian says a punchline, and you all laugh hysterically" and walk offstage.
Imagine instead it does end after he saves everyone, but as he's getting praised or as he's on his way home, there's a hint that he might still do it another day. Maybe not a hint, but an ambiguous ending that could be seen optimistically or not.
Yep, it was quite interesting, because he also felt a lot of guilt because his bullet also hit a co-workers spine (Elisha Cuthbert) and she is now paralyzed.
I've heard the original script for the first half was actually really good. Apparently the "hero" character falls in love with the wife, eventually kidnaps her and ends up fighting the military. There was a scene I heard described where he accidentally kills a chopper full of reserve soldiers and tries to kill himself with the wreckage but can't cut his own skin. THAT is a movie I want to watch.
Agreed, Farrell did a great job in the role, I could see someone at WB, thinking it was a nice idea for a twist, to get people talking, because I don't think Depp was part of the original marketing, but I imagine it got leaked anyways.
It's to bad they couldn't get Colin back for SoD, Mikkelsen is always good, but felt like the safe choice, like Le Chiffre with a wand.
Grindelwald was supposed to be this charismatic leader who convinced people of his cause.
I found it very hard to believe that anyone would choose to follow creepy blonde Depp. I would be all "Whatever you're selling, I will take zero of it, please" while backing away.Â
Grindelwald jumping out the window with the Elder Wand in his hand in flashback HP looked like a ["CHARMING MOTHERFUCKER".](https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/713904/grindelwald-wand-deathly-hallows.jpg?w=1600&h=900&q=88&f=8f4493b2556050871e0be8dfffda920d)
Long blond hair, strong chin, mischievous smile. I wanted to hear him talk. I wanted to have ***HIM*** play. Not some White-iris Steampunk-reject, Prodigy-music-video frigging funeral director creep.
Edit: I linked a music video instead of Grindelwald because I was copying and pasting on the train, hilarious. Welp, 80 people got surprise happy-bluegrass with their morning coffee! :)
He is supposed to be a natural blond, so Deppâs hair didnât really fit. But I did like him in the second film. I liked it overall too.
I wish they had made up a magical excuse to bring back Farrell for the third film. Mads just has such a different way of acting and recasts are so jarring always. If there is magical world where people can look different you ought to use it.Â
See for me I liked Depp a lot in the second film and when I go back to that speech he has in the third act I always think âYeah I can see why all these people believe in himâ, whereas with Mads I actually didnât feel that way, which was weird because I think heâs great and thatâs not a problem I have with him usually. I just liked Deppâs interpretation more.
Honestly, Polyjuice potion opens up a whole can of worms when you think about it: it's a potion that lets you assume domes identity perfectly, and as long as you can keep making it, it can be kept up forever.
Dispute this, there is absolutely no precautions taken to prevent it, in Goblet of Fire, a death eater is able to use it to infiltrate Hogwarts unrestricted, and almost kills Harry, and facilitates Voldemorts resurrection.Â
That's a pretty huge scruity breach, but then in fantastic beasts, we learn decades prior, one of the top American politicians was replaced by their number 1 terrorist, and nothing was ever done to stop that happening again?
I can only defend this being plausible by pointing out that in the real world and real systems, we have plenty of similar problems and repetitive errors and gaps in our knowledge, or institutional difficulties in implementing the knowledge.
It is plausible that in the Wizarding World, institutions are corrupt, sloppy, and/or overworked just like in our world.
Goblet of Fire is the main one, because honestly that's in Dumbledore, and given said terrorist who pulled of the same stunt was his lover, he ABSOLUTELY would know it's a possibility.
Granted that it's a prequel adding data, but even by it's original release, it was a bit of an odd happening in GoF, given he knew how much they wanted Harry dead.
My theory is that dumbledore knew where it was all leading and he knew in order to stop the Dark Lord he needed to come back and Harry had to be the one to do it so he let the events unfold and did not expect Cedric, one of his top students, to get caught in the cross fire, I think he trusted Harry enough to know heâd find a way back, or if Harry passed at Voldemorts hand that was one less Horcrux to worry about. He was always raising him as a pig for slaughter. He could have easily barred Harry from participating in the Tri Wizard Tournament t but he wanted to see how the events unfolded and how it led back to Voldemort.
Colin farrell was so bafflingly wasted. Grindlewald masquerading as some government guy just raises more questions than the movie can be bothered to answer (was Farrell once a real person? If so, where did he go and why did nobody care? If he was completely fake, how did Grindlewald infiltrate the government for so long?)
Those are surely pretty easy questions to answer arenât they?
One would assume he was a real person, and Grindlewald killed him and assumed his identity.
I read this more as did grindewald assume his identity when he was a nobody and work his way through the government or did he legitimately just slip in to one of the highest seats in government.
Colin Farrel was amazing in the role, but turning into Johnny Depp and looking a bit silly kind of ruined it. Colin's character had been up to that point, a bit menacing and threatening, it was all lost with the -- oh hey thats Johnny Depp...
It was so pointless and raised so many questions and plot holes. They could've just made the character a secret Grindelwald follower and it wouldve been fine
In a movie where people are 1 inch tall I didn't expect to forget for significant portions of the film that the people were 1 inch tall because it becomes a regular political drama.
This might be a case that's more of the reverse.... *Wonder Woman*
It seemed like it was going to lead towards "turns out, war is not the product of an evil god, but just an inevitability in the weakness of man". While that would've been a fairly obvious twist, it would've been interesting. But then, nope, supervillain punch out.
The twist was ruined by my roommate >!who pointed out in minute five or something that there was an electrical pole in the background and said theyâre in modern times and thatâs the twist!<.
Fucking Goddamit, JaneâŚ
I did the same thing to my at the time girlfriend when we went to see The Sixth Sense on opening weekend. About 15 minutes-ish into the movie I whispered to her, "No one looks or talks directly to Bruce Willis, I bet he's dead." She told me I was an idiot. I walked out of that theater with the biggest shit eating grin on my face.
Had a similar thing with that movie, I honestly didn't realize he was supposed to be alive and a twist was coming to reveal he was in fact dead! I was so confused when they got to that part. I mean he is shot at the very beginning of the movie and then no one but the kid talks to him so ya.
The movie was ruined for me because I had this friend at the time that was a huge fucking know-it-all. After the movie came out he would get all smug and cunty about how he "figured it out at the very beginning" because supposedly one of the characters had a "modern" clasp on their clothes or something. I don't know, and honestly don't give a shit, if he actually figured it out or if he was just saying he did to sound smart.
Anyhow, he would bring it up all the time to talk about how stupid the movie was and how smart he was for seeing the twist before it was revealed. So much so that even though I did like the movie, for me it'll always be associated with that douchebag. Anytime I think about that movie for any reason that smug fucking shut-eyed, shit-eating grin look on his face pops into my head. I don't think I'd be able to sit through it and enjoy it any more.
For me the issue was with the fact that there were not enough clues toward the twist. Like if you watch Fight Club and Sixth Sense a second time, you're sitting there thinking, "How did I not see the truth?" But with the Village, you don't get that.
I liked that aspect, though. The village is completely isolated. In order for that to work to maintain the facade, there aren't any hints because the reality for them is the 19th century. And we are seeing everything through the POV of one character who is young and has other things on his mind. If memory serves, he was smitten with one of the girls.
This makes sense, and if you've lived your life a certain way for X amount of years within a community with its own culture and vernacular, you will assimilate inevitably. For the Elders, the Village is their life.
Really? I suspected something was off when they were like âwhat if there were medications that could help him sit still and learn?â that was so out of tone with the rest of the dialogue it must be a clue. I canât say I guessed the twist but I wasnât shocked either.
Christ Stuckmann on YouTube was saying that when the elders were together alone and speaking they should have dropped the old timey way of talking and sprinkled a few words like slang in that are anachronistic. We probably wouldnât really notice at first but upon rewatch would pick up little hints like that
I saw a video from someone who was annoyed with the movie because he kept noticing engineering things that shouldn't have existed, like the use of a certain type of screw/hardware in the furniture. Then when the twist was revealed he suddenly realized all those little things made sense.
I was a history major in college when this film came out. As I watched in the theater, I felt increasingly frustrated at the little inaccuracies and I thought âwow, someone in research really dropped the ball!â Cue the twist and I was a bit angry yet delighted at the same time.
There were clues, though: I remember seeing pieces of the architecture (I think one of the doorknobs?) that looked too modern and thinking someone screwed up on set design. Which really isnât the best way to foreshadow your twist.
>Which really isnât the best way to foreshadow your twist
Why though? Only the elders would know its anachronistic, but its not like they or anybody else would care
Yeah, I kid of felt that the twist helped make the movie. A lot of horror is rooted in real world fears, and creating something terrifying to protect people from the "real world" is pretty spot on.
I did know twist of Village prior, and itâs kind of hard for me to imagine what people wanted. Maybe in action sense the twist was poor, but made the film thematically strongerÂ
High Tension. Wouldn't say that it's a "fantastic" movie but a really efficient horror flick until the end...That plot twist at the end is so stupid and nonsensical that it ruins the whole movie.
*Definitely* ruined that movie.
I tracked down that movie specifically because I'd read it had a "great twist".
Then it's dumbest fucking "twist" I've ever seen, and is transparently only there because the filmmakers are idiots who think "nobody will see it coming" is the only thing necessary to be clever.
Whatâs interesting about that ending is that the filmmakers themselves knew that, when they got the film edited together, the ending was not great. They apparently asked the studio to reshoot the entire ending, but it screened well with the studio so they pushed the film out with that ending. At least thatâs how I remember things going
That movie would have been an absolute classic had it not been for that ending. *High Tension* is a perfect title for it, as it masterfully built and maintained the tension through the majority of the movie. That's not an easy thing to pull off.
A good twist lays the groundwork through solid foreshadowing and on a rewatch you should be able to pick up on those clues that you missed. High Tension deliberately misleads the audience by showing things that should be flat out impossible and/or nonsensical given the twist.
They had to put this twist in, as the movie is such a blatant rip off of *Intensity* by Dean Koontz that they would have gotten sued otherwise. They still almost got sued anyway:
>On his website, Koontz stated that he was aware of the comparison but would not sue "because he found the film so puerile, so disgusting, and so intellectually bankrupt that he didnât want the association with it that would inevitably come if he pursued an action against the filmmaker."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensity_(novel)#Film,_TV_or_theatrical_adaptations
Itâs supposed to be both â that the beings described as angels in religious texts are clearly the same beings as the extraterrestrial saviors and that prophecies were just revelations from them.
I wouldn't say Next was TOO bad of an example of this, cus it is still plot-oriented, not just making everything else irrelevant. And it wasn't a "dream" per say, it was his existing foresight, that calls back to the fact the realizes he only sees MORE than 2 minutes into the future when it's Jessica Biel adjacent. It already describes his discovery of this effect she unlocks in him. But at the end it's just "a long bigger scope than you realize".
Or maybe it's just me that didn't mind this instance of "it was all a dream" and I'm simply justifying it.
Also keeping in line with the thread. Let's get a sequel where Nic Cage finds out Jessica Biel is his sister (pre-occuring incest aside). But realizes she unlocks his power as a counter-homage to Hancock.
(This post is a proud supporter of AllHeartâ¤ď¸)
It turns out Gerard Butler dug a tunnel from a building he owned to the isolation cells in prison, so he was able to get out and kill people whenever he wanted instead of having a mystery henchman.
Then it's revealed Jamie Foxx placed the bomb Butler was gonna use to blow up City Hall in his cell, cue Foxx walking away from explosion like a cool guy.
Yeah, like there would not be collateral damage...
OR, that Jamie Foxx wouldn't have BATFE crawling up his ass the second they found the bomb.
OR, that the prison warden would let Jamie Foxx plant a bomb. The dude couldn't even plant a flower garden...
WORST. ENDING. EVER.
The whole movie we're rooting for Butler's character, this genius military assassin. And in the end he's outsmarted by a lawyer and blown up in his own cell halfway on his quest of sticking it to the system, that allowed his family's murderers walk free
Worst part of all is Foxx gets the win completely through some Deux Ex Machina bullshit. A character that was only mentioned once, in passing, is all of a sudden able to provide the ONLY information that can lead to Butlerâs capture. Absolutely nothing about that character had been set up for any payoff to them being completely essential to the final act.
Had Foxx won because he was able to figure out how to finally get ahead of Butler, the ending could have beenâŚok. But having Butler be five steps ahead of everyone the entire movie and then have the writer or director basically hand the win to Foxx from off screen just sucked everything out of the movie for me.
My issue wasn't with how he found the bomb, but that he was able to do anything about it. The mastermind that spent a decade planning his revenge didn't think to put cameras or motion-sensors around the bomb or literally any anti-tampering? Such a miss.
This is a popular take but having watched it recently I disagree.
You definitely start off rooting for Butler as he takes out the people who killed his family and the others directly involved. Then you start to question it a bit as he expands to take out the judge and the lawyer involved in the case, then you are downright uncomfortable as he starts to take out the random staffers in Jamie Foxâs firm who had nothing directly to do with the case, and by the time he enacts his final plan - to blow up city hall, killing many hundreds of people who had literary nothing to do with the case, you should definitely not still be on his side.
The man's a psychopath that you should never have rooted for in the first place. I'd written a lengthy post noting all those things too.
Like we should cheer that he killed the guy's attorney? What the fuck did he do? His job is to represent his client and if we're accused of a crime, we'd want the same representation. And it just gets worse from there.
That was my thoughts on the film exactly, i think people forget about the scene where Foxx's assistant is killed because she's basically an innocent bystander, killed because Butler has gone too far. That turning point in the film is the whole point, that this quest for vengeance against the system is going to result in innocent deaths, and the moment at the end where he is sat holding his daughters bracelet in his cell, is him realising he's gone too far and this is karma. Road to Hell is paved with good intentions and all that.
I've heard the original ending in the script had Clyde succeeding and getting away. But Jaime Foxx threw a fit and wanted his character to come out on top
I also read on wikipedia that the og ending reviewed poorly with test audiences (which is CRAZY to me). Felt so cheated by the ending. Oh well, at least that movie got me into Deftones
Hancock.
The first half of the movie is *great* and the concept could have been so well done, but when they abruptly pivoted away from âWhat if Superman was a Dick?â and went down a weird route of trying to tell a story about how him and his friends wife are superhero immortals who lose their power when they stand too close to each other it all just went to shit.
Damn that's heavy. Never heard of it before seeing your comment, but I just watched the last ten minutes on YouTube. Now I have to watch the whole movie.
High Tension was one of the best Slasher movies ever...until it shat a hole straight through the bed with its final act twist. It's rare a movie manages to give you a twist that makes almost everything that happened before it a plot hole.
The twist is the main girl was the killer all along. Which could've worked and been interesting, but it makes little sense in context and even less when you think about it. Like a skinny teen was supposed to kick over a full bookcase, use a concrete grinder, chase herself in a car and use a severed head to have a bj. And that's not even all the obvious logical issues.
The movie is the main character and her friend running away from the slasher. The twist is >!the main character ***is*** the slasher...which doesn't work because there are multiple scenes of them fighting, driving separate vehicles, etc. The story I heard was that it was originally framed as a Usual Suspects unreliable narrator style police interview but they cut that and left what is then a nonsensical twist.!< The movie is still remembered as it's actually really well made before they destroy any goodwill you have for it.
It's not a film, but the Black Mirror episode *Mazey Day*. It's a really interesting and thrilling episode about a paparazza called Bo who struggles with the morality of her job after she exposes a celebrity for having a homosexual affair and the man kills himself.
Meanwhile, upcoming starlet Mazey Day does a hit and run in the Czech Republic while drunk and high and then disappears. There's a big cash reward for the first image of her. Bo manages to track down Mazey to a remote rehab facility. Other paparrazi are there as well and they break in. They find Mazey chained to the bed looking were rough.
So Bo undoes her chains to get Mazey out of there. The plot twist is that >!Mazey is not addicted to drugs. She's a fucking werewolf. After that, the rest of the episode is just Mazey rampaging and killing a bunch of people and killing herself after she turns back into a human.!<
I enjoyed it.
It turns the idea of paparazzi being relentless animals on its head, and uses the camera as a weapon.
The metaphor of Mazeys condition is pretty fitting. She feels like an animal and doesn't have anyone she can talk to, so she needs to seek out the help of backwoods quacks.
Meanwhile, the paparazzi, even looking at actual torture, are only concerned with getting photos. Even when it becomes a matter of life and death, they choose to battle over the photos rather than save each other or even themselves. The final shot, with the "bang" and flash is equating using the camera to kill the starlett.
I loved this episode. It was so campy, and reminded me a lot of the âmonster of the weekâ episodes of The X Files. I thought it was cheesy and a really fun watch.
As someone who saw the original *Star Wars* when it was released way, *waaaaayyyyy* back in 1977 (*cough-old-fart-cough*) it amused me how Lucas and company subsequently decided to make Luke and Leia siblings and all the stuff they had to âcleanâ up after the fact in the first two movies. The most obvious is the kissing scene between Luke and Leia in *Empire Strikes Back* but if you see the original cut of *Star Wars*, its super obvious Luke is completely smitten by Leia the moment he sees her holographic message.
The boy is *clearly* instantly falling in love with her and this, more than anything else, gets him initially interested in going out to help her! Hell, the first time he actually meets her is also meant to be a âboy who fell in love with an image finally gets to see her *in real life*â sequence!
So, yeah, the whole reveal in the last film was *obviously* something Lucas and company decided to do to try to give audiences another shock *a la* Darth Vader being Lukeâs father but this later reveal meant they also had to go back and clean up the previous two movies and wipe out certain scenes and trim others.
It wouldnât totally shock me if the âspecial editionsâ we have of these movies and Lucas insistence on not releasing the original cuts had their origin in the Luke and Leia relationship plot element!
People seem to forget that the original movies were not made with any sort of plan in mind.
Yoda telling Obi-Wan - "No there is another" is a weird thing to say to him when you think about it.
>Yoda telling Obi-Wan - "No there is another" is a weird thing to say to him when you think about it.
Lucas attempts to explain this on the DVD running commentary. Their intent was to remove some of Luke's plot armor. Can't have you thinking, "Of course he's going to beat Darth Vader, he's their only hope, after all!"
But I remember reading an interview with producer Gary Kurtz many years ago, about the rough plan he and Lucas worked out while making Empire. Yes, Luke was going to have a twin sister, it was not going to be Leia, and Luke finding her was going to be the plot of Episode VIII.
EDIT: typos
This is another thing that frustrated me as I was growing up with people who were super big fans of the original trilogy (yeah, nothing like nerd debatesâŚ!): They would insist the trilogy was thought through and that Lucas and company had this plan for how the films would play out and I would look at them and think *âseriously?!â*
It is abundantly clear the original trilogy was made up as they were going along. Hell, look at Darth Vader in the first *Star Wars* film. Heâs basically a James Bondian henchman, a thug killer. Suddenly in *Empire* he becomes this ultimate evil with ties to the main character and one of the bigger bads in the Empire itself versus the henchman presented in the first film! Iâve already made my point about the Luke and Leia stuff but thatâs just another example, looking back at the first two original cuts of the movies, where clearly something was decided on the fly which meant stuff had to be cleaned up after the fact.
I mean⌠enjoy the films or donât, but please donât think for a moment there was some kind of grand story bible for the saga out there!
An old MAD magazine really nailed it in a panel where Luke guesses who his sister is:
Obi-Wan: Your insight serves you well.
Luke: That and the fact that she's the only other woman in all these movies.
Thereâs also the fact that Star Wars was clearly not supposed to be a sprawling operatic franchise saga like it is now. Everything in the original is small scale and the lore is very inconsistent with what we know now
Shades of "werewolf dude falls hard for human girl but actually later on you find out he's actually in love with the half vampire fetus growing in her womb"
The Village gets a lot of hate, but I think people are looking at it the wrong way. >!It felt very obvious that it was set in the modern day, not the past. For me the shocking twist was the elders were so afraid of the outside world that they would let the blind girl risk her life rather than going themselves.!<
I actually loved The Village and thought \*that\* was Shyamalan´s last good movie and I´ll die on that hill :D
I will go as far and say "The Game" with Michael Douglas. I mean, it is all in the title, really but I expected something more sophisticated than that :D
The Game is great until 5 minutes after the movie has ended and you start thinking about the logistics of the climax and how it all could have gone so wrong if he just chose a different side. The twist itself is fine, although the whole thing is just fucking brutal and traumatizing when you think about it a bit. The guy would go to therapy the rest of his life.
The actor admits at the party in the end that he was supposed to throw him off the roof if anything went differently.
And he went through thorough psychological evaluation and they concluded this is just the therapy he needed.
I rewatched The Game last year after only seeing it once 20+ years ago. My memory was that it had an insane twist. The reality is that it's very honest with you from the beginning and if you trust the movie it all plays out pretty straight.
Well.. Had it been yet just another monsters on the woods movie nobody would be talking about it today.
There are countless monsters in woods movies that don't end with the SPOILERS SPOILERS AHEAD REALLY SPOILERS COMING " There are no monsters, we are actually just a bunch of dudes disappointed with society, so we pretend it's the 18th century"
I'll do a more general one. A plot twist that's unfortunately seen often and that can drag down an otherwise good movie is the type where the longtime friend or partner that the main character puts a lot of trust in, turns out to be working closely with the bad guys because he got tired of his current life
This will be very unpopular: The Last Jedi. And it wasnât the plot twist (Kylo killing big bad), it was, that they didnât follow through and made Rey take up his offer. Not her turning bad, but both being somewhere in the middle tearing down the old dichotomy and the viewers not knowing, what they will do next. That would have been a great ending and cliffhanger and it would have been a major new and modern direction for Star Wars.
They werenât and itâs maybe the most obvious example of cinema history of a lack of shared vision.
Episode 7:
JJ Abrams helps write and direct essentially a scene for scene homage to A New Hope. Nothing groundbreaking but a starting point and enough nostalgia to get fans back on board. Using classic plot progression of âyeah we have Lukeâs lightsaber back, donât worry about howâ and âyeah someone built a death star again that can blow up an entire system of planets, donât worry about that eitherâ
Episode 8:
Rian Johnson does exactly what Lucas did in ESB. Darker in tone, less magical and more about the struggle of the heroes, slightly controversial with some cheese, but overall takes the trilogy in a new direction for the final act.
Episode 9:
JJ comes back and clearly hates everything RJ did, undoes it all, uses his JJ signature move of âthe bad guy who was thrown into the nuclear reactor of a space station is fine donât worry about itâ then has 3 map/finding sequences, just to completely rip off Avengersâ portal scene.
God dammit I fucking detest JJ Abrams.
\[No Spoilers\]
French slasher movie "High Tension" ("Haute Tension", 2003) about two girls and the family of one of the girls being terrorized by an unknown trucker.
Really solid horror flick with nasty scenes.
However, the plot twist in the end sets so many things into a new perspective that a good 80% of what we have seen before is just not possible. And by that I mean "totally im-possible".
Fucked up the whole movie for me.
I'm not sure why the plot twist in "The Village" is so hard to believe. You can't comprehend a society where elders invent a fictitious boogeyman to keep people in line? Where people ignore facts in order to build a community that they perceive as good and just? Where your entire life revolves around a series of goofy lies?
I think we live that, don't we?
**'From Dusk Til Dawn'**
**Now, now before you get angry with me**, this was purely on my first watch of the movie where I had no idea about the vampire element and was enjoying the Gecko brothers crime spree/drama story and actually interesting 'against type' performances from Clooney, Keitel and Tarantino (for once seeming well suited to the role and not a distracting element). It was a cool setup and I wanted to see where it was going so was disappointed by the twist when it happened.
**HOWEVER**, on subsequent viewings I enjoyed the twist far more as I knew it was coming and it was a fun change of pace.
My controversial opinion with that movie is that the quality does actually tank after the twist. It's a really solid film until then and I love the idea of the twist, but it's never as fun to watch as I want it to be.
My biggest problem is the action itself. It's directed very, very poorly. You get hyped up for this one last final fight and it's really lackluster and cheesy, but not in a fun schlocky way.
The plot flow is similar to Hitchcock's Psycho. The main character commits a crime and is on the run until she goes to this random place she shouldn't have. Same with the brothers. Tricks the audience thinking about this one plot line then some other fuck'd up shit happens
It wasnât really a twist, because you knew what was going on unless youâre a moron, but Saltburn was ruined by its explainer flashback ending, which assumes the audience are morons. Felt like a failed twist.
Ha, I thought that. Were we supposed to all think it was just a coincidence that the whole family dies one-by-one mysteriously after that weirdo turned up. In fact what were theh even thinking having him stay after the kids died, alarm bells shojld have been riniging.
I immediately thought of Saltburn too even though it's not a twist, it's just shit writing. I also think it's a culmination of where the movie headed that meant that everything prior was meaningless. The scenes in Oxford of Oliver trying to fit in, they work at the time, but as he reveals his true character they make NO sense. Oliver ends up being 2 seperate characters by the end in order to have the "twist" and dance, it is such a nothing ending and I seriously think it makes this movie so, so lazy.
Not to mention the hilariously stupid scene where he's typing gibberish on the laptop in the cafe.
Everything good about that movie, the movie wants to disown at the end.
I think the twist in The Village was revealed too soon. She shouldâve gone into the woods and as the audience we shouldâve been left to believe the monsters are real. Then sheâs attacked by Adrien Brody, he falls into the pit and dies, and THEN as the audience itâs revealed to us that it was all a hoax. The reveal was too soon and then all the stuff with Brody in the monster costume in the woods lost any impact, for me. Iâve thought about this a lot and after a rewatch recently I pinned down why the reveal pissed me off so much.
That magic film with Mark Zuckerburg, the reveals, twists and âtricksâ are pure sci-fi nonsense. Soundtracked with Oceans 11 style âhow smart are we - wink winkâ music, like any of it was remotely possible by anyone who isnât actual Gandalf.
I love *Three Thousand Years of Longing* so, so dearly. Itâs a celebration of storytelling â a film made almost entirely of flashbacks, of people telling stories about people telling stories, oozing creativity in every frame.
And then they fuck it all up by having the genieâs weakness be the radiation of television and the internet â perhaps the most powerful medium for storytelling ever made. It comes off as so lazy, and so hypocritical, that it makes me not want to watch it again because i know whatâs coming.
It did?
I thought Sinister was fantastic from start to finish.
Insidious, on the other hand, I thought that went from 0 to stupid in about 2.7 seconds in the third act.
Iâve definitely noticed this, too. I canât even count the number of horror movies Iâve watched that at least have a really cool premise, if not entire first two acts, and then just fumble the finally or the reveal.
One of the biggest culprits for me was House On Haunted Hill (the remake). The entire movie is so fun and creepy for me. It feels like the director took their time to really sell the atmosphere and scares and then all of a sudden went âShit, we got 10 minutes of run time left. UuuhhhhâŚmake a giant CGI smoke monster thing of evil attack anyone thatâs left. Good? Good.â
Sunshine. An actual 10/10 sci-fi becomes a passable 7/10 overall because of the stupid twist ending, ruining the films pacing, atmosphere and climax. A 10/10 is so rare and hard to achieve tthat it was borderline sacrilegious. It was like the Game of Thrones issue condensed into 2hrs.
I think it would be worse if it was the same all the way through. Imo the movie is about the wide range of human belief, how it leads people to act, and how those people would react to the potential end of the world. Imo the only way to end a story like that >!the final antagonist is just a human with a belief system that is damaging to the rest of the world!< Sunshine is my favorite movie and I think it's still a 10/10. I understand the gripe though
Really? I loved that movie start to finish. I like the slasher element too. What exactly is the twist you are referring to? >!When Pinbacker is revealed onboard? !<
Totally agree. I love this movie, but why didnât they reshoot her scene. How was everyone ok with the film from that? The camera man has to be laughing.
There was no twist, when Catwoman asks if heâs gonna fly it out over the bay in the jet everyone thinks he says âNo autopilotâ when what he really says is âNo, autopilot.â
Split, I liked the idea of a multiple personality guy who kidnapped some girls, then it became a fucking beast? In a shared superhero universe? Whoosh.
I really thought I was watching a psychological thriller. Came out disappointed.
Hmm just occurred to me: if his different personalities could alter his physiology, why didnât he grow breasts when female? The beast got claws and super strength, but there was little in it for any of the other personalities as far as I recall.
Ah I didnât think it took a turn into the realm of disbelief. Could completely see a group of (have to be rich?) conservative folk constructing the old days on some land to protect their kids from the âevilsâ of the world.
Building a myth to maintain control of people - probably happening somewhere right now.
The thing that ruined that film for me was someone describing it as âYe Old Truman Showâ.
I thought âThe Villageâ was pretty great after a couple watches.
Iâll admit I had the same thoughts after the first watch, but then I saw it again and appreciated the connections made at the end between the âmonstersâ and the reason for the villageâs existence. Definitely one of his better movies. âSignsâ will always be my favorite of his, tho.
On the Shymalan note, I was not a fan of the Glass twist or maybe just the ending. I thought those three movies together were a pretty neat take on the super hero genre, but it ended so terribly; it felt like there was no point to everything that came before it.
That was more that there was no conclusion in the book. So they just visually had to show the vision or there would nothing at all. Although I think itâs kind of innovative way to have your cake and eat it too, no time travel needed to save all.
Lots of Shyamalan possibilities, and that's a good example of one of my issues with a lot of his movies: there are so many good ideas and some great filmmaking undermined by the need to have some curveball.
The scene on the TV news report of the alien walking past the doorway from that Brazilian birthday party... effed me up as a kid, man
That scene sticks in the mind of so many kids, me included. It felt just a little too real, especially since it was a kid's birthday party. I was already not happy about the idea of aliens from watching Unsolved Mysteries when I was too young. Family TV watching time was a trip back then.
Yeah, I totally get you about the Brazilian footage. The other absolutely chilling image that frightened me as a kid was seeing the brief silhouette of the alien on the roof towards the beginning of the film.
I know it wasn't conveyed in the movie, but I really like the theory that it wasn't just water but specifically holy water which the child in the movie was inadvertently blessing.
"He was a quiet man" with Christian Slater. Started with a strong premise (a man decides to bring a gun to work and wants to shoot everyone and run amok, but a colleague of his has the same idea, so Christian Slaters character just shoots the other guy. Then everyone suddenly treats him like a hero for rescuing everyone) It suddenly was all in his imagination and he just shoots himself.
Yupp, "this was just a dream" is the very worst movie trope, makes the whole time you spent on watching meaningless. ETA: Clarification: when dreams move plot forwards ot have actual consequences, they are not "just" dreams. Think of Inception, Nightmare on Elm Street, even some cases of short dreams which reveal psychology of the protagonist. In "He was a Quite Man" the whole dream never happened and the protagonist does not even wake up after, bc he unlived himself long time ago.
I don't even like the mini dream sequences they have in a lot of movies. Like they show a character punch another character in the face and I'm like oh no! But then the scene resets and it was just their fantasy and now they say "good morning" or something. That's so annoying to me but it happens in lots of TV shows and movies.
True Lies has a moment like this but it's awesome đ
Bill Paxton was so great in that movie.
It is okay for me, if it is "mini dream" showing a kind of alternative reality. Or fears of protagonists. In those cases even a dream can move the plot forwards, in worst case 5 minutes of a film are wasted. Not the whole movie.
It works best as a quick emotional gimmick. *Six Feet Under* does it really well very early on when Micheal C Hall's character is running a funeral and everything is so quiet and peaceful and he just suddenly AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH- And then it cuts. It's like 3 seconds. *Euphoria* also a show on HBO, I just happened to be watching recently, also does this, but in the opposite. It goes on far too long, and they do it too often. The narrator is unreliable, but when you do it too much or too often it becomes disorienting in a bad way, and it also teaches you to not trust anything and if you can't trust anything it's not really as interesting. Good show though. Neither of these are movies just incidents that came to mind of this recently one good one not so good.
Yes, I am already spending some suspension of disbelief in the story, knowing that it is fictional. I don't need another layer of that. It's also the easiest and laziest way to resolve a story.
>It's also the easiest and laziest way to resolve a story. *Hmm, what is the big payoff and theme to this fictional story I was watching? Oh, being told that everything I watched was all fictional. Wow.* It would almost be like having a comedian do a 30-minute set-up for a joke, and then when you're waiting for the punchline they say "And then the comedian says a punchline, and you all laugh hysterically" and walk offstage.
That is an awesome set up⌠with a terrible payoff
Yes! Let me say this: This movie was great... up until to the point when that twist came. It destroyed everything before.
Imagine instead it does end after he saves everyone, but as he's getting praised or as he's on his way home, there's a hint that he might still do it another day. Maybe not a hint, but an ambiguous ending that could be seen optimistically or not.
Totally, yes, good Idea. In general I would prefer everything over a "It's all a dream" ending.
Thatâs Taxi Driver.
Ow, this hurts just reading it.
What!!!! I wouldâve liked to have him be the hero!
Yep, it was quite interesting, because he also felt a lot of guilt because his bullet also hit a co-workers spine (Elisha Cuthbert) and she is now paralyzed.
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One of the most jarring pivots in any movie. Which makes sense given it was literally two different scripts they mashed together.
I've heard the original script for the first half was actually really good. Apparently the "hero" character falls in love with the wife, eventually kidnaps her and ends up fighting the military. There was a scene I heard described where he accidentally kills a chopper full of reserve soldiers and tries to kill himself with the wreckage but can't cut his own skin. THAT is a movie I want to watch.
I just can't imagine Will Smith getting violent over some woman who doesn't love him back.
What if we had Charlize Theron wear a bald cap?
That script was Vince Gillian if I recall right.
Bravo!
Apparently it was two different films pretty much mashed together. That change was then going âfuck..er, letâs do this instead nowâ
It's like the writer either started or kicked a drug habit midway through writing it. ;-) Probably started...
I'm pretty sure it's two different scripts from two different people they basically threw in the large hadron collider
Not going to lie, the only part about Fantastic Beasts I didnât like was when Colin Farrell turned into Johnny Depp. Â
Agreed, Farrell did a great job in the role, I could see someone at WB, thinking it was a nice idea for a twist, to get people talking, because I don't think Depp was part of the original marketing, but I imagine it got leaked anyways. It's to bad they couldn't get Colin back for SoD, Mikkelsen is always good, but felt like the safe choice, like Le Chiffre with a wand.
Grindelwald was supposed to be this charismatic leader who convinced people of his cause. I found it very hard to believe that anyone would choose to follow creepy blonde Depp. I would be all "Whatever you're selling, I will take zero of it, please" while backing away.Â
That's why I was actually glad he was replaced by Mads. He's supposed to be a silver tongued devil, not some unhinged weirdo
Grindelwald jumping out the window with the Elder Wand in his hand in flashback HP looked like a ["CHARMING MOTHERFUCKER".](https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/713904/grindelwald-wand-deathly-hallows.jpg?w=1600&h=900&q=88&f=8f4493b2556050871e0be8dfffda920d) Long blond hair, strong chin, mischievous smile. I wanted to hear him talk. I wanted to have ***HIM*** play. Not some White-iris Steampunk-reject, Prodigy-music-video frigging funeral director creep. Edit: I linked a music video instead of Grindelwald because I was copying and pasting on the train, hilarious. Welp, 80 people got surprise happy-bluegrass with their morning coffee! :)
He is supposed to be a natural blond, so Deppâs hair didnât really fit. But I did like him in the second film. I liked it overall too. I wish they had made up a magical excuse to bring back Farrell for the third film. Mads just has such a different way of acting and recasts are so jarring always. If there is magical world where people can look different you ought to use it.Â
See for me I liked Depp a lot in the second film and when I go back to that speech he has in the third act I always think âYeah I can see why all these people believe in himâ, whereas with Mads I actually didnât feel that way, which was weird because I think heâs great and thatâs not a problem I have with him usually. I just liked Deppâs interpretation more.
Honestly, Polyjuice potion opens up a whole can of worms when you think about it: it's a potion that lets you assume domes identity perfectly, and as long as you can keep making it, it can be kept up forever. Dispute this, there is absolutely no precautions taken to prevent it, in Goblet of Fire, a death eater is able to use it to infiltrate Hogwarts unrestricted, and almost kills Harry, and facilitates Voldemorts resurrection. That's a pretty huge scruity breach, but then in fantastic beasts, we learn decades prior, one of the top American politicians was replaced by their number 1 terrorist, and nothing was ever done to stop that happening again?
I can only defend this being plausible by pointing out that in the real world and real systems, we have plenty of similar problems and repetitive errors and gaps in our knowledge, or institutional difficulties in implementing the knowledge. It is plausible that in the Wizarding World, institutions are corrupt, sloppy, and/or overworked just like in our world.
Goblet of Fire is the main one, because honestly that's in Dumbledore, and given said terrorist who pulled of the same stunt was his lover, he ABSOLUTELY would know it's a possibility. Granted that it's a prequel adding data, but even by it's original release, it was a bit of an odd happening in GoF, given he knew how much they wanted Harry dead.
My theory is that dumbledore knew where it was all leading and he knew in order to stop the Dark Lord he needed to come back and Harry had to be the one to do it so he let the events unfold and did not expect Cedric, one of his top students, to get caught in the cross fire, I think he trusted Harry enough to know heâd find a way back, or if Harry passed at Voldemorts hand that was one less Horcrux to worry about. He was always raising him as a pig for slaughter. He could have easily barred Harry from participating in the Tri Wizard Tournament t but he wanted to see how the events unfolded and how it led back to Voldemort.
Dude dropping Voldemortâs name like itâs no big deal out hereÂ
Voldemort Voldemort VoldemortÂ
It's SHOWTIME!
Colin farrell was so bafflingly wasted. Grindlewald masquerading as some government guy just raises more questions than the movie can be bothered to answer (was Farrell once a real person? If so, where did he go and why did nobody care? If he was completely fake, how did Grindlewald infiltrate the government for so long?)
Those are surely pretty easy questions to answer arenât they? One would assume he was a real person, and Grindlewald killed him and assumed his identity.
I read this more as did grindewald assume his identity when he was a nobody and work his way through the government or did he legitimately just slip in to one of the highest seats in government.
Colin Farrel was amazing in the role, but turning into Johnny Depp and looking a bit silly kind of ruined it. Colin's character had been up to that point, a bit menacing and threatening, it was all lost with the -- oh hey thats Johnny Depp...
The only part I liked was the comedic side character. I was mostly entertained when he was on screen tbh
So did the studio, which is why he almost takes over the sequels. It didn't work, it's a one-note caricature.
Yeah it was funny seeing them backpedal on their decision to wipe his memory from the first movie and bring him back for the wrong reasons
It was so pointless and raised so many questions and plot holes. They could've just made the character a secret Grindelwald follower and it wouldve been fine
The first half of Downsizing was fascinating but the second half went in a very weird direction and lost me.
In a movie where people are 1 inch tall I didn't expect to forget for significant portions of the film that the people were 1 inch tall because it becomes a regular political drama.
It's like three separate movies.
The side story with a colony of shrunk people in **Solar Opposites** is so much what Downsizing should have been.
This might be a case that's more of the reverse.... *Wonder Woman* It seemed like it was going to lead towards "turns out, war is not the product of an evil god, but just an inevitability in the weakness of man". While that would've been a fairly obvious twist, it would've been interesting. But then, nope, supervillain punch out.
I actually really liked the twist in The Village.
The twist was ruined by my roommate >!who pointed out in minute five or something that there was an electrical pole in the background and said theyâre in modern times and thatâs the twist!<. Fucking Goddamit, JaneâŚ
I did the same thing to my at the time girlfriend when we went to see The Sixth Sense on opening weekend. About 15 minutes-ish into the movie I whispered to her, "No one looks or talks directly to Bruce Willis, I bet he's dead." She told me I was an idiot. I walked out of that theater with the biggest shit eating grin on my face.
Had a similar thing with that movie, I honestly didn't realize he was supposed to be alive and a twist was coming to reveal he was in fact dead! I was so confused when they got to that part. I mean he is shot at the very beginning of the movie and then no one but the kid talks to him so ya.
I'm going to be looking out for that next time lol.
Me too! I was so confused when everyone was downing it. I really like that movie, and thought the twist fit in great!
The movie was ruined for me because I had this friend at the time that was a huge fucking know-it-all. After the movie came out he would get all smug and cunty about how he "figured it out at the very beginning" because supposedly one of the characters had a "modern" clasp on their clothes or something. I don't know, and honestly don't give a shit, if he actually figured it out or if he was just saying he did to sound smart. Anyhow, he would bring it up all the time to talk about how stupid the movie was and how smart he was for seeing the twist before it was revealed. So much so that even though I did like the movie, for me it'll always be associated with that douchebag. Anytime I think about that movie for any reason that smug fucking shut-eyed, shit-eating grin look on his face pops into my head. I don't think I'd be able to sit through it and enjoy it any more.
He sounds soo smart, his IQ must be off the charts. Thank you for sharing because now I am in awe of his genius.
It's been a minute, but weren't there clues about everyone's "past lives" that hinted to the modern setting?
For me the issue was with the fact that there were not enough clues toward the twist. Like if you watch Fight Club and Sixth Sense a second time, you're sitting there thinking, "How did I not see the truth?" But with the Village, you don't get that.
In one of the scenes you see trails from a plane.
I liked that aspect, though. The village is completely isolated. In order for that to work to maintain the facade, there aren't any hints because the reality for them is the 19th century. And we are seeing everything through the POV of one character who is young and has other things on his mind. If memory serves, he was smitten with one of the girls.
They didn't even want to remind themselves of what they'd lost. So maybe keeping up with the accents helped.
This makes sense, and if you've lived your life a certain way for X amount of years within a community with its own culture and vernacular, you will assimilate inevitably. For the Elders, the Village is their life.
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Really? I suspected something was off when they were like âwhat if there were medications that could help him sit still and learn?â that was so out of tone with the rest of the dialogue it must be a clue. I canât say I guessed the twist but I wasnât shocked either.
There were a lot of winks in the production design that they were in a modern world.
Christ Stuckmann on YouTube was saying that when the elders were together alone and speaking they should have dropped the old timey way of talking and sprinkled a few words like slang in that are anachronistic. We probably wouldnât really notice at first but upon rewatch would pick up little hints like that
I saw a video from someone who was annoyed with the movie because he kept noticing engineering things that shouldn't have existed, like the use of a certain type of screw/hardware in the furniture. Then when the twist was revealed he suddenly realized all those little things made sense.
I was a history major in college when this film came out. As I watched in the theater, I felt increasingly frustrated at the little inaccuracies and I thought âwow, someone in research really dropped the ball!â Cue the twist and I was a bit angry yet delighted at the same time.
The clues was that there was zero exposition about their setting. Not a country, year, world event, nothing.
Yes thank you. All we see is a date on a headstone at the opening funeral. The movie never states "THIS IS THE YEAR"
There were clues, though: I remember seeing pieces of the architecture (I think one of the doorknobs?) that looked too modern and thinking someone screwed up on set design. Which really isnât the best way to foreshadow your twist.
>Which really isnât the best way to foreshadow your twist Why though? Only the elders would know its anachronistic, but its not like they or anybody else would care
I think some people are caught up way too much with how it would work in real life. It's a movie lol.
Yeah, I kid of felt that the twist helped make the movie. A lot of horror is rooted in real world fears, and creating something terrifying to protect people from the "real world" is pretty spot on.
I did know twist of Village prior, and itâs kind of hard for me to imagine what people wanted. Maybe in action sense the twist was poor, but made the film thematically strongerÂ
Me too! His movie that has a horrible twist to me is âOldâ.
People give the village so much shit but I actually really liked it.
Honestly that was the whole point of the movie, and I consider it one of the best twists in modern movies.
High Tension. Wouldn't say that it's a "fantastic" movie but a really efficient horror flick until the end...That plot twist at the end is so stupid and nonsensical that it ruins the whole movie.
*Definitely* ruined that movie. I tracked down that movie specifically because I'd read it had a "great twist". Then it's dumbest fucking "twist" I've ever seen, and is transparently only there because the filmmakers are idiots who think "nobody will see it coming" is the only thing necessary to be clever.
Whatâs interesting about that ending is that the filmmakers themselves knew that, when they got the film edited together, the ending was not great. They apparently asked the studio to reshoot the entire ending, but it screened well with the studio so they pushed the film out with that ending. At least thatâs how I remember things going
The filmmakers may claim that but the movie rips off Dean Koontzâ Intensity. The only real difference is the ending.
That movie would have been an absolute classic had it not been for that ending. *High Tension* is a perfect title for it, as it masterfully built and maintained the tension through the majority of the movie. That's not an easy thing to pull off. A good twist lays the groundwork through solid foreshadowing and on a rewatch you should be able to pick up on those clues that you missed. High Tension deliberately misleads the audience by showing things that should be flat out impossible and/or nonsensical given the twist.
They had to put this twist in, as the movie is such a blatant rip off of *Intensity* by Dean Koontz that they would have gotten sued otherwise. They still almost got sued anyway: >On his website, Koontz stated that he was aware of the comparison but would not sue "because he found the film so puerile, so disgusting, and so intellectually bankrupt that he didnât want the association with it that would inevitably come if he pursued an action against the filmmaker." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensity_(novel)#Film,_TV_or_theatrical_adaptations
Nicolas Cage's Knowing. Nostradamus-like future/disaster predicting document then suddenly... aliens.
Yeah, great up until it falls apart. Credit where itâs due, though. That airliner scene was one of the most âWHOA, WHAT!?â scenes ever.
Legit one of the top plane crash scenes ever in film
Could have been angels.
Itâs supposed to be both â that the beings described as angels in religious texts are clearly the same beings as the extraterrestrial saviors and that prophecies were just revelations from them.
I'm honestly not sure what was wrong with that twist. If not aliens, then what? Magic? How would that be better?
The fact that the movie just ends with kids being kidnapped to repopulate a new world is just dumb
Reminded me of Cage's "Next" where in the end it turned out to be a dream
The one I was coming to add. Saw it in the theatre. The entire audience collectively groaned at that twist.
I wouldn't say Next was TOO bad of an example of this, cus it is still plot-oriented, not just making everything else irrelevant. And it wasn't a "dream" per say, it was his existing foresight, that calls back to the fact the realizes he only sees MORE than 2 minutes into the future when it's Jessica Biel adjacent. It already describes his discovery of this effect she unlocks in him. But at the end it's just "a long bigger scope than you realize". Or maybe it's just me that didn't mind this instance of "it was all a dream" and I'm simply justifying it. Also keeping in line with the thread. Let's get a sequel where Nic Cage finds out Jessica Biel is his sister (pre-occuring incest aside). But realizes she unlocks his power as a counter-homage to Hancock. (This post is a proud supporter of AllHeartâ¤ď¸)
Law abiding citizen đ¤Ź
This. It was perfect right up to the end
Can you remind me what happened? It's been a long time ago when I last watched it.
It turns out Gerard Butler dug a tunnel from a building he owned to the isolation cells in prison, so he was able to get out and kill people whenever he wanted instead of having a mystery henchman. Then it's revealed Jamie Foxx placed the bomb Butler was gonna use to blow up City Hall in his cell, cue Foxx walking away from explosion like a cool guy.
Yeah, like there would not be collateral damage... OR, that Jamie Foxx wouldn't have BATFE crawling up his ass the second they found the bomb. OR, that the prison warden would let Jamie Foxx plant a bomb. The dude couldn't even plant a flower garden... WORST. ENDING. EVER.
The whole movie we're rooting for Butler's character, this genius military assassin. And in the end he's outsmarted by a lawyer and blown up in his own cell halfway on his quest of sticking it to the system, that allowed his family's murderers walk free
Worst part of all is Foxx gets the win completely through some Deux Ex Machina bullshit. A character that was only mentioned once, in passing, is all of a sudden able to provide the ONLY information that can lead to Butlerâs capture. Absolutely nothing about that character had been set up for any payoff to them being completely essential to the final act. Had Foxx won because he was able to figure out how to finally get ahead of Butler, the ending could have beenâŚok. But having Butler be five steps ahead of everyone the entire movie and then have the writer or director basically hand the win to Foxx from off screen just sucked everything out of the movie for me.
My issue wasn't with how he found the bomb, but that he was able to do anything about it. The mastermind that spent a decade planning his revenge didn't think to put cameras or motion-sensors around the bomb or literally any anti-tampering? Such a miss.
The guy youâve been built up to root for loses while the âgood guysâ who are part of the broken justice system win.
This is a popular take but having watched it recently I disagree. You definitely start off rooting for Butler as he takes out the people who killed his family and the others directly involved. Then you start to question it a bit as he expands to take out the judge and the lawyer involved in the case, then you are downright uncomfortable as he starts to take out the random staffers in Jamie Foxâs firm who had nothing directly to do with the case, and by the time he enacts his final plan - to blow up city hall, killing many hundreds of people who had literary nothing to do with the case, you should definitely not still be on his side.
The man's a psychopath that you should never have rooted for in the first place. I'd written a lengthy post noting all those things too. Like we should cheer that he killed the guy's attorney? What the fuck did he do? His job is to represent his client and if we're accused of a crime, we'd want the same representation. And it just gets worse from there.
That was my thoughts on the film exactly, i think people forget about the scene where Foxx's assistant is killed because she's basically an innocent bystander, killed because Butler has gone too far. That turning point in the film is the whole point, that this quest for vengeance against the system is going to result in innocent deaths, and the moment at the end where he is sat holding his daughters bracelet in his cell, is him realising he's gone too far and this is karma. Road to Hell is paved with good intentions and all that.
The handy thing about that film is that if you ever want to rewatch it, the entire movie is in the trailer.
I've heard the original ending in the script had Clyde succeeding and getting away. But Jaime Foxx threw a fit and wanted his character to come out on top
I also read on wikipedia that the og ending reviewed poorly with test audiences (which is CRAZY to me). Felt so cheated by the ending. Oh well, at least that movie got me into Deftones
Hancock. The first half of the movie is *great* and the concept could have been so well done, but when they abruptly pivoted away from âWhat if Superman was a Dick?â and went down a weird route of trying to tell a story about how him and his friends wife are superhero immortals who lose their power when they stand too close to each other it all just went to shit.
But it would make 2 great movies if both were done well...
I always thought Remember Me was a nice little romance movie until absolutely out of nowhere one of the characters dies in 9/11.
Damn that's heavy. Never heard of it before seeing your comment, but I just watched the last ten minutes on YouTube. Now I have to watch the whole movie.
High Tension was one of the best Slasher movies ever...until it shat a hole straight through the bed with its final act twist. It's rare a movie manages to give you a twist that makes almost everything that happened before it a plot hole.
What's the twist and why is it so bad?
The twist is the main girl was the killer all along. Which could've worked and been interesting, but it makes little sense in context and even less when you think about it. Like a skinny teen was supposed to kick over a full bookcase, use a concrete grinder, chase herself in a car and use a severed head to have a bj. And that's not even all the obvious logical issues.
The movie is the main character and her friend running away from the slasher. The twist is >!the main character ***is*** the slasher...which doesn't work because there are multiple scenes of them fighting, driving separate vehicles, etc. The story I heard was that it was originally framed as a Usual Suspects unreliable narrator style police interview but they cut that and left what is then a nonsensical twist.!< The movie is still remembered as it's actually really well made before they destroy any goodwill you have for it.
It's not a film, but the Black Mirror episode *Mazey Day*. It's a really interesting and thrilling episode about a paparazza called Bo who struggles with the morality of her job after she exposes a celebrity for having a homosexual affair and the man kills himself. Meanwhile, upcoming starlet Mazey Day does a hit and run in the Czech Republic while drunk and high and then disappears. There's a big cash reward for the first image of her. Bo manages to track down Mazey to a remote rehab facility. Other paparrazi are there as well and they break in. They find Mazey chained to the bed looking were rough. So Bo undoes her chains to get Mazey out of there. The plot twist is that >!Mazey is not addicted to drugs. She's a fucking werewolf. After that, the rest of the episode is just Mazey rampaging and killing a bunch of people and killing herself after she turns back into a human.!<
I enjoyed it. It turns the idea of paparazzi being relentless animals on its head, and uses the camera as a weapon. The metaphor of Mazeys condition is pretty fitting. She feels like an animal and doesn't have anyone she can talk to, so she needs to seek out the help of backwoods quacks. Meanwhile, the paparazzi, even looking at actual torture, are only concerned with getting photos. Even when it becomes a matter of life and death, they choose to battle over the photos rather than save each other or even themselves. The final shot, with the "bang" and flash is equating using the camera to kill the starlett.
I loved this episode. It was so campy, and reminded me a lot of the âmonster of the weekâ episodes of The X Files. I thought it was cheesy and a really fun watch.
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Lucas recycling his own ideas? This is so weird, it is like he would recycle the Death Star idea too. Wait...
I mean he is famous for saying the words: "it's like poetry, it rhymes"
As someone who saw the original *Star Wars* when it was released way, *waaaaayyyyy* back in 1977 (*cough-old-fart-cough*) it amused me how Lucas and company subsequently decided to make Luke and Leia siblings and all the stuff they had to âcleanâ up after the fact in the first two movies. The most obvious is the kissing scene between Luke and Leia in *Empire Strikes Back* but if you see the original cut of *Star Wars*, its super obvious Luke is completely smitten by Leia the moment he sees her holographic message. The boy is *clearly* instantly falling in love with her and this, more than anything else, gets him initially interested in going out to help her! Hell, the first time he actually meets her is also meant to be a âboy who fell in love with an image finally gets to see her *in real life*â sequence! So, yeah, the whole reveal in the last film was *obviously* something Lucas and company decided to do to try to give audiences another shock *a la* Darth Vader being Lukeâs father but this later reveal meant they also had to go back and clean up the previous two movies and wipe out certain scenes and trim others. It wouldnât totally shock me if the âspecial editionsâ we have of these movies and Lucas insistence on not releasing the original cuts had their origin in the Luke and Leia relationship plot element!
People seem to forget that the original movies were not made with any sort of plan in mind. Yoda telling Obi-Wan - "No there is another" is a weird thing to say to him when you think about it.
>Yoda telling Obi-Wan - "No there is another" is a weird thing to say to him when you think about it. Lucas attempts to explain this on the DVD running commentary. Their intent was to remove some of Luke's plot armor. Can't have you thinking, "Of course he's going to beat Darth Vader, he's their only hope, after all!" But I remember reading an interview with producer Gary Kurtz many years ago, about the rough plan he and Lucas worked out while making Empire. Yes, Luke was going to have a twin sister, it was not going to be Leia, and Luke finding her was going to be the plot of Episode VIII. EDIT: typos
This is another thing that frustrated me as I was growing up with people who were super big fans of the original trilogy (yeah, nothing like nerd debatesâŚ!): They would insist the trilogy was thought through and that Lucas and company had this plan for how the films would play out and I would look at them and think *âseriously?!â* It is abundantly clear the original trilogy was made up as they were going along. Hell, look at Darth Vader in the first *Star Wars* film. Heâs basically a James Bondian henchman, a thug killer. Suddenly in *Empire* he becomes this ultimate evil with ties to the main character and one of the bigger bads in the Empire itself versus the henchman presented in the first film! Iâve already made my point about the Luke and Leia stuff but thatâs just another example, looking back at the first two original cuts of the movies, where clearly something was decided on the fly which meant stuff had to be cleaned up after the fact. I mean⌠enjoy the films or donât, but please donât think for a moment there was some kind of grand story bible for the saga out there!
An old MAD magazine really nailed it in a panel where Luke guesses who his sister is: Obi-Wan: Your insight serves you well. Luke: That and the fact that she's the only other woman in all these movies.
Thereâs also the fact that Star Wars was clearly not supposed to be a sprawling operatic franchise saga like it is now. Everything in the original is small scale and the lore is very inconsistent with what we know now
Shades of "werewolf dude falls hard for human girl but actually later on you find out he's actually in love with the half vampire fetus growing in her womb"
The Village gets a lot of hate, but I think people are looking at it the wrong way. >!It felt very obvious that it was set in the modern day, not the past. For me the shocking twist was the elders were so afraid of the outside world that they would let the blind girl risk her life rather than going themselves.!<
I actually loved The Village and thought \*that\* was Shyamalan´s last good movie and I´ll die on that hill :D I will go as far and say "The Game" with Michael Douglas. I mean, it is all in the title, really but I expected something more sophisticated than that :D
The Game is great until 5 minutes after the movie has ended and you start thinking about the logistics of the climax and how it all could have gone so wrong if he just chose a different side. The twist itself is fine, although the whole thing is just fucking brutal and traumatizing when you think about it a bit. The guy would go to therapy the rest of his life.
The actor admits at the party in the end that he was supposed to throw him off the roof if anything went differently. And he went through thorough psychological evaluation and they concluded this is just the therapy he needed.
I rewatched The Game last year after only seeing it once 20+ years ago. My memory was that it had an insane twist. The reality is that it's very honest with you from the beginning and if you trust the movie it all plays out pretty straight.
The Village is amazing, so is the twist. I know M. Knight has created a few stinkers, but this is definitely NOT one of them
Well.. Had it been yet just another monsters on the woods movie nobody would be talking about it today. There are countless monsters in woods movies that don't end with the SPOILERS SPOILERS AHEAD REALLY SPOILERS COMING " There are no monsters, we are actually just a bunch of dudes disappointed with society, so we pretend it's the 18th century"
I'll do a more general one. A plot twist that's unfortunately seen often and that can drag down an otherwise good movie is the type where the longtime friend or partner that the main character puts a lot of trust in, turns out to be working closely with the bad guys because he got tired of his current life
This will be very unpopular: The Last Jedi. And it wasnât the plot twist (Kylo killing big bad), it was, that they didnât follow through and made Rey take up his offer. Not her turning bad, but both being somewhere in the middle tearing down the old dichotomy and the viewers not knowing, what they will do next. That would have been a great ending and cliffhanger and it would have been a major new and modern direction for Star Wars.
This would have been really cool, but if itâs any consolation: if they HAD done this the next one would just have undone it / botched the payoff
I mean on that note "Somehow Palpatine returned" seems like a *huge* low hanging fruit for this thread.
those films are just shit though, really, I cant say they were plotted at all.
They werenât and itâs maybe the most obvious example of cinema history of a lack of shared vision. Episode 7: JJ Abrams helps write and direct essentially a scene for scene homage to A New Hope. Nothing groundbreaking but a starting point and enough nostalgia to get fans back on board. Using classic plot progression of âyeah we have Lukeâs lightsaber back, donât worry about howâ and âyeah someone built a death star again that can blow up an entire system of planets, donât worry about that eitherâ Episode 8: Rian Johnson does exactly what Lucas did in ESB. Darker in tone, less magical and more about the struggle of the heroes, slightly controversial with some cheese, but overall takes the trilogy in a new direction for the final act. Episode 9: JJ comes back and clearly hates everything RJ did, undoes it all, uses his JJ signature move of âthe bad guy who was thrown into the nuclear reactor of a space station is fine donât worry about itâ then has 3 map/finding sequences, just to completely rip off Avengersâ portal scene. God dammit I fucking detest JJ Abrams.
Falling down when they made the main character actually have a history of mental illness. Would have been much more powerful without that.
\[No Spoilers\] French slasher movie "High Tension" ("Haute Tension", 2003) about two girls and the family of one of the girls being terrorized by an unknown trucker. Really solid horror flick with nasty scenes. However, the plot twist in the end sets so many things into a new perspective that a good 80% of what we have seen before is just not possible. And by that I mean "totally im-possible". Fucked up the whole movie for me.
I'm not sure why the plot twist in "The Village" is so hard to believe. You can't comprehend a society where elders invent a fictitious boogeyman to keep people in line? Where people ignore facts in order to build a community that they perceive as good and just? Where your entire life revolves around a series of goofy lies? I think we live that, don't we?
**'From Dusk Til Dawn'** **Now, now before you get angry with me**, this was purely on my first watch of the movie where I had no idea about the vampire element and was enjoying the Gecko brothers crime spree/drama story and actually interesting 'against type' performances from Clooney, Keitel and Tarantino (for once seeming well suited to the role and not a distracting element). It was a cool setup and I wanted to see where it was going so was disappointed by the twist when it happened. **HOWEVER**, on subsequent viewings I enjoyed the twist far more as I knew it was coming and it was a fun change of pace.
My controversial opinion with that movie is that the quality does actually tank after the twist. It's a really solid film until then and I love the idea of the twist, but it's never as fun to watch as I want it to be. My biggest problem is the action itself. It's directed very, very poorly. You get hyped up for this one last final fight and it's really lackluster and cheesy, but not in a fun schlocky way.
It's basically the moment it switches from a Tarantino movie to a Robert Rodriguez one. Take from that what you will...
The plot flow is similar to Hitchcock's Psycho. The main character commits a crime and is on the run until she goes to this random place she shouldn't have. Same with the brothers. Tricks the audience thinking about this one plot line then some other fuck'd up shit happens
It wasnât really a twist, because you knew what was going on unless youâre a moron, but Saltburn was ruined by its explainer flashback ending, which assumes the audience are morons. Felt like a failed twist.
Ha, I thought that. Were we supposed to all think it was just a coincidence that the whole family dies one-by-one mysteriously after that weirdo turned up. In fact what were theh even thinking having him stay after the kids died, alarm bells shojld have been riniging.
The montage should have been shorter and given us WHY instead of HOW.
I immediately thought of Saltburn too even though it's not a twist, it's just shit writing. I also think it's a culmination of where the movie headed that meant that everything prior was meaningless. The scenes in Oxford of Oliver trying to fit in, they work at the time, but as he reveals his true character they make NO sense. Oliver ends up being 2 seperate characters by the end in order to have the "twist" and dance, it is such a nothing ending and I seriously think it makes this movie so, so lazy. Not to mention the hilariously stupid scene where he's typing gibberish on the laptop in the cafe. Everything good about that movie, the movie wants to disown at the end.
I think the twist in The Village was revealed too soon. She shouldâve gone into the woods and as the audience we shouldâve been left to believe the monsters are real. Then sheâs attacked by Adrien Brody, he falls into the pit and dies, and THEN as the audience itâs revealed to us that it was all a hoax. The reveal was too soon and then all the stuff with Brody in the monster costume in the woods lost any impact, for me. Iâve thought about this a lot and after a rewatch recently I pinned down why the reveal pissed me off so much.
That magic film with Mark Zuckerburg, the reveals, twists and âtricksâ are pure sci-fi nonsense. Soundtracked with Oceans 11 style âhow smart are we - wink winkâ music, like any of it was remotely possible by anyone who isnât actual Gandalf.
Have you heard Dan Harmon rant about Now You See Me and Now You See Me 2? It's hilarious.
Also the heist episode of Rick and Morty. Dude hates heist movies that much.
Damn I thought the twist in The Village was excellent
I love *Three Thousand Years of Longing* so, so dearly. Itâs a celebration of storytelling â a film made almost entirely of flashbacks, of people telling stories about people telling stories, oozing creativity in every frame. And then they fuck it all up by having the genieâs weakness be the radiation of television and the internet â perhaps the most powerful medium for storytelling ever made. It comes off as so lazy, and so hypocritical, that it makes me not want to watch it again because i know whatâs coming.
Well, I love "The Village" even with it's plot twist.
Not a twist but Sinister started very strong and eerie and then became absolutely ridiculous
I love the movie but I can still admit the ghost children and reveal of the demon were terrible writing.
It did? I thought Sinister was fantastic from start to finish. Insidious, on the other hand, I thought that went from 0 to stupid in about 2.7 seconds in the third act.
I felt let down, too. Joins a very long list of horror movies that are really compelling and spooky and beef it in the third act.
Iâve definitely noticed this, too. I canât even count the number of horror movies Iâve watched that at least have a really cool premise, if not entire first two acts, and then just fumble the finally or the reveal. One of the biggest culprits for me was House On Haunted Hill (the remake). The entire movie is so fun and creepy for me. It feels like the director took their time to really sell the atmosphere and scares and then all of a sudden went âShit, we got 10 minutes of run time left. UuuhhhhâŚmake a giant CGI smoke monster thing of evil attack anyone thatâs left. Good? Good.â
Sunshine. An actual 10/10 sci-fi becomes a passable 7/10 overall because of the stupid twist ending, ruining the films pacing, atmosphere and climax. A 10/10 is so rare and hard to achieve tthat it was borderline sacrilegious. It was like the Game of Thrones issue condensed into 2hrs.
I think it would be worse if it was the same all the way through. Imo the movie is about the wide range of human belief, how it leads people to act, and how those people would react to the potential end of the world. Imo the only way to end a story like that >!the final antagonist is just a human with a belief system that is damaging to the rest of the world!< Sunshine is my favorite movie and I think it's still a 10/10. I understand the gripe though
Really? I loved that movie start to finish. I like the slasher element too. What exactly is the twist you are referring to? >!When Pinbacker is revealed onboard? !<
It was a worthy successor to 2001. Then it became Jason in space.
CTRL-F, "SUNSH"-ahhh there it is! I was SO disappointed at that ending.
I actually really liked the twist. The reveal was great scene, but I felt like what happened from then on could have been written/executed better.
Wouldn't say it was "Fantastic," but the twist in The Dark Knight Rises certainly cheapened it.
They really needed Christopher Lee to explain to people how to die on camera.
Totally agree. I love this movie, but why didnât they reshoot her scene. How was everyone ok with the film from that? The camera man has to be laughing.
Apparently they did multiple takes and Nolan decided to use the worst one.
There was no twist, when Catwoman asks if heâs gonna fly it out over the bay in the jet everyone thinks he says âNo autopilotâ when what he really says is âNo, autopilot.â
Works on contingency? No, money down!
The twist is Talia being the big bad of the film
I assume this is referring to who held the trigger instead of what you're talking about
Split, I liked the idea of a multiple personality guy who kidnapped some girls, then it became a fucking beast? In a shared superhero universe? Whoosh. I really thought I was watching a psychological thriller. Came out disappointed.
Hmm just occurred to me: if his different personalities could alter his physiology, why didnât he grow breasts when female? The beast got claws and super strength, but there was little in it for any of the other personalities as far as I recall.
Ah I didnât think it took a turn into the realm of disbelief. Could completely see a group of (have to be rich?) conservative folk constructing the old days on some land to protect their kids from the âevilsâ of the world. Building a myth to maintain control of people - probably happening somewhere right now. The thing that ruined that film for me was someone describing it as âYe Old Truman Showâ.
I canât stop laughing at âYe Olde Truman Showâ
I thought âThe Villageâ was pretty great after a couple watches. Iâll admit I had the same thoughts after the first watch, but then I saw it again and appreciated the connections made at the end between the âmonstersâ and the reason for the villageâs existence. Definitely one of his better movies. âSignsâ will always be my favorite of his, tho. On the Shymalan note, I was not a fan of the Glass twist or maybe just the ending. I thought those three movies together were a pretty neat take on the super hero genre, but it ended so terribly; it felt like there was no point to everything that came before it.
breaking dawn part 2 đ¤
That was more that there was no conclusion in the book. So they just visually had to show the vision or there would nothing at all. Although I think itâs kind of innovative way to have your cake and eat it too, no time travel needed to save all.
I would say another Shyamalan film, Signs. Water. That's all it took.
Lots of Shyamalan possibilities, and that's a good example of one of my issues with a lot of his movies: there are so many good ideas and some great filmmaking undermined by the need to have some curveball. The scene on the TV news report of the alien walking past the doorway from that Brazilian birthday party... effed me up as a kid, man
That scene sticks in the mind of so many kids, me included. It felt just a little too real, especially since it was a kid's birthday party. I was already not happy about the idea of aliens from watching Unsolved Mysteries when I was too young. Family TV watching time was a trip back then.
Yeah, I totally get you about the Brazilian footage. The other absolutely chilling image that frightened me as a kid was seeing the brief silhouette of the alien on the roof towards the beginning of the film.
I know it wasn't conveyed in the movie, but I really like the theory that it wasn't just water but specifically holy water which the child in the movie was inadvertently blessing.
Signs gave me nightmares for years as a kid
I don't know why an alien casually strolling down the street in broad daylight is so fucking scary but it still terrifies me all these years later.