|
Greatest Movie Twists, Part 16 |
|
|
Greatest Movie Twists, Part 16 |
|
Note: The films that are marked
with a yellow star |
|
Greatest Movie Twists, Spoilers and
Surprise Endings |
||
| Film Title | Brief Scene Description | Example |
|
Oldboy (2003)
|
This compelling, mysterious, and visceral (double) revenge thriller from Korean director Park Chan-wook was adapted from the Japanese manga written by Tsuchiya Garon; its potently sinister tale was told mostly in flashback -- a recently-released prisoner named Dae-su Oh (Choi Min-sik), after being kidnapped from a phone booth, was kept in a dingy, shabby windowless cell for 15 years, without knowing the charges; during his imprisonment, he learned over television that he was framed for the murder of his wife, and his young three year-old daughter was sent to a foster parents home; after being freed inexplicably, he had only a few days to seek surrealistic vengeance and discover the enigmatic reasons for what had occurred, while engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with his villainous, sadistic and insane captor/tormentor Woo-jin Lee (Yu Ji-tae); he learned by film's end that his former schoolmate Woo-Jin had blamed Dae-su for spreading a rumor about an incestuous pregnancy in his family (between young Woo-Jin and his sister Lee Soo-ah) that led to the humiliated sister's suicide -- although his guilt-ridden memory (at the time of his own bullet-to-the-head suicide) revealed that Woo-jin killed his own sister; a helpful female sushi chef Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong) took pity on Dae-su and eventually became his lover -- and then Dae-su realized in horror that he had taken the virginity of his own long-lost daughter; to show atonement and to prevent any further rumors or talk, he cut off his own tongue with a rusty pair of scissors, and tried to brainwash himself with a hypnotist to forget; the film ended ambiguously with Dae-su embracing Mi-do - but did she know the truth? |
 
|
|
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969, UK)
|
In the shocking and tearjerking ending of this sixth film in the James Bond series, the British secret service 007 agent (George Lazenby) senselessly lost his newlywed wife Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo or Tracy Bond (Diana Rigg) only moments after their Portugal wedding when Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas) attempted to kill Bond -- he strafed their honeymoon Aston Martin car from his black Mercedes sedan with MP-40 submachine gun fire and then drove away, as Louis Armstrong's mournful and ironic rendition of "We Have All the Time In the World" played; she was hit in the forehead by a bullet through the windshield and instantly killed [NOTE: This was the only film in which Bond married one of his Bond girls] |
|
|
Open Your Eyes/Abre los Ojos (1997, Sp.)
|
This confusing, baffling and somewhat captivating film (a remake of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)) opened with 25 year-old formerly handsome playboy César (Eduardo Noriega) in a prison cell relating his story, in flashback, to psychiatrist Antonio (Chete Lara); he told how he suffered a hideous facial disfigurement following an automobile accident, and became suicidal when forced to wear a mask to hide the deformity; the confusing part of this film was that much of the film was a virtual reality dream that César experienced after he fell asleep drunk in the street; he began to have unsettling disjunctions and bewildering reality flips (his face changed from being deformed to being healed, and beautiful Sofia Cueto (Penelope Cruz) became his girlfriend and then was transformed into his obsessive ex-lover Nuria (Najwa Nimri) - crazed, he murdered her); while placed in a cell for the criminally insane, he realized that he had signed a contract with a cryogenics company called Life Extension (or L.E.) that would provide him with a future fantasy virtual life of "artificial perceptions" based upon his past; at the end of the film, he decided to wake up and 'kill' his virtual life - but before he did so, he conjured up Sofia and best friend Pelayo (Fele Martinez) to see them one last time; then, he jumped from the LE company's high-rise roof, resolving to "open his eyes" to non-cryogenic life; just before he hit the ground, the film cut to black, and a strange woman's voice (a nurse?) soothed him: "Tranquilo. Tranquilo. Abre los ojos..." ("Relax. Relax. Open your eyes..."); questions inevitably arose: Was César alive or dead? Was Sofia and Nuria the same individual? Was the entire film just another dream? etc.; the film was remade in Hollywood as Vanilla Sky (2001) with Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz (again), and the virtual reality plot/theme has since been used innumerable times by other films such as eXistenZ (1999) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) |
    
|
|
The Others (2001)
|
In this spooky tale set at the end of WWII, overprotective governess Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman) - the single mother of two light-sensitive children Anne (Alakina Mann) and Nicholas (James Bentley) - began to suspect that their rambling, gothic house was haunted when they heard odd sounds and thought there were intruders; the arrival of three servants (housekeeper Mrs. Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), an old gardener Mr. Edmund Tuttle (Eric Sykes), and a young mute girl Lydia (Elaine Cassidy)) added to the mystery as did three gravesites; the sad ending with a double twist revealed during a seance (conducted by "The Others", the Marlish family who had moved into the mansion) that the governess and her two children were dead; in a murder/suicide, Grace had gone mad after her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) left her for the war, and smothered her children with pillows before suicidally shooting herself with a shotgun; the "ghosts" Grace kept seeing in the house were actually the new tenants who had moved into the house, and were attempting to exorcise them; in addition, the servants were actually 'ghosts' of servants who were long dead |
   
|
Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
|
In this wondrously imaginative World War II era fantasy film set in Spain during Franco's regime, young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) sought refuge in an imaginary escapist world in a forest home filled with fairies and a faun named Pan (Doug Jones); the film concluded with the unexpected death of Ofelia at the hands of malevolent and brutal Spanish fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi López) - her adoptive father, as she fulfilled the third of three tests given to her by Pan to prove that she was the true princess of the underworld; when she brought her newborn brother to the labyrinth and presented him to Pan, she was told that she must shed the blood of an 'innocent' - her brother; when she refused, she was shot in the stomach by the Captain; she fulfilled the test however, when her own blood dripped down and opened the portal - she was then seen dressed in gold joining her dead mother and actual father in the land of the fairies' throne room, where she was applauded as the long-lost Princess Moanna |   
|
|
The Parallax View (1974)
|
In this political thriller that paralleled the JFK assassination to some degree and was made during the Watergate era, rogue investigative newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) witnessed the assassination of US Senator Carroll (Bill Joyce) from California (and aspiring Presidential candidate) at Seattle's Space Needle; although a government commission declared it the work of a "lone gunman" (identified as waiter Thomas Richard Lindern (Chuck Waters)), he took notice a few years later as witnesses suspiciously died off, and decided to obsessively pursue a possible conspiracy theory of his own; his case led to the shadowy Parallax Corporation into which he found himself recruited (after watching a 'brainwashing' montage-collage of non-verbal images that functioned as a psychological test, juxtaposed with white-on-black words such as "Mother", "Country", and "Me") as a disaffected political assassin (with alias name "Richard Parton") in order to penetrate their organization to learn more ("Who's ever behind this is in the business of recruiting assassins"); he became fully unaware -- after it was too late -- that he was being framed and set up by the company to take the fall for another similar assassination - this time it would be the murder of Senator Hammond (Jim Davis) in a convention hall; by film's end, Frady was implicated and trapped in the killing of Hammond, and was thought to be the assassin as he fled from the scene (people saw him next to a planted unused gun and assumed he did it); when he ran, he was gunned down by the real assassin (Bill McKinney); months later, a commission reported that Frady had blamed Senator Hammond for killing Senator Carroll - and had sought revenge -- and Frady was declared the lone assassin |
   
|
|
Planet of the Apes (1968)
|
This film's iconic, chilling, startling, twist-surprise ending has become common knowledge -- stranded American astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston), having escaped from enslavement and imprisonment by talking civilized apes, rode on horseback down a beach in the Forbidden Zone with mute cave-woman Nova (Linda Harrison); he suddenly saw the spiked crown of a battered Statue of Liberty buried waist-deep in beach sand; he exclaimed as he pounded his fist into the sand and railed against generations almost 2,000 years earlier that had destroyed Earth's civilization with a nuclear war: "Oh my God! I'm back, I'm home. All the time. We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah damn you, (God) damn you all to hell!" |
 
|
|
Planet of the Apes (2001)
|
There was a bizarre, non-sequitur plot twist ending in Tim Burton's 2001 remake, in the film's plot about how US astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) journeyed to a strange planet ('of the apes') in the year 2029; at the film's conclusion, he went backward in time and returned to present-day Earth with a crash landing, where he found that the statue of the President in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC had been replaced by a statue of ruthless ape General Thade (Tim Roth) with the inscription: "IN THIS TEMPLE AS IN THE HEARTS OF APES FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE PLANET THE MEMORY OF GENERAL THADE WILL BE ENSHRINED FOREVER"; the world was dominated and populated by talking apes who swarmed around him in police cars and helicopters |
|
(alphabetical by film title)
Intro
| Part 1 | Part
2 | Part 3 | Part
4 | Part 5 | Part
6 | Part 7 | Part
8 | Part 9 | Part
10 | Part 11 | Part
12 | Part 13
Part 14 | Part
15 | Part 16 | Part
17 | Part 18 | Part
19 | Part 20 | Part
21 | Part 22 | Part
23 | Part 24 | Part
25
Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.
Greatest
Movie Twists, Spoilers, and Surprise Endings: Avid filmgoers often
speak about seeking rare movie surprises in the movie-going experience,
such as discovering films that have cunning plot twists, a shocking
surprise ending, a surprise revelation about a particular character,
or some other unknown or unsuspected narrative element. Compiled here
in this comprehensive collection is a detailed set of films with the
greatest movie twists, spoilers, and surprise endings.
are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the 
