Top 7 twist endings that sucked
Jul 24
A good twist will immediately set your mind spinning. You sit there in the darkened theatre with your jaw agape, breathlessly going over the last two hours of your life and combing through those memories for some kind of clue. The best twists will encourage repeat viewings; the very best twists will serve to enrich the thematic conent of the film.
The other side of the coin is the bad twist: the kind of twist that makes you go “Huh?” The worst case scenario is that the final twist is a cheap shot, a retread of a dozen other twists, or an obviously easy way out of a tricky situation. The very worst twists invalidate the entire film’s existence — such as the rightly-hated “It was all just a dream!” twist.
Here is a list (by no means exhaustive) of the film twists that annoyed me the most:
7 – Remember Me (2010)
Robert Pattinson spends a most of the movie trying to un-estrange himself from his distant father, Pierce Brosnan. He finally manages to pin him down for a meeting, to reconcile their differences. They agree on a time and a place. Pattinson arrives early, but Brosnan, as always, is late. Pattinson looks out the window, and the camera tracks out to reveal he’s halfway up the World Trade Centre. We find out the date — 11 September 2001 — and the film fades to black. I guess that’s one way to solve familial relationship problems, but it’s no way to end your movie.
6 – Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)
The infamous “space between spaces” line came after the all the fridge-nuking and monkey-swinging, and as such isn’t the target of as much vitriol as those earlier indications of inanity. But it is still mind-bogglingly stupid. The Indiana Jones movies have always had a creeping sense of the supernatural about them – Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull took it a step too far.
5 – Planet Of The Apes (2001)
People often forget that Tim Burton made The Planet Of The Apes. They’re too busy swooning over Edward Scissorhands and … well that’s it, actually. People often forget how awful the twist ending of The Planet Of The Apes is, too, because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Mark Wahlberg travels into the future, hangs out with some cranky apes, comes back to his own time, and finds … the planet overrun by cranky apes. This sucks twice as hard because the twist of the original Apes was so much better.
4 – Saw (2004)
The first time I watched Saw, I guessed that the genial old fellow in the hospital was the killer, purely because the camera lingered a beat too long on him in the first act. What I didn’t know was that he could paralyse himself for extended periods of time, and stop his breathing, in order to convince two people in the room with him that he was a corpse. That’s an impressive skill. So impressive a skill, in fact, that it’s quite clearly bullshit.
3 – Inception (2010)
Inception was such a cortical strain that it really needed a powerful finish in order to validate all the hard work your poor cerebellum did over the past two and a half hours. What we got instead was a cheap trick, a sleight of hand that denied the film a real sense of purpose or higher meaning. Nolan delivered such a satisfying twist in Memento that we all thought he couldn’t possibly fail. Then, he did.
2 – Most M Night Shyamalan movies (2002, 2004, 2008)
It started with Signs: aliens for whom water is like acid is to us. It’s like humans landing naked on Venus and complaining about all the sulfuric acid everywhere — that is, outrageously stupid. Plus, biologists have shown that water is one of the few reliable mediums for live to get started in. So chances are, any alien life-form (especially if it looks suspiciously human-shaped) we come across will be water-dependant, not -intolerant.
Then there was The Village: all those monstrous beasts you spent the entire film evading were just people in fake-looking suits! And also you’re living in the modern world, but you’re trapped in the woods so that you’ll never escape and find out that science can cure all your illnesses! The twist ending ruins the movie, drains any sense of horror, and causes your empathy for the characters to dissolve in seconds.
Finally, there was The Happening: turns out all plants everywhere in the world have evolved a very specific airborn neurotoxin that breaks down the brain’s inhibitions! And it only applies to one species out of ten million — us! There are so many things wrong with this — including the implication that plants are sentient — that The Happening officially destroyed what little faith I had in M Night Shyamalan to deliver anything resembling a half-decent movie any more. I didn’t even watch The Lady In The Water — did that have a stupid twist as well?
1 – All those mid-noughties thrillers that tried to copy Fight Club
People watched Fight Club. A lot of people. Some of them were filmmakers. Forgetting that so many other people had also watched Fight Club, these filmmakers decided to pull the same final-reel twist over and over again in the following decade that it became something of a running joke.
Hide And Seek: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Robert DeNiro) split personality. Secret Window: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Johnny Depp) split personality. The Number 23: the menacing killer is the protagonist (Jim Carrey), before he got amnesia. Perfect Strangers: the mancing killer is the protagonist (Halle Berry) — the kicker is that she knows what she’s doing — and keeps doing it anyway.
The rash of mid-00s twist-based films has finally abated, and hopefully we can look forward to films that offer decent, rather that deficient, twists.
What final-reel twists bugged the hell out of you? Did you think Inception‘s twist was that bad, or am I crazy? Any thoughts are welcome and appreciated.
Sam Raimi directing OZ: THE GREAT AND POWERFUL, starring Robert Downey Jr.
Jun 16
Where do you go searching for your next project after being axed from the mega-bucks Spider-Man franchise you helped create? Why, you simply follow the yellow brick road.
Deadline reports that Sam Raimi has officially signed to direct the project Oz: The Great and Powerful, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz detailing how the man who becomes Wizard wound up in the land of Oz in the first place (also via rogue tornado– hopefully complete with flying old ladies still-cycling mid-air).
Man-of-the-moment Robert Downey Jr. is attached to star as the circus wrangler character who inadvertently becomes Wizard, though it’s not certain if he will remain attached at this stage.
Things we can be thankful for:
- At least it’s a prequel and not a flat-out remake of The Wizard of Oz
- Robert Downey Jr. as the Wizard. I mean, why not?
- Sam Raimi’s slapstick, comic-book, Three Stooges-style of filmmaking should be right at home with this kind of project.
- It’s not being made by Tim Burton starring Johnny Depp and/or Helena Bonham Carter (God, just imagine).
The screenplay has been kicked around for a while, and at one stage Sam Mendes was attached to direct. It’s only now that my interest is perked, however. Sam Raimi in the chair and Robert Downy Jr. on the screen in a prequel to The Wizard of Oz is undeniably intriguing.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND box office makes Tim Burton a $1billion director
May 27
Disney is jumping for joy and rolling around in large wads of cash as Tim Burton’s CGI-heavy version of Alice in Wonderland just become the sixth film in history to crack the illustrious $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. To date, Alice has earned over $332 million in the US and almost $670 million in worldwide cinemas. This makes Tim Burton a billion dollar director– just think of the wild and crazy things he can dream-up and shoot now!
With the 3D movement and inflation continue to gently nudge movie ticket prices upwards, certain milestones in film box office takings become easier to obtain. Like Avatar reaching a staggering $2.7 billion, for instance. Technically, more people still saw Gone With The Wind in theatres back in 1939/40, but we let that slide because, unlike the music industry, the Hollywood spotlight is shone on how much money a film earns and not how many people bought a ticket (which is a shame).
As slashfilm reports, Alice in Wonderland now sits with other $1billion earners:
- Avatar ($2.7 billion)
- Titanic ($1.8 billion)
- The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ($1.1 billion)
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest ($1.06 billion)
- The Dark Knight ($1 billion)
Shouldn’t be much longer before the entire Top 10 earners of all time crack $1 billion. Christopher Nolan’s third Batman, perhaps?
Warner Bros. plans to saturate the market with 3D
Mar 19
The descent into gimmicky 3D has officially begun. Again. This time for real. Warner Bros., the studio behind the Harry Potter and current Batman franchises (among others) is planning to release all its ‘tentpole’ (studio-speak for effects-heavy crowd-pleasing stuff like superhero flicks) movies in 3D. There are 5 of them coming out this year, and another 11 next year. Woe betide the happles Harry fan prone to motion sickness or migraines. Alan Horn made the announcement at this year’s ShoWest. I guess the mighty Avatar has a lot to answer for here, seeing as it raked in huge wads of cash despite being almost exclusively screened in 3D. The market model might seem sound, but the artistic reasons behind WB’s decision to release everything in 3D are a little muddled.
Avatar was actually shot in 3D — you know, with a dual-lens camera that records two images from slightly different perspectives which are overlaid and filtered to create the 3D effect in that little grey mushy thing in your skull — a true stereoscopic image. WB has decided that to save time or money or something it’s going to convert all its tentpole films into 3D in post-production. This is a painstaking process that takes at least three months to complete, and it involves 3D artists going through every single shot in the film and mapping flat images to 3D models and then separating all the layers into different planes.
The result is noticeably different from true 3D. Some layers and characters stand apart from each other like cardboard cut-outs, true depth in scenes is hard to replicate, and CGI elements always come off looking more 3D than their live-action counterparts. I’ve seen this in action a couple of times — I caught glimpses of A Nightmare Before Christmas in its 3D re-release, and it looked more like the 3D team had just separated fore-, mid- and background from each other and put them in three separate flat planes. This doesn’t look very 3D. I caught the latest Harry Potter (number … 6?) in its Imax run, and was therefore treated to the first thirteen minutes in post-produced 3D, and the result was similarly underwhelming. The best bit of the whole 13-minute segment was seeing how far actors’ noses stick out in real life.
What films are going to be converted into 3D in this manner, you ask? Well, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2; the third Nolan / Bale Batman film; the as-yet unconfirmed Superman reboot; next month’s The Clash Of The Titans; Final Destination 5; and any number of other DC projects including The Green Lantern and The Flash. WB has stated that they’re keen to fill the Harry Potter void with lots of comic book adaptations, and it’s about time they stepped up in answer to Marvel’s disconcertingly frequent level of output; you can bet that any and all of these will also ship in the third dimension.
So it looks like James Cameron’s plan to bring real 3D to a cinema near you has backfired: instead of filmmakers planning to shoot their next flick with 3D cameras, thereby altering the very nature of the craft, we’re getting studio-mandated post-facto sub-par 3D conversions in a transparent effort to grab money and ride Avatar‘s coattails in the general direction of the bank. If the industry wants 3D to stick around this time, they have to do it right, they have to do it Cameron’s way.
On the plus side, maybe public reaction will be sufficiently negative for this whole 3D movement to get canned before it takes off. Wouldn’t that be nice?
PLANET OF THE APES prequel gets a director, exasperated sighs from fans
Mar 15
There hasn’t been a good Planet Of The Apes film for at least forty years. Sure, the second one was okay, between Linda Harrison and some Golden Age sci-fi trappings, but the ones without Charlton Heston didn’t elicit more than a yawn from audience, and the Tim Burton reboot was jaw-droppingly, mind-bogglingly, cringe-inducingly awful in every conceivable way (except for the remarkable special effects, of course) — and the less said about the animated and live-action TV shows, the better. So here we are again, reading about a cult sci-fi film from days gone by being unceremoniously ripped into the twenty-first century by creativity-bereft studio execs. The Thing, Dune, Predators, Tron Legacy – the procession of worthless reboots goes on and on.
So apparently there’s been a script ready for this Apes prequel for quite some time. A fellow called Scott Frank, who wrote the sublime social sci-fi / noir / thriller Minority Report wrote a script called Caesar, which deals with scientists genetically augmenting an ape (specifically, a chimpanzee) to make it “more human”. Frank is quick to trump his script as “hard” sci-fi, the likes of which hasn’t been seen on screen since something like Children Of Men or Contact, but this is at odds with the “genetically augmenting an ape” part of the synopsis — there are a good number of practical and ethical issues that keep scientsits from this kind of research in reality, so we’ll take the “hard” sci-fi claim with a grain of salt.
On the other hand, he promises to bring back some of the classic themes and messages explored in the original classic film, a good sign if ever there was one. Forty years later people are still laughing “you blew it up, you maniacs!” or “get your paws off me, you damn dirty ape” and neglecting to discuss the important issues of holistic morality and the treatment of non-human animals brought up in the original. Planet Of The Apes put humans in the position of animals and asked “are language and civilisation prerequesites for emotion?” and in so doing invited viewers to question their own treatment of our relatively non-communicative animal neighbours. If Scott Frank can wrap socially vital issues like this up in a quotable, engaging narrative then maybe this Caesar business isn’t so bad after all.
The director recently attached to Caeasar is some bloke called Rupert Wyatt, who directed a film called The Escapist which, I must admit, I’d never heard of till I googled Wyatt’s name. It got mixed-to-positive reviews from the critics, but it was Wyatt’s debut, so he’s got plenty of room to grow. Minority Report dealt with heady issues of fate, crime, punishment and free will (in addition to being a first-rate thriller / noir), so if Scott Frank has pumped similar thoughtfulness into Caesar, Wyatt may be able to put a worthwhile Apes prequel onto the screen for us after all. If not, we can all get up and start singing “Oh my god, I was wrong / it was Earth, all along / Yes you’ve finally made a monkey out of me …”
OPINIONS COUNT