It's been a big year for twist endings.
So far we've seen heroes turn into villains, villains turn into allies, secret societies
at work, life-altering decisions, and even one movie that turned out to partially take
place in a video game.
These are the biggest plot twists of 2019 so far.
Spoilers ahead.
The marketing for Us presented the film as a home invasion thriller with a dark secret.
That secret seems to get revealed when Red explains the nature of the Tethered and why
she decided to stage an uprising for her people.
It's a twist, of sorts, but it's really more of an explanation.
"The two were connected.
Tethered together."
Then the real twist arrives at the very end of the movie, when Adelaide realizes via a
long-repressed memory that she's actually the Tethered one, and that Red was her original
self, who she strangled and hid down in the tunnels so she could attempt to live a normal
life.
In retrospect it explains so much, but even if some viewers guessed it from the beginning,
watching it all build to that moment remains intensely satisfying.
There are a number of exciting developments in the much-anticipated and divisive final
season of Game of Thrones which could be considered important twists.
If we're talking about truly massive twists, though, we have to talk about the Mad Queen,
and the fall of Daenerys Targaryen.
Though it had been foreshadowed in various ways throughout the series, Dany's turn from
righteous crusader for the oppressed to full-on genocidal dragon rider happened so quickly
in the midst of the show's final season that many fans were caught off guard.
The episode in which she reached a point of no return, "The Bells," is one of the most
harrowing moments in the entire series, and some viewers still have their jaws on the
floor.
In 2016, M. Night Shyamalan pulled off what might be the biggest twist of his career with
the surprise reveal that his thriller Split was actually a secret sequel to his 2000 classic
Unbreakable.
Glass is a follow-up to both films that brings together the heroes and villains of each story
into one superhero universe, but it gets even wilder from there.
It turns out that Kevin Wendell Crumb, a.k.a. the Horde, and David Dunn, a.k.a.
The Overseer, are not the most powerful forces in their world.
As their final clash is underway, Shyamalan reveals that they were brought together not
to be studied or have their superpowers revealed, but to be executed by a secret society determined
to keep the balance by wiping out gifted people.
Then, of course, Shyamalan couldn't help but throw in another twist by making the brilliant
Mr. Glass construct a counter-scheme that resulted in proof of superheroes being released
to the world, establishing the potential for an even bigger universe.
And, presumably, even more twists to come.
Avengers: Endgame was only ever going to end one way: with the Avengers finding a path
to defeating Thanos and restoring their snapped-out friends to life after the events of Infinity
War.
We knew that going in.
The only mystery was in how it would happen, and the film threw viewers for a loop just
a few minutes into the adventure.
The stage is set for an Avengers vs. Thanos rematch almost right away, but when the surviving
members of Earth's Mightiest Heroes get to him, Thanos reveals that he's already destroyed
the Infinity Stones.
"I used the stones to destroy the stones.
It nearly killed me.
But the work is done."
Thor executes Thanos, and before we can even get over the shock of that death, the film
jumps ahead five years to show a seemingly doomed world.
The 2019 film adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary didn't attempt to hide its major
alterations to the source material.
Some of the film's earliest trailers gave away that the new movie was going to make
the Creed family's eldest child, Ellie, the victim of a tragic early death and even more
tragic resurrection.
That runs contrary to King's book, which kills off the family's youngest child, Gage.
It was a big change that seemed to allow the filmmakers more leeway to play with the psychological
terror while also upping the violence factor of the undead child.
It was also a brilliant bait and switch hiding the film's real twist.
The original story ends with Louis Creed's killer undead son murdering his wife, which
then drives Louis to bury her in the cemetery to bring her back as an undead ghoul as well.
In the new film, the undead Ellie kills both her mother and father and buries them in the
cemetery, and then the trio of undead Creeds descends on a young Gage as the movie ends.
It ups the horror quotient of the film's final minutes quite a bit, and while not all fans
will agree with the new direction, there's little doubt that few of us saw it coming.
Serenity came and went as a blip on the screen in the midst of a crowded year for movies,
despite a cast that includes Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.
Serenity is the story of a fisherman and boat captain who's obsessed with catching a big
tuna that always seems to avoid him.
His relatively boring life is changed when his ex-wife shows up and offers him a ton
of money to kill her abusive new husband.
So far, all the ingredients for a nice little thriller are there.
And then it turns out this is all happening inside a video game.
That's right, the story of Serenity is actually that a 13-year-old boy has programmed a video
game as a therapeutic exercise to reconnect with his dead father.
Then he decides to change the game's programming when he realizes he wants to kill his abusive
stepfather.
Then things get even weirder when the game itself seems to want to deny its own programming
and somehow prevent the murder.
You'd think the biggest twist in Spider-Man: Far From Home would come from Mysterio, the
man who uses super-advanced illusion tech to trick everyone into thinking he's a superhero
fighting off city-destroying monsters.
The trouble is, a lot of people guessed the twist that Mysterio was a villain just from
watching the film's trailers and understanding that Mysterio is traditionally a villain in
the comics.
To be truly surprised by a daring twist, you have to stick around until the mid-credits
scene.
There, it's revealed that Mysterio doctored a video before his death to make Spider-Man
look like the true villain of their struggle, while also outing Peter Parker as the man
in the mask.
This sudden change in the character's status quo, plus the sudden return of J.K. Simmons'
J. Jonah Jameson to the Spider-Man universe, is enough to make the audience feel as shocked
as Peter Parker.
Set in 1969 Hollywood, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shows us a history of a tipping
point within both the film industry and Los Angeles as a whole.
There's a sense of a city and an art form on the brink, and Quentin Tarantino successfully
creates the feeling that anything might happen.
Then, as the film reaches its climax, he drops the big twist.
It turns out that anything-can-happen feeling is there to set up Tarantino's dream version
of events: a world in which Sharon Tate and her friends are never murdered by the Manson
Family, and the Family members are instead fought off by Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton.
Sharon survives, Rick gets another shot at a career, and Cliff is along for the ride.
It's a bittersweet happily ever after, and one that lands even if you do see it coming.
There are two major twists in Joker, and both are presented in a way that creates a certain
sense of ambiguity so that you're not sure what to believe.
The first arrives when it's revealed that Arthur Fleck might actually be the illegitimate
son of Thomas Wayne himself, which makes him Bruce Wayne's half brother.
Doubt is later cast on this claim, but Arthur seems to cling to it, and that attachment
pays off later.
The film's ending drops the second major twist: the riot Arthur Fleck inspired creates the
environment in which Bruce Wayne's parents were killed.
So, in the continuity of this movie, the Joker inadvertently creates Batman.
Does this make the film too twisty for its own good?
Your mileage may vary, but there's no doubt you left the theater thinking about it.
Shazam! seemed to be a pretty traditional superhero origin story as it follows Billy
Batson and his journey from orphan boy to impossibly powerful superhero.
We see Billy learning to use his new powers in a mature way, his connection to the people
who become his chosen family, and his eventual defeat of the supervillain Sivana not just
through brawn, but through the power of love.
The twist comes in just how that love manifests itself.
In the midst of his final battle with Sivana, Billy remembers the wizard who gave him his
powers hinted that he would be able to share that power.
"With your heart, unlock your greatest power.
The thrones of our brothers and sisters await!"
Billy realizes that means that he must pass his gifts onto his chosen family.
And that's how, in 2019, we got the Shazam Family on the big screen.The film's willingness
to put such a massive new development out there so late in the story was part of what
made it so much fun.
One of the biggest keys to Parasite's success is the way it lulls you into thinking everything's
going to go one way before zipping off in another, unexpected direction.
The major turn comes midway through the film, just after the Kim family has thoroughly infiltrated
the Park family's lives.
At this point, director Bong Joon-Ho has expertly planted the seeds for what we think is about
to happen, which is the Park family's slow discovery that the Kim family have conned
them.
Then the doorbell rings, and the fired housekeeper who we never expected to see again shows up.
Then she enters the Park house again, and reveals both the secret bunker beneath the
structure, and the man living down there.
It's a brilliant turn that subverts expectations and fits perfectly within the film's framework.
Knives Out provides ample opportunities for twists and turns during its runtime, and writer/director
Rian Johnson delivers plenty.
However, the biggest plot twist at work in Knives Out involves Harlan Thrombey, a noted
mystery writer who's found dead of an apparent suicide at the beginning of the film.
It's eventually revealed that Harlan did commit suicide, after his nurse Marta accidentally
gave him what she believed to be a fatal dose of morphine.
Harlan killed himself rather than risk Marta getting arrested for a simple mistake, but
it turns out there was even more to the story.
In the end, private investigator Benoit Blanc reveals that Harlan's grandson Ransom actually
switched the labels on Harlan's medication to engineer the morphine overdose, but Marta
gave Harlan the right medication out of instinct.
So, the twist in the end is that there's not a murder of any kind, and that Harlan's death
really was just a misguided suicide.
If you walk out of The Lighthouse and someone asks you what the film's about, there's a
good chance you'll have some difficulty answering that question.
Yes, it's the story of two lighthouse keepers who seem to be slowly losing their grip on
sanity and reality, but if you really dig into the intricacies of the film, it's a lot
more complicated than that.
That said, there's still a powerful twist lying in wait near the end of the film.
It comes when the young wickie Ephraim Winslow reveals that his real name is Thomas Howard,
and that Winslow was an identity he stole from a man who died in a timber accident that
he didn't stop.
This revelation, and the guilt that comes with it, helps to add tremendous depth and
emotional weight to the film's powerful climax.
Plus, there's the fact that the twist means that both major characters are named Thomas,
their similarities contrasting against each other in progressively more violent ways.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.