Sometimes, small, unassuming moments in a movie don't reveal their significance until
later.
Here's a look at the most rewarding not-so-minor moments in great pictures those seemingly
random, throwaway details that happened to be a lot more important than you realized.
Spoilers ahead.
J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot wowed audiences with a killer explanation for presenting the
original Enterprise crew played by younger actors: it takes place in an alternate timeline.
One clue to the film's timeline-shifting conceit comes in the opening scene.
Characters can briefly be seen using communicators, which look almost identical to the ones from
the original Star Trek series.
When Nero jumped timelines in order to stage his assault, his incursion had consequences.
After his attack, the timeline was subtly altered, which manifests in the communicators
looking completely different from the originals every time we see them after that point in
the movie.
John Carpenter's The Thing is an absolute master class in suspense, and much of the
film's tension is mined from the shape-shifting nature of its alien menace and the isolated
setting of an Antarctic research base.
Trapped together in close quarters, those stationed at the base are forced into a deadly
game of hide and seek with a predator capable of impersonating any living organism.
Although, it's a situation they could easily have avoided if any member of their team spoke
Norwegian.
The film opens with a helicopter tracking and attempting to kill a dog as it flees over
the tundra.
It makes its way to the American base, where the puzzled Americans understand nothing of
the situation other than that the Norwegians are obviously in a blind panic.
Unfortunately, he's shot dead before he can try to explain what's going on, and the Americans
have no idea that he was actually saying: Anyone who speaks Norwegian would have known
he was giving them a warning, saying:
"Get the hell away from that thing!
That's not a dog, it's some sort of thing!
It's imitating a dog, it isn't real!
Get away, you idiots!"
Given the film's bleak and ambiguous ending, it just might have been the misunderstanding
that doomed the planet.
In Get Out, Chris, a black man, is invited to the home of his white girlfriend parents
only to discover that the family is involved in a nefarious plot to hijack the bodies of
healthy young black people to host the minds of rich, elderly whites.
It's a shocking twist, unless you speak Swahili.
The film's main title theme is a piece called "Sikizila Kwa Wahenga," and its lyrics contain
an important message for Chris and the audience.
Translated, they say:
"Brother, listen to the ancestors.
Run!
You need to run far!
Listen to the truth.
Brother, listen to the ancestors run, run!
To save yourself, listen to the ancestors."
Peele confirmed in a GQ interview shortly before the film's release that this was fully
intentional, saying
"The words are issuing a warning to Chris.
The whole idea of the movie is 'Get out!' — it's what we're screaming at the character
onscreen."
"Get out."
"Sorry man."
"Get out!"
Robert Eggers' The Witch rewards viewers for paying close attention, and it's also prone
to taking sudden and hard left turns into the bizarre and surreal.
Events befall the film's hapless family of religious outcasts that seem like they can
only be explained by the supernatural — but in the film's first act, it gives away the
possibility that there may be a different explanation.
In an early scene, father William and son Jonas are tending to the family's meager crop
of corn, which appears to have been affected by some type of fungus.
Indeed, it's been noted by some fans that it looks like a very specific type: ergot,
which is known to cause a variety of symptoms when ingested including mania, psychosis,
and hallucinations.
It's even been suggested that ergot may have played a role in the events leading up to
the actual Salem witch trials, and Eggers himself all but confirmed the theory in a
Slate interview:
"There are clues about different interpretations.
So, for example, the rot on the corn is ergot, which is a hallucinogenic fungus, so if you
wanted to take that route, you could."
"Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?"
"Yes."
In the first act of Blue Ruin, we meet Dwight, a homeless drifter living out of his battered
blue Plymouth sedan who exhibits signs of profound PTSD.
It's later revealed that Dwight's parents were brutally shot to death in their car by
a local bully named Wade years earlier, and Wade's impending release from prison has Dwight's
already fragile mental state at the breaking point.
Sharp-eyed viewers may have been able to deduce that Dwight's life had been marred by violent
crime within the film's first few minutes.
His blue Plymouth looks pretty much like any other cheap, neglected beater car you might
see, except for one crucial detail: the bullet holes adorning the drivers' side.
It's not just a cheap beater, it's his parents' old vehicle, the very one they were gunned
down in.
Dwight has literally been living in the memory of their murder, which makes his quest for
brutal revenge all the more understandable.
Marvel's crossover blockbuster The Avengers features a number of moments which subtly
foreshadow later events.
In one of its funniest scenes, Tony Stark calls out a S.H.I.E.L.D.
agent on the deck of the Helicarrier for not doing his job
"That man is playing Galaga!
Thought we wouldn't notice, but we did."
As it turns out, the joke has a deeper resonance than just showing how poorly staffed S.H.I.E.L.D.
is.
Galaga is an unwinnable game in which the player must defend against increasingly aggressive
swarms of alien invaders, not unlike the task the Avengers face in the film's climax.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of Spider-Man finally made his debut in 2016's
Captain America: Civil War.
When the Avengers are split down the middle over the government initiative to regulate
them, Peter Parker is recruited by Tony Stark as a failsafe in the looming fight against
Captain America.
It's the beginning of what will become a warm, almost father-son relationship between Stark
and Parker and with one nuanced line delivery, Tom Holland clues the audience in to the fact
that Parker looks up to Iron Man in a most profound way.
"You're Spider-Boy?"
"S-Spider-Man."
"Not in that onesie you're not."
"It's not a onesie."
The reason Peter's embarrassed doesn't come down to his age; in the MCU, Stark is the
only hero to use the "-Man" suffix, implying that Parker has modeled himself after his
idol.
Ironically, it seems like he's got a lot more in common with a different superhero.
"You got heart, kid.
Where you from?"
"Queens."
"Brooklyn."
In Andy Muschietti's 2017 theatrical adaptation of It, actor Bill Skarsgård brought whole
new dimensions of brain-melting terror to the part of Pennywise.
From his very first appearance onscreen, he gives off the distinct vive of a vicious,
feral animal merely disguised as a clown and also gives the audience a clue as to how it
subtly manipulates its prey.
Georgie, the younger brother of main protagonist Bill, loses his paper boat in a storm drain
but there's something down there, ready to lure him in with the promise of returning
it to him.
When its eyes first appear in the darkness, they're distinctly greenish-yellow.
But when Pennywise steps out of the shadows to reveal itself, the shade of its eyes has
changed to blue the same color as his brother Bill's eyes.
“You look like a nice boy.
I bet you have a lot of friends."
"Three, but my brother's my bestest."
"Where's he?"
It just may have been the comforting hue of his brother's eyes that convinced Georgie
to make the fatal mistake of trusting Pennywise.
For the capper on Hugh Jackman's 17-year run as Wolverine, Logan showed audiences a grim
future for mutantkind: none have been born for a quarter-century, seizures have driven
Charles Xavier's telepathy haywire, and it's heavily implied that his episodes have killed
off most of the mutants that were left.
Xavier is being cared for by Logan and Caliban while hiding out in an abandoned, rusted out
mill — and astute viewers may have noticed that its interior is a pretty dead-on visual
reference to his earlier years.
The many points of sunlight shining through the holes into the dark interior of the mill
are highly reminiscent of Cerebro, the machine Xavier once used to track mutants.
"These lights represent every living human on the planet."
Cerebro would render the locations of all mutants worldwide, which appeared as points
of light, in three-dimensional space.
The hideout’s ceiling isn’t just a cool throwback to the glory days of of the X-Men
- oh no… that would be too easy there’s something else going on here: ,
where the lights once represented living beings, they are now just holes…
because all of the mutants are gone.
Pivoting from dark family tragedy to supernatural thriller, Hereditary keeps you completely
unsure as to whether any of it is actually happening.
You can't really be sure if the supernatural goings-on are really taking place or if Annie's
mental illness is manifesting in seemingly supernatural ways.
That is, unless we were paying attention during her scene in the support group, when Annie
talks about how her brother complained about their mother trying to put people inside of
him.
It could be interpreted as schizophrenia … except that we later find out that this is exactly
what Annie's mom was trying to do.
She was part of a coven searching for a male host for the demon Paimon, and her attempts
to put Paimon inside her son was rationalized away as symptoms of his schizophrenia.
2016's Arrival gave us a heady sci-fi scenario: 12 alien spacecraft descend upon different
points of the Earth.
The U.S. military recruits an expert linguist to decipher their communications, which appear
as circular, complex glyphs.
Other nations are also in on the effort, which takes a harrowing turn when the alien beings,
which have been dubbed "heptapods," appear to make a reference to using a weapon.
None of the involved countries are able to agree on the interpretation but Arrival's
use of communication issues are hinted early on in the nicknames that the American team
gives to two aliens.
They're called "Abbott" and "Costello," which is obviously a reference to the famous comedy
duo, whose most iconic sketch, "Who's on First?" was essentially one long series of humorous
miscommunications.
"Who's on first?"
"Yes."
"I mean, the guy's name."
"Who."
"The guy playing first."
"Who."
"The guy playing first base."
Who?
The guy playing first!
"Who is on first!"
"What're you asking me for?
I dunno!"
"What we've got here is failure to communicate."
The nicknames given to the creatures serves as a clue to sharp audiences about what's
really going on