A good plot twist is hard to deliver. You can’t telegraph it too much or the audience will guess it way ahead of time, but it also can’t come completely out of left field or the audience will feel cheated. Because it’s so hard to pull off, well-executed plot twists live on strongly in our memory. For some of them, even people who haven’t seen the movie are aware of the plot twist because everyone won’t shut up about it. So let’s take a look at some of the most memorable and well-executed plot twists in sci-fi and fantasy.
Obviously there are SPOILERS AHEAD, so do not proceed unless you’re totally okay having movie’s twists spoiled for you. Do you have any favorites that didn’t make the list? Talk about them in the comments!
The Double Twist in Moon
In the 2009 movie Moon, an astronaut named Sam is prepared to head back to earth after staying on a lunar base for years. After an accident, he runs across a doppelganger of himself. They both believe they are clones of the other. But it turns out that they are both clones of the original Sam and the company has been producing clones and killing them rather than paying for new astronauts.
The Memorable Twist in Robot & Frank
Robot & Frank is a movie about an old former jewel thief who is kept company by a domestic robot who helps him with his dementia. Meanwhile, he’s trying to impress a librarian he’s attracted to, who is single after a previous relationship. It turns out in the end that the librarian is actually his own ex-wife, and he just doesn’t remember her thanks to his dementia.
The Hidden Twist in Blade Runner
In Blade Runner, the twist is so well hidden it wasn’t even in the original release of the movie. In the dystopian world of the movie, the hardboiled Deckard is hunting humanlike androids called Replicants. Ridley Scott, the director, originally intended the movie to end on a dream sequence that suggests Deckard himself is a Replicant. But it was cut. However, we can see the twist ending in the Director’s Cut of the movie.
The Experimental Twist in 12 Monkeys
In 12 Monkeys, a virus has wiped out most of humanity and the mysterious “Army of Twelve Monkeys” are believed to be the perpetrators. Cole is sent back in time to stop the virus, but he’s haunted by a dream where he witnesses a man shot in an airport. At the end of the movie, he learns it wasn’t the Army behind the virus, but a man named Dr. Peters. At end of the movie, Cole is shot by the police at the airport and we see his younger self witnessing the shooting- turns out the guy he saw shot was himself.
The Dastardly Twist in Unbreakable.
Unbreakable is remembered as the only other really good twist move M. Night Shyamalan made beside The Sixth Sense. In this movie, a comic book art dealer named Elijah Price theorizes there must be someone out there who is “unbreakable”. A security guard named David Dunn survives a train crash that killed everyone else with no injuries. Elijah reaches out to him and together they discover he’s both invulnerable and has psychic powers. Elijah encourages him to be a hero and he successfully saves a family. But then David discovers that Elijah orchestrated the original train accident in order to find someone with superpowers and he has been behind several murders before this as well. Elijah’s goal was to create a hero so that he could oppose said hero as their perfect villain.
The Transformative Twist in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The Harry Potter books had a lot of great plot twists- the movies didn’t tend to do them justice a lot of the time, particularly in The Goblet of Fire where Barty Crouch Jr. being alive and working for Voldemort was not a surprise, but ridiculously telegraphed. But at the very least the great twist in The Prisoner of Azkaban wasn’t ruined, even if it wasn’t quite as effective as it was in the book. The revelation that Sirius Black is innocent and it was in fact Peter Pettigrew who betrayed Harry’s parents and on top of all that, Pettigrew isn’t dead but was Ron’s rat Scabbers all along, is still a totally awesome one. Poor Ron though, honestly.
The Ghastly Twist in The Others
The Others was set up like your typical horror movie. In the 1940s, a woman named Grace moves into a new home with her two children and begins to suspect it’s haunted by ghosts. And it turned out that it was- except it was Grace and her children who were the ghosts. The “apparitions” they saw were in fact living people who would eventually be scared away by the spirits of Grace and her kids. Grace had killed her children and then committed suicide years earlier.
The Duplicate Twist in The Prestige
The Prestige was a tale of two competing magicians that managed to pull off a multiple twists in more ways than one. The big mystery of the movie was how both magicians- Robert Angier and Alfred Borden- pulled off a certain magic trick. The movie also starts with Borden on trial for Angier’s murder. Well, it turns out that the way Borden pulled off his trick was that he had a secret twin brother all along. Angier chose a much more wasteful method, getting Nicola Tesla to help him clone himself (this is what puts the movie firmly in sci-fi territory), using the clones in the trick every night and letting them die. The murdered Angier is in fact a clone Borden discovered. At the end of the movie, Borden finally kills the real Angier who is basically like “worth it!” It’s all very complicated, but it makes sense…if you think very hard.
The Delicious Twist in Soylent Green
The 1973 film Soylent Green takes place in the far-off dystopian future of….2022, where the world is overpopulated and poverty-ridden. Most of them survive thanks to a food product manufactured by the Soylent Corporation called “Soylent Green”. While investigating a murder, detective Frank Thorn, played by Charlton Heston, discovers that Soylent Green is made from human remains. His horrifying line “Soylent Green is people!” is well remembered and oft-repeated by many to this day.
The Deadly Twist in The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense was the movie that launched M. Night Shyamalan’s career and led to him unfortunately doing several other less successful twist movies to the point where we just want him to stop. But The Sixth Sense’s twist worked really well. The movie centers around a counselor, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, who is working with a little boy who claims to see dead people. Meanwhile, Malcolm is struggling with his own problems- he was shot earlier by a patient he couldn’t help and is now obsessed with his work. His wife has taken to ignoring him.
But at the end of the movie, it turns out that Malcolm died from that gunshot and his wife hasn’t been ignoring him, he’s a ghost. It changes everything about the movie.
The Statuesque Twist in Planet of the Apes
This is another twist that was so beloved that pretty much everyone knows about it, even if they haven’t seen the movie. It also doesn’t help that the cover art of the video release tends to spoil it as well.
The iconic 1968 movie started with Taylor, an astronaut played by Charlton Heston (he seems to have been popular for twisty movies), crashlanding with his crew on an unknown planet after a long journey in space. He finds that this world is ruled by talking apes and humans are either on the run or enslaved by them. Taylor eventually escapes the apes but while walking on the beach he finds a destroyed Statue of Liberty and realizes he has been on Earth, his home planet, all along.
He only aged a year or so during his space travel, but a very long time has passed since he left Earth and it has destroyed itself in a nuclear war in the meantime, leading to near-extinction of humans and the rise of mutated apes. Taylor breaks down in despair and utters the iconic lines: “Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time it was…we finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
The twist was enough to propel the movie to superstardom, launching a frachise, including a remake by Tim Burton with a decidedly less successful twist ending and the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes trilogy. It’s especially impressive, since the original novel the movie is based on Monkey Planet did not have any such twist. The entire thing was the invention of Rod Serling, the guy behind The Twilight Zone.
The Parental Twist in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
It’s a well-known twist by now thanks to how it is constantly quoted and the fact there’s an entire trilogy of prequel movies centered around how it came to be, but Darth Vader saying “I am your father” to Luke Skywalker was a huge shock back in 1980. It was hard to see coming, since the trustworthy Obi-Wan Kenobi had said Luke’s dad was dead, but in hindsight it made perfect sense Obi-Wan would lie to Luke about his father being the greatest villain, especially when the guy was his old student. Turns out what Obi-Wan really meant was that Anakin Skywalker, the man Darth Vader had been, was dead and only the villain remained.
The most impressive thing about the twist would have to be the lengths to which George Lucas went to keep it a secret. He did everything he could to make sure as few people as possible knew about the twist to ensure it wouldn’t be leaked. He didn’t even tell the actor who played Darth Vader, David Prowse, instead having him say “Obi-Wan killed your father” during the scene. Of course, as many know, while Prowse played Darth Vader in body, it was James Earl Jones who voiced the character, so the line was later dubbed over with the real one.
Lucas didn’t even tell Mark Hamill about Luke’s parentage until a few minutes before the scene was shot and he told him about it privately, warning him that if the secret was leaked, they would know Hamill was the source since basically no one else on the crew knew.
All this cloak-and-dagger secrecy and hard work paid off, as the reveal the dastardly villain was Luke’s real father is still considered one of the most memorable shocking moments in pop culture.