When we discuss twist endings in a movie, you never forget your first time. In particular with the sci-fi genre, there are many films where the audience thinks they know where the story is going, but then the rug is pulled out from right under them and sends them in a completely new direction. They’re the kinds of twists that completely reframe everything that came before them, and will never feel as exciting as they did when they were first discovered. The only problem is once you know what’s coming, you can’t experience them the same way again.
We’ve got five sci-fi films out of many that provide this exact feeling, but this isn’t just about a movie having an unexpected twist ending that surprises an audience with something meaningless for the purpose of shock and awe. It’s about one that completely changes the viewing experience from start to finish, making you rethink about the entire narrative as if everything you knew beforehand was wrong. These are movies that deeply affected the genre and would go on to become an archetype for future creators to elevate their own work with. A list like this shouldn’t require a disclaimer, but consider this your last warning that spoilers will not only be a part of this piece – it’s the entire thing.
Trying to understand time paradoxes can cause a person’s head to explode, but in the case of Predestination it can cause bombings that affect the future. Ethan Hawke plays a temporal agent who has one last loose end to wrap up before he can retire. His goal is to find the “Fizzle Bomber” who has been messing with the timeline with his terrorist-like attacks at different places during various points in time. He chases this extremist from decade to decade, learning more about them and himself along the way, which is what leads to his jaw-dropping discovery that changes the entire tone of the film.
It turns out this time-traveler is the mad bomber, as well as both of his parents thanks to various cosmetic and gender reassignment surgeries they underwent through their lifetime, and eventually the person who sent him on his wild goose chase that kicked off this bizarre and paradoxical chain of events. Ethan Hawke’s singular character is essentially everyone and everyone is them, just displaced by different years and all unaware of each other until they are – and then feigning ignorance to continue the cycle from never ending. This is the kind of stuff that would give Doctor Who a hard time to decipher and have it make sense, but that’s what you get when you travel time and drop a bombshell of a revelation on a person… or persons.
As a whole, Soylent Green is that vintage slow sci-fi that comes with the 70’s territory. It takes its time to get where it’s going, but it marks its arrival with a huge impact. This dystopian tale has one of the darkest endings to a movie on this list, revealing that this overpopulated and polluted world that is hanging on by a thread has been feeding its inhabitants their own neighbors in the form of a thin wafer. “Soylent Green is people!” shouts Charlton Heston in the closing moments, revealing a secret given to him through inaudible whispers by Edward G. Robinson in his final role before passing months before the film’s release.
The ending itself is shocking with the revelation that these millions upon millions of humans are unwittingly consuming each other to continue the circle of life, but it’s made monstrously effective when you consider how something like that actually could happen. Maybe not in our lifetime or the next, but as an eventuality that feels everything but inevitable. As environmental crises continue to be a hot topic on the socio-political scene, the conclusion of Soylent Green remains a possible reality that many fear to this day. It’s not just the secret that made this movie’s final words so haunting, but how they stick with you for years to come.
Christopher Nolan’s Victorian thriller starts as a story about rival magicians, but rapidly changes into a sci-fi after the introduction of Nikola Tesla and his novel teleportation machines. The movies ending consists of two major twists, the first explaining that Christian Bale’s character is actually two characters — a pair of identical twins who lived two separate yet similar lives. The second twist brings us back to those teleporters, revealing that Hugh Jackman’s character was not changing positions but cloning himself and then killing the duplicate to conclude the trick. The only problem now is that even the magician isn’t sure who is real and who is the double.
A good magician never reveals how the trick is done, which is why none of the entries on this list will ever be quite as good as they were upon initial viewing. In this case though, there’s one more sleight of hand that can only be enjoyed by watching the film a second time and realizing that Nolan gives away the trick during its opening minutes. This secret on top of the secret becomes the “prestige” of the film itself, adding another layer to the tricks this film just pulled on its audience.
Charlton Heston earns a second shout-out on this list with this 1968 sci-fi movie that elevated the genre, and also gave us a secret so shocking that it’s been part of the pop culture zeitgeist for generations. As Heston’s character earns his liberation from the evolved apes, he ventures into the unknown world ahead of him only to discover a familiar sight — the Statue of Liberty jutting out of the sandy desolation. It’s in that instance that Heston’s character realizes this wasn’t some strange alien world after all, but the tragic future of his own.
Twist endings were a specialty of Rod Serling, the genius behind The Twilight Zone who wrote this script alongside Michael Wilson. If anyone knew how to manipulate an audience towards an unexpected ending, it was this pair of creators. Planet of the Apes never made it seem like they were hiding any major secrets about its origin story throughout the film, only briefly touching on what happened to the humans that once inhabited the land. It’s only at the very end that we realize what we just watched was us, flipping the entire story on its head and adding an unexpected element that completely alters the way we felt about the entire film. Future entries in the saga would include other twist endings that were world-changing (and in one case, world-ending), but none hit as hard as the first time.
Luke Skywalker’s unnerving revelation at the end of The Empire Strikes Back is a seminal moment for young fans who have never watched the Star Wars franchise before and have no idea about the prequels. Like several of the other movies on this list, the Jedi student’s discovery about his parentage has become the stuff of legend, continuing to be referenced throughout pop-culture over 40 years later – “Luke, I am your father.” What makes this one so much bigger than the others is how intimate yet monumental it feels. It’s Shakespearean in nature as the breaking point for many heroes in tragic plays who previously believed they were good but are now forced to question their entire belief system.
This wasn’t just a shock to be shocking or a twist for the sake of surprise. It subverted the audience’s expectations by linking the greatest threat among the galaxy with the nephew of a humble dirt farmer turned Jedi who is supposed to be our pure and relatable hero. How could this person be related to that monster? Even though there was still some runtime left in ESB after this revelation, words are sparse before the credits roll as both the audience and our rebel heroes absorb the news. There are few lines that have been a mainstay in media for as long as this one has, and that’s a celebration of how powerful this secret was and still feels today.
What other sci-fi movies with twist endings do you feel will never be as shocking as the first time you watched them? Let us know in the comments!
