Even a good movie can sometimes have a surprisingly obvious twist, and these sci-fi efforts didn’t do a great job of hiding their big revelations from audience members. A great twist ending can turn an otherwise passable movie into an instant classic. However, the opposite is also true. Some otherwise truly superb movies, from 2003’s Haute Tension to 2019’s Glass, have been let down by last-minute plot twists that left viewers feeling puzzled, annoyed, or outright betrayed.
While these twists are sometimes hated because they seemingly come out of nowhere, in other instances, it is their predictability that makes them frustrating. Plot twists that everyone saw coming can be just as bad as revelations that no one could possibly have predicted, as evidenced by a handful of examples from the sci-fi genre. Some of these movies weren’t hurt by their predictable twists, but others, like Prometheus, Terminator: Dark Fate, and 65, never recovered entirely from plot revelations that were intended to be jaw-dropping and instead felt yawn-inducing.
2012’s Alien prequel Prometheus had its fair share of plot problems, from the inexplicable actions of some major characters to the knotty timeline of its Xenomorph backstory. However, one of the Ridley Scott movie’s biggest unforced errors came in Charlize Theron’s character, Meredith Vickers. Introduced as a Weyland-Yutani employee who is close to company founder Peter Weyland, Meredith has a notable frosty relationship with Michael Fassbender’s David, the android that Weyland treats as a surrogate son. This is because she is secretly Weyland’s biological daughter, a twist so obvious that many viewers incorrectly assumed that it wasn’t meant to be a twist at all.
Released in March 2023, 65 was a major box office flop for star Adam Driver. This is a shame, as the sci-fi action thriller had a neat premise and a couple of fun set-pieces that fulfilled its potential. When Driver’s astronaut Mills leaves his home planet, his spacecraft crash-lands on an unidentified planet that viewers soon realize is Earth, 65 million years ago. Alongside his ship’s only other survivor, Ariana Greenblatt’s Koa, Mills attempts to escape the prehistoric earth while avoiding the ravenous dinosaurs that still roam its surface.
Since 65 is set on a prehistoric Earth inhabited by dinosaurs, viewers won’t have trouble guessing what the concerning anomaly on its way to the planet is. When Mills finds out that something big is heading for a collision course with the planet, it doesn’t take a historian to guess that this anomaly is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, so the movie’s decision to drag out this reveal is a bizarrely misguided choice in an otherwise solid popcorn flick.
Not every predictable twist is a bad one, as evidenced by 2017’s superb satirical sci-fi horror Get Out. The directorial debut of Jordan Peele, Get Out tells the story of Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris, an ordinary photographer who is unsettled by the weird behaviour of his white girlfriend’s family during a weekend at their remote, palatial upstate New York home. From the moment that the family’s Black servants start to act in bizarre, counterintuitive ways when interacting with Chris, it’s clear that there is some kind of Stepford Wives/ body swap situation afoot. Indeed, Get Out eventually confirms this is the case, but only after a slow-burning setup where viewers know what’s going on, but Chris isn’t quite certain yet.
While Get Out’s big twist takes a while to arrive, there is a sense of dramatic irony to the reveal. It is clear that viewers are meant to know what’s happening before Chris, so the audience is left pleading for him to “Get out” by the time he finally connects the dots. In contrast, the predictability of 2004’s I, Robot twist seems a lot less intentional. This sci-fi noir sees Will Smith’s detective Spooner investigate a killing that was seemingly committed by a humanoid robot servant. While I, Robot doesn’t think its all-knowing, soft-voiced AI overlord is an obvious suspect, viewers might well cotton to the Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence’s guilt a lot sooner than the protagonist.
From the moment John Connor’s return was announced in Terminator: Dark Fate, it was obvious that the character was doomed. The Terminator franchise had already explored John’s story from every imaginable angle between Terminator: Judgment Day, Terminator: Rise of the Machines, Terminator: Salvation, and Terminator: Genisys, and the promotional materials featured very little footage of this supposedly central character. As such, while John’s Terminator: Dark Fate death was intended to be devastating, the scene instead felt inevitable for most viewers.
