As film fans, it gets to a point where we’ve seen thousands of movies and find it incredibly easy to figure out what’s going to happen in a given story, because the majority of films don’t steer too clear from a successful formula.
As a result, it’s always fun when a movie decides to pull the rug out and massively subvert our expectations, preying on the fact that we’re incredibly genre-savvy and flipping our firmly held ideas on their head.
And so, as inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the very subject, here are 10 movie scenes that so brilliantly subverted our expectations.
These scenes all proved that the filmmakers were acutely aware of the very tropes we ourselves anticipated, and sought to defy them in ways that made the movie feel more fascinatingly unpredictable.
Though subversion isn’t inherently smart and creative, especially if done only for its own sake, it can nevertheless breathe fresh life into tired stories when a skilled filmmaker is at the helm – as was certainly the case with these movies.
Nothing excites the audience quite like the realisation that they’ve got no idea of how the story’s going to go from here…
Duncan Jones’ Moon is one of the greatest and most frustratingly unsung sci-fi films of the last 15 years, revolving around an astronaut, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who spends three years mining alternative fuels on the Moon, accompanied only by a mannered artificial intelligence, GERTY (Kevin Spacey), which assists him in his mission.
But sci-fi being what it is, we’re of course trained to expect GERTY to go in the unhinged tradition of his older sibling HAL 9000 from 2001: Space Odyssey and turn villainous, probably to a murderous end.
Yet the entire film passes without GERTY ever turning on Sam, and in fact, he assists him all the way to the end without protest.Â
We keep waiting for GERTY to turn on Sam and puts the benefits of his employer Lunar Industries first, but it never happens – he’s programmed to help Sam and evidently does that job far better than the company surely expected.