So, what am I going to write that you aren’t going to like? Well, this time it’s that there are no spoilers and everyone who freaks out about them is annoying.
First off, right out of the box, let’s get this straight; there are no spoilers. Movies rarely respect the audience enough to not just give away everything that’s coming. People who think they are avoiding spoilers before the movie by being that annoying person who yells “NO SPOILERS” and then sticks their fingers in their ears or something are just delaying spoilers until about five minutes into the movie when the main characters usually just tell you the entire plot right up front.
Also, has no one ever watched a trailer for a movie? What the hell? It’s such a big deal if someone talks about a movie that people literally shut down an entire conversation because they don’t want it to be “spoiled,” even though the trailers for movies show you all the best scenes, give up all the best jokes, and explain the entire plot. Do these “spoiler” people sit in a movie theater with their fingers in their ears, eyes shut, yelling LA LA LA LA through the entire 30 minutes before a movie starts?
Second, if somehow you do get to a movie without knowing what It’s about (why are you going to movies you know nothing about?) and you go all the way through the movie without knowing beforehand what is going to happen, you’re probably not even smart enough to be reading the words I’m writing at this moment. That’s not how the vast majority of movies work. Directors are trying to make the movies as transparent as possible so that the rubes don’t leave the movie without knowing EXACTLY what it was about.
Think about it right now. When was the last movie you saw that had a twist so important, it would have ruined the movie to know about it? Now, think about movies that you made it to the twist without having known what it was going to be? It’s hard, right?
Now think about this; if you can remember a movie that the twist was that important, would you ever watch the movie again? Because guess what? If you rewatch a movie, you already know what’s going to happen. If spoilers were so damn important, we would never rewatch anything. Or are you a goldfish and literally can’t remember what happened after it’s gone?
This is why I say there are no spoilers. That’s not how movies work, and when you act like a dick and don’t let people talk about a movie you haven’t seen, you aren’t saving a movie for yourself, you’re just treating your friend badly. They saw a cool movie and they want to talk about it because it’s cool. They want to share something with you, but your selfish ass is shutting them down because you haven’t seen it yet.
On the flip side of that, if your friend goes to see a movie they say is bad, all of a sudden, spoilers are out the window. Suddenly, you don’t care about spoilers. You want to know why the movie sucked. Now you are getting all the spoilers and you will probably decide not to go to that movie based on what your friend has told you. Why does this make any sense at all?
If your friend likes a movie, you won’t let them talk about it. If your friend doesn’t like a movie, you will let them talk about it. In the first scenario, they tell you about an awesome movie and you go right out to see it for yourself. In the second scenario, they tell you about a crap movie and you don’t go see it. Here’s the catch; you don’t know if you will agree with your friend on that movie, but either way, you have shut down any conversation you might have had with them.
If they “spoil” a movie and it makes you go see it, you then call them up immediately to discuss the movie with them. If you shut them down and don’t let them talk about the movie, the conversation never happens. By the time you see the movie, you don’t have the memory of the conversation because it never happened, so you forget to call them. The friend isn’t thinking about the movie any longer, because life, and if they even find out that you have seen it, there is no conversation to fall back on to remind anyone that there is anything interesting to talk about. So not only did you kill a conversation when you whined about spoilers in the first place, but you also killed the later conversation you could have had because there’s no reference point to get the conversation going again.
Of course, when you let your friend tell you all about a movie that sucked, then you don’t go see that movie because it sucked, right? What happens when you watch it a couple months or years later and you do like the movie? You skipped out on a movie that you ultimately liked for no reason. Now it’s been months or years and you probably aren’t going to go back to that person and have that discussion again.
Also, what happened to the spoilers? You let your friend tell you all about it at some point, which made you not go see it, then you watched it and it wasn’t actually spoiled by knowing what happened. Weird how that works.
Now, it might also suck by the time you get to watch it, but the conversation you had with a friend didn’t make it suck. It was the movie. It’s the same way if they tell you that they like the movie and you see it and you like it. You didn’t like it because they said it was good, you liked it because the movie was good.
That’s kind of the big point to this entire post. If the movie is good, there are no spoilers. If the movie relies on the one trick of the twist in order to be good, that’s usually not a good movie. If the twist is going to be good at all, the movie has to be good in front of it and after. Otherwise, why would you ever watch it again? The twist that you didn’t want spoiled was just a stupid gimmick.
Plus, getting back to what I was saying at the top, the vast majority of movies made these days don’t even trust you as a viewer enough to keep the twist a secret. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good movie, it just means that knowing the twist isn’t going to hurt because the movie is good.
If the movie sucks, there’s no twist that’s going to save it. In fact, the twist in a bad movie just makes the movie worse. At best, you make fun of the twist in a bad movie, and at worst, you simply never go see another movie by that director again.
So, all this “spoiler” nonsense is literally just making the world worse. I don’t know how many times I listen to podcasts and I have to hear five minutes on “spoilers coming, we are going to talk about the movie, skip ahead if you don’t want to hear” bullshit every single time. I know what the podcast is about. I know you are going to talk about the effing movie. Who the hell is listening to a movie podcast, about a specific movie, and then gets surprised that there are spoilers in it? Oh yeah, the same mouth breathing drool monsters that can sit through 90 minutes of a movie and have no clue that a twist is coming.
It’s time to stop. There are no spoilers. If you want to go sit in a bunker and not interact with humans so that every movie that has ever been made will be a surprise to you, then please, go do it and let the rest of us start having conversations about movies again.
That’s the end of this rant, but I wanted to leave you with a list of some of the best damn movies ever that had amazing twists that were never spoiled even when you knew they were coming and some movies that basically fail because the twist could never really save them.
Good Ones:
Raiders of the Lost Ark – Nobody knew the Nazis were going to get their faces melted off and when you heard about it from you friends, you didn’t say “no spoilers,” you said, “hell yeah, I want to watch Nazi faces melt.”
Empire Strikes Back – Almost universally considered the best Star Wars movie and, especially if you watched the prequels first, you already know that Vader is Luke’s father. It never gets old. The movie is a banger from the beginning and nothing gets changed because you already knew the twist at the end. In fact, Star Wars is one of the biggest franchises in history in which spoilers are nothing. If you like the prequels at all, you already know the spoiler that Anakin becomes Darth Vader. And Rogue One, which is one of the best Star Wars movies in my opinion, is nothing but spoilers because we already know they steal the plans and that none of them make it. We watch it because it’s a good movie.
The Usual Suspects – Okay, this one is a bit tougher. It is a lot more fun to not spoil this one so that you can watch your friend find out who Kaiser Soze really is, but that never meant that you couldn’t talk about the movie. The movie is great regardless, which is why you are willing to watch it again and again to see the big reveal. You can tell people the entire plot of this movie, and never even mention what the twist is, but if you did tell them the twist, it wouldn’t kill the movie, they’d just be sitting there trying to figure out how that guy is Kaiser Soze.
Friday the 13th – Everyone knows that Jason doesn’t show up until the second movie, but everyone wants to see an old lady get her head chopped off anyway.
Bad Ones:
The Sixth Sense – This one might be controversial. A lot of people liked this movie and thought the reveal of Bruce Willis being dead was wild. I personally don’t think the movie holds up that well. I went and saw it in the theater when it came out, and I thought it was a pretty good scary movie, but Bruce Willis being dead did nothing for the movie in my opinion. In fact, it went south after that. What was the point? I thought the movie was about the kid being haunted by ghosts and figuring that part out. The reveal at the end did literally nothing for the movie. Pull that out of the movie and nothing happens to the movie.
Sleepaway Camp – This is just a bad movie from the get go and the twist ultimately reveals that the child has been abused their whole life. I have no idea how they spun off 2 and a half other movies on this piece of garbage. I will say the final scene is effective for shock value, but also not worth the wait.
Planet of the Apes (2001) – First off, it’s a remake of a classic movie, so that’s dumb, but second, the twist is that Abraham Lincoln is an ape? What the hell were they thinking? Again, this might have been a mediocre movie that could have been fine, but the twist at the end, which was supposed to be the thing nobody should spoil, absolutely ruined the movie. Knowing the spoiler actually makes it better because you can prepare yourself for the ultimate stupidity that is on its way so it doesn’t make you want to kick puppies on the way home from the theater.
The Hobbit – This is the movie I most wish someone would have spoiled for me. The Hobbit is probably my favorite book of all time. I was very excited to go see the movie when it came out. I have read The Hobbit many times, so I had no need to read about the movie beforehand, or watch any trailers, so I went into that movie blind. About two hours into the movie, I was thinking, “How long is this movie?” because I knew that they were not even close to the end of the story. Then it ended and I looked it up to find out that it was a trilogy.
What? They did each of the Lord of the Rings books as single movies and each one of those books was longer than The Hobbit. So they decided to make the shortest book into three movies? Why? Also, because they had to expand the story, they added in a bunch of backstory, and then they just added in extra stupidity to make sure they had three movies. The movies are terrible regardless, and I literally just gave up after the second one, but good lord I wish someone had “spoiled” the movie for me so that I could have just waited for it to come out on DVD instead of sitting in a theater watching Peter Jackson jerk off on my favorite book.
So, if you have made it this far, it’s your turn. Argue with me if you’d like in the comments, because who knows, maybe you didn’t like this blog post; it is kinda what I intended. But also, just let us know which movies you think should never be spoiled, or movies that were spoiled because you did know something in advance, or tell us why a movie utterly failed by trying to rely on some twist not being spoiled. I want to hear from you and maybe I’m not gonna like it. lol.