(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 28 February 2026 16:45, UK
A powerful twist can often be the difference between a good film and a great one. Psycho, The Sixth Sense, Gone Girl, Shutter Island, and countless other cinematic classics all exercise the concept of a good mind-boggle, leading you astray just when you thought you had it all figured out.
However, there’s little worse than when a director thinks they’ve done something, changing course at the last minute, only for the entire execution to fall completely flat on its face. After all, when you have high hopes for a film, only for it to switch things up in the most ridiculously unexpected way, it can undo all the potential it set up before, leaving you wondering what the hell anybody in that writer’s room was even thinking.
Often, that’s all it comes down to: laziness and poor writing. At the same time, said twists can often arrive without enough prior detail or nuance for it to hit satisfyingly, making the whole thing feel jaunty and incoherent rather than a real, integral part of the narrative. For instance, the reason why the twist in Barbarian feels so hard-hitting is that the whole time, we’re led to believe that the monster is the villain, only to have our perceptions completely challenged when it turns out that she is instead a victim.
It’s also why many people, the cast included, regard Planet of the Apes as one of the worst twists in history: because, once we finally get to the ending, none of it actually makes any sense. Similarly, people have called out Signs for equally lazy writing, especially with regard to the logistics of an alien invasion on a planet that is mostly water, when that turns out to be their main weakness.
One of the most controversial, however, undeniably has to be Allen Coulter’s 2010 coming-of-age drama Remember Me, in which Robert Pattinson plays one-half of a couple whose past struggles bring them closer. However, at the end, while things seem to be moving forward for the pair, he ends up dying in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
That said, if you were to ask someone like James Cameron, the worst twist in cinematic history would be neither of those examples. Instead, when faced with the topic, he once called out David Fincher for his “stupid” decision to kill off his best characters in the opening minutes of Alien 3, only for them to be replaced by characters he dislikes.
As he explained on Michael Biehn’s Just Foolin About podcast, “I thought that was the stupidest fucking thing. You build a lot of goodwill around the characters of Hicks and Newt and Bishop, and then the first thing they do in the in the next film is kill them all off, right?”
He added, “Really smart, guys. And replace them with a bunch of fucking convicts that you hate and want to see die. Really clever.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that a major franchise has killed off some of its more popular characters, but what Cameron seems to have issues with is that this also happened in its opening sequence – the worst possible time for characters we’re interested in to suddenly be ripped from the story. Judging by the response, it seems Cameron is far from alone in his gripe, especially with Newt, whose presence anchored the emotional core of the entire story.