There is a lump discussion about what constitutes a good twist. To me, it comes down to this - a good twist enhances the drama that has come before it, while a bad twist negates it.The first approach has replay/rewatch value, the second does not. This is why the twist of The Sixth Sense works. It doesn't render repeat viewings worthless, it renders them more meaningful as they take on fresh relevance in light of what we now know.
The twist in Bioshock, similarly, just adds new significance to what we have seen before. It changes it, certainly, it alienates you in a Brechtian sense, but I really like that kind of approach and bollocks to anyone who says otherwise.
On the other hand, I will give another M. Night Shyamalan film as an example of a twist that does not work, at least in the format in which it was presented, and that is The Village, where you have a whole movie of effective suspense and tension which is also masterfully underlined by the fact that you don't know what the outside menace is lurking on the edges of this quaint colonial New England town, and as soon as you realize that this town is a little as-yet-uncivilized pocket existing within the modern day and that the threat from the outside is the modern world encroaching on it, you are gone.
It is a good Twilight Zone-style twist, but it only really works in a short subject, because a short subject requires less of a time investment from its audience, so even if they don't like the twist they will have lost nothing but a few minutes of their time to it. Whereas if you put that same twist at the end of a feature film, all it does is motivate the entire audience to go, is that really what I spent two hours on? was I actually scared and suspended for the sake of something that turned out never to have been a threat to begin with?
So you see what I mean; it is a bad twist because it negates everything that came before. The only reason that it would work in a short film is that not as much comes before and so there is not as much to negate and hence less damage to be done. It you are efficient enough, the intellectual merits of the twist will outweigh the time-sink that you have asked your audience to devote to it.
To take another example, let us look at Now You See Me, a magician heist movie. Mark Ruffalo plays the obsessed detective trying to track down and apprehend the skillful magician master criminals, and it turns out at the end that he masterminded the entire thing. Now when I saw this in the theater with family I was the only one who saw the twist coming, and that was mostly because I was not looking at it from a plot perspective, since it doesn't make a lick of sense from a plot or character perspective. Rather, I was thinking about it from a writer's perspective, i.e. when you have come up with a story this weird and convoluted, you are going to want to lead up to a big twist at the end in the mould of the Sting, because all heist movies live in the shadow of The Sting and its masterful final con of the audience.
In this case, you cannot really do that. I predicted the twist because Mark Ruffalo's character was the only one for whom it made absolutely no sense. Really, any other character could have been the mastermind, but that would have rendered the reveal less surprising. Make him the mastermind, and it is entirely unexpected. But here is the problem - it negates every scene the character was in before. All the development that has gone into that character has been wasted, because he was actually a completely different character the whole time.
Which brings me neatly into the issue of spoilers and why I don't really care about spoilers at all. Here is the thing: if your story does really hinge on a plot twist being a surprise, then as far as I am concerned you have just written a really bad story. These things should hold up to repeated enjoyment, provided you have genuinely written a good story. If you have succeeded, the twist should make the story better, and hence going in with foreknowledge should enhance your experience. A twist that does not enhance the experience is the equivalent of a jump-scare. It is very easy to do and the impact lasts for only a second and won't work the second time around. In contrast, good twists and atmospheric drama implant ideas into your head that you just cant shake. Either way, a bold-faced twist is consistently meaningless.
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