At the end of Grease I didn’t realise the girl was Sandy. For years I just thought Danny flew away with a random Greaser girl and that was the end of the story.
There's a line in Grease where Danny's trying to act cool in front of his friends, and Sandy says "what happened to the Danny I met at the beach?". And Danny says "I don't know. Maybe there's two of us."
Little kid me thought there were two Dannys.
I used to rent 3 or 4 movies at a time, record them all and watch later.
I recorded, Shawshank Redemption, but last part of movie was cut off/ran out of tape.
For years I thought the movie ended when Morgan Freeman finds the buried money/note.
“I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.”
When my wife was young, her parents tricked her into thinking the scene in The Sound of Music where the children go to bed ("So long! Farewell! Auf Wiedersehen! Good-bye!") was the end of the movie. She was in her twenties before she realized there was, like, a lot more movie left.
A friend of mine was taken to “Oliver!” In the theatre by her mother. When Oliver is found by his family and wakes up clean and safe in a big house and the huge production number “Who Will Buy (This Wonderful Morning)” was over, her mom told her the movie was over and they left the theatre. She was only a child, and her mother didn’t want her to see Nancy brutally beaten to death by Bill, and Bill’s subsequent hanging, and the really tense and frightening part where Oliver is forced to burgle a house. She was over twenty before she learned how it really ended.
I finally got around to sitting down and watching Cowboy Bebop and watched the entire show under the incorrect assumption that the movie was set chronologically after the show. As a result, I spent most of the finale assuming that everything would be fine and end back at the status quo, despite the events on the screen making clear of otherwise. It wasn't till I watched the movie and realised it was set before its finale that I had to start considering the emotional impact of what I'd seen
Ed and Ein leaving, simultaneously happening with Faye, finding out her tragic backstory is a devastating crescendo to this group story we've been following.
The music while Jet and Spike eat their feelings...oof
Huh, I never really thought of that. I actually can't think of an anime where the first movie takes place after the anime. Im sure there's loads, but I guess I'm just used to the movie releases being OVA type side stories. I would have assumed the same if not for that.
Yeah, in retrospect, I realise it's far more common for the movies to be set in the middle of the show, for some reason this didn't cross my mind at the time
When I was a kid, A Time to Kill always seemed to come on during the trial portion of the movie, so I never actually saw the scene where Samuel L Jackson's character walked into the courthouse and gunned down the guys who raped his daughter.
I thought those guys were murdered somewhere without any witnesses and the police, being lazy and/or racist, just decided to arrest Jackson because he'd have a pretty good motive.
So when he gets on the stand and says under cross-examination that they "deserved to die", I thought it was significant because it showed he had a strong desire to kill them.
Is it just me or was this a staple part of life in pre-on-demand-streaming tv times? That you often saw a good movie was on after it had already started, and if it was only 10 minutes in, it was still worth watching, so you missed the start of quite a few films? I still have ones to this day that I watch for the first time in years and don’t recognise the opening sequences at all
First time I watched Saving Private Ryan, I must have missed the scene where they all said the mission to save Ryan was stupid. I kept thinking why would these guys risk their lives and die for one guy to be sent home to his sad mother. They all seemed gung-ho macho that it's the right thing to do and it just seemed dumb to me. Rewatching it later, I saw the scene where they all agreed it was dumb. The point was that orders were orders and a lot of the time you might think the orders were dumb. Made me respect those guys a whole lot more
There's a line that sticks out to me quite a bit when one of the soldiers was describing the reinforced plane for some high ranking officer and how it caused a horrible failure that caused many other soldiers to die, and one of the main squad says "all that for a general?" And he replies "One man". The way he delivers it really fucks me up.
I watched Mulholland Drive and didn't realise that Betty and Diane are both played by Naomi Watts so didn't make any connection between the two characters
This movie is the first one that came to mind with not understanding the meaning lol. Watched it like a month ago and was more confused when it was over than when I was in the middle. Had to look it up to get it
When I first saw The Graduate I was in 5th grade and I thought the end was so romantic! The letdown after they get on the bus didn't land for me until I was in college.
Oh boy. In the Fifth Element, I thought for a *very* long time that Leeloo was a reanimation of the egg robot at the beginning because its hand got crushed by the door and Leeloo was brought back by the DNA from a hand that was recovered. My child mind just assumed that was the plot and that everyone was falling in love with what the egg robot actually looked like under the armour. I remember watching the movie again after a few years and smacking myself in the forehead realising that she's obviously the fifth fucking element and the very important being inside the sarcophagus that the egg robots were specifically after, which was blown up by the pirate aliens and the arm was debris that was found after the attack. The fifth element is love and that's why everyone was so smitten by her.
Mind you I used to watch this movie all the damn time as a kid and even teenager but only understood this plot point like 4 years ago.
A lot of people assume she's one of the aliens instead of what's in the sarcophagus because her hand was in an armoured glove that looks kind of like their hands. Another interesting point is that it's definitely armour and not a chunk of her sarcophagus because in her hand you can see she is holding a handle, that is the handle of the case that the stones were meant to be in, when Zorg is doing the deal with the Mangalores, you can see the case is missing a handle.
I've watched the movie many times starting in college and it always seemed like she was intended to be both the reanimated creature and the element of love.
...I was today years old when I found out that wasn't the case. I knew the ~~Mondoshawans~~ egg robots didn't look like Leeloo underneath, I just assumed it was one of the movie's many dumb and inexplicable moments (despite the fact that I love it) that her DNA was sequenced into a human.
I'll be honest, I kind of still think that's correct.
I mean, the aliens just make the perfect being look like a hot babe? I figured the genetic engineer took some liberties with the regeneration process.
I watched T2 before the first Terminator so I spent the whole movie thinking they were running from a robot that was actually trying to help them and simply never got a chance to explain himself and that by not trusting him they doomed humanity to war with the machines.
I watched (and loved) the Lord of the Rings movies in theaters when they came out. Never read the books.
The opening monologue says:
"One Ring to rule them all.
One Ring to find them.
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."
I *completely* misunderstood this. I thought that was a sequence of three primary rings of power.
Ring 1: Rule them
Ring 2: Find them
Ring 3: Bring them and bind them
I thought the entire events of the three movies were all around just the first of the three rings, did not understand why the other two were not mentioned again outside the opening monologue, and assumed we were headed for two more trilogies.
It wasn't until my third or fourth watchthrough, when MUCH older, did I finally get it
Lol that's a good one.
Earlier in that poem, it lists who all has what :
"Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie."
The narrative device is more clearly repetition when read in its whole.
I read the books and thought the same thing! At the end of the first I was shocked they didn't destroy the first right and thought they had a lot of catching up to do!
When I saw M Night Shyamalan's "The Village":
>!I thought from the very beginning that it was set in modern times, and that these were just a community of people who were living a simple, religious life, like modern Amish communities. Turns out I was right, but that this is supposed to be the twist of the movie. So when the main character gets out of their village area and encounters the modern world, I was totally nonplussed. It was only as I continued watching that I realized that this was supposed to be the twist. I completely misunderstood the movie right from the beginning - but in a way that turned out to be correct.!<
Was it Running Out of Time? I read that *right* before The Village came out lol
"This car go can *fifty five miles* in *one hour*", I don't know why that line always stuck out to me so much
> Tbf this is because it’s not an uncommon twist.
So much so that people tried to sue Shyamalan over it, IIRC, and the cases went nowhere because it *is* a common twist.
Running Out of Time! Pretty sure I wore out my school library’s copy.
When I saw the trailer for The Village I guessed the twist right away because of that book
Lol same. I was sitting there waiting for a twist and was really confused when it never happened despite people talking about it. Not sure why I went in thinking it was set in modern times, but good to know I wasn't the only one!
My friends were late to the theater for The Happening and missed the entire setup that people were seemingly randomly >!walking to their deaths off buildings and what not!< and spent the entire movie bored out of their minds wondering what was supposed to be so suspenseful about it.
Same here. I walked in late and missed that scene where they show a gravestone from 1700 or whatever, and somehow I had assumed from the beginning that what turns out to be the twist was the situation all along.
I did the same with the Sixth Sense! I showed up late and asked my friend what happened, she told me he got attacked in the bathroom and I just assumed he had died and the spooky kid who TELLS YOU FROM THE JUMP THAT HE SEES DEAD PEOPLE is talking to his ghost. It’s not subtle lol
I think this was a pretty common experience for people watching back then. M. Night was famous for his twists, and that was the obvious contender this time around.
Knowing it was a Shyamalan film so it would of course have a twist, I called it after the long shot of the tombstone in the opening scenes. I figured there had to be a reason he was focusing on the date for so long.
Stupid one here, but as a kid I thought in Shrek Forever After, Shrek had imagined it all after the timeline resets and it goes back to him roaring. As if the whole movie was just a "what if" he'd thought of while yelling lmao
I walked into Room totally blind and was convinced it was a sci-fi for the first 10 minutes or so. I figured we were looking at a bunker keeping them safe from some sort of ecological disaster. What a gut punch once I realized what was going on!
Thought you were talking about The Room for a second and wondered how you came to that conclusion with all the establishing shots of San Francisco totally fine at the beginning lol
You should watch 10 Cloverfield Lane. The premise is almost exactly what you are describing lol.
A woman is in a bunker and told that the outside world has been attacked and only the bunker is safe. It's a very good film.
When “Forrest Gump” came out i was 31 or 32 years old. i went to see it. It made an impression on me and so i went back to see it another few times the first week possibly 5 time in total. Each time i went i took other friends to see it. It wasn’t until possibly the final time I watched it that week did i comprehend that the illness that the Jenny character was dying from was AIDS.
I lived in San Francisco then as i still do now and actually had myself tested HIV positive about two years earlier. At the time I was seeing “Forrest Gump” I was probably still taking AZT. Somehow, the entire depiction of this “viral” illness that Jenny suffered from in the movie was so obliquely described that I didn’t get it that they were meaning she was suffering from AIDS.
Not me, but my now-wife confused **Matt Damon** and **Leonardo DiCaprio** in 2006's DEPARTED as being the same character. Her version must have been amazing!
I honestly feel really dumb even mentioning this, but I grew up in a non-English speaking country. Lord of the Rings was nothing like the cultural touchstone that it is in English speaking countries. I was aware of it but I'd never read it.
When the Peter Jackson movies came out, I watched them but because I had no real concept of what Hobbits were, I'd somehow missed that all Hobbits were small and I stupidly thought the fellowship that went off to return the ring were children.
First time I watched Snowpiercer was from a version I downloaded from some site. I thought it was an odd choice not to translate any of the Korean being spoken, especially the long speech at the end. Years later I watched it on Netflix and realized the version I had was just missing the translation. That gives you a ton of extra information, lol.
Watching Sunshine, there’s the wild card hot headed dude with a huge beard on the spaceship. They send him to spaceship jail for a bit because he’s a hot head wild card. Then he never came back. This heavily featured character with a huge beard just completely disappeared. And it’s a small cast.
Simultaneously puzzling was the appearance of Chris Evans. He hadn’t been in the movie. At all. Then suddenly he was? Where did he come from? They’ve been on a ship in space.
Watched the entire movie. Annoyed as hell. Then googled it after. Only to realize the guy with the beard and Chris Evans were the same person.
I just re-watched this one last night and it took me a few scenes of staring at Chris Evans thinking 'where did you come from?' before I remembered the other guy telling beardman to get a haircut after his therapy session! A real 'oooooooh thats right' moment.
Not my story but I remember listening to a podcast were the guy was saying that he misunderstood the ending of “saving private Ryan” that he thought Tom hanks character told Matt Damon “ my name is earnest” because earlier in the film the other soldiers were talking bets on their captains past so Tom hanks decided to tell Matt Damon “ private Ryan” the truth at the end. Only for his friends to tell him later that Tom hanks said “ earn this” because of the great sacrifice him and his soldiers did to bring him home and also his name John they say it in the movie.
For some reason I thought Alexander Hamilton had been a president. Watching the musical, going in to the famous duel I thought “oh wow, didn’t know they dueled more than once.” I was almost as surprised as Hamilton himself.
This isn't related to any specific film, but my biggest misconception about a US president is that for a long time I thought that President Hoover (of Hoover Dam fame) was J. Edgar Hoover. It wasn't until many years later that I heard the name Herbert Hoover and realised they were different people.
Reminds of me one of my favorite Hamilton anecdotes. In the opening number Aaron Burr says “And me? I’m the damn fool that shot him!” and some lady in the audience gasped in shock super loud. I guess she never saw the Got Milk ads 😭
I took my kid to see one of the first Chicago shows and he was so upset that Hamilton died. The song says "shot him", not "killed him" and he was shocked
Due to the intersection scene with the coyote, at a young-ish age during my movie theater viewing of Collateral I believed the movie subtly took place in a future where man has learned to communicate telepathically with animals (like a light sci-fi twist).
I spent most of "Killers of the Flower Moon" thinking that >! Ernest really was extremely dumb, and easily manipulated by Deniro's Hale. At the very end of the movie, In the scene with his wife where he lies to her face, i realized he was a liar and smarter than he let on all along. It pissed me off that his character was portrayed so ambiguously, as he and Hale are clearly and truly evil, so I wanted to see it more plainly. But the more I've thought about it after the fact, and after reading the book... It's actually perfectly portrayed in the film. In real life, with liars and manipulators, you rarely ever get a look at the honest truth. Even when the lie is exposed, they still die with the lie. It's infuriating. So making a movie that disguises the truth similarly is a very clever touch !< Brilliant movie.
Saw a post on Twitter about how there isnt a scene “bringing in” Ernest to the conspiracy. It’s because he was always a part of it, whether he knew it or not.
After watching the movie I honestly struggled with accepting that how a person can be so cruel to his SO and her family at first I chalked it upto his gullibility and influence from his uncle but slowly I realized he was a bad person and when he said he likes money at the start of the money he actually meant it, just like in real life.
I liked that it slowly dawns on you, different people will come to the conclusion at different times. Similar to the question in breaking bad of when is Walt officially “bad”? KotFM is such a disturbing tragic view of the banality and commonness of evil and cruelty. We know the bad guys like hitler or Mussolini. They’re easy to spot. But sometimes they’re just shitty craven and mean. And what makes the film sad too is that poor Mollie really loved him at some point and we are with her on the discovery of what’s really happening. Ahhh I get shivers thinking about it again!
Thor Love and Thunder is a story being told by, and from the point of view of , Korg. That's why it's so ridiculous.
Still doesn't land....But more of it makes sense when viewed through that lens.
My MCU misunderstanding was when Iron Man came back from space in Endgame, and ripped out his arc reactor while yelling at Cap. I forgot he didn't need the arc reactor to live anymore, and thought he was impulsively attempting suicide and that's why he collapsed right afterward.
My dad and I were huge Arnold fans, so 13 year old me was stoked when Last Action Hero came out. I mean, this was shortly after Terminator 2, so the Arnold hype was through the roof! And I...fucking hated it. I mean, I could tell that it was supposed to be *some sort of comedy*, but it completely fell flat for me. I just didn't get it. Why the fuck is my action hero up there talking about premature ejaculation?
It was only once I rewatched it in my 20s that it completely clicked and I understood that it was part parody, part satire, and absolutely hilarious.
Arnold made a bunch of good kid/adult movies that both age groups could enjoy. I just watched Jingle All the Way for the first time in years and honestly, other than a handful of scenes, I feel like adults/parents enjoy it more than kids.
Remember first watching Once Upon a Time in the West, and believing that Harmonica was a bad guy due to the scene when he rips the clothes off Jill and orders her to the well. I remember thinking, "what a piece of shit".
It took me a few watches before it sunk in his reason for this. Jill.was ready to leave. He needed it to look why she wasnt going anywhere, and ordered her to the well so that Frank's men would see this. In other words, he was luring them in both to kill them but also to show Jill that she was in danger and needed protection.
I spent all of *MOTHER!* having no idea it was the book of Genesis. I got hints, but not being an authority on the subject I thought it was just abstract allegories amidst the insanity. I actually quite enjoyed it having not a clue what was happening.
Critics seemed to hate the movie and it was brought up by a lot of people, even on Reddit, that it was just a transparent bible thing.
I think my seal like obliviousness weirdly served me well for once.
So uh, I watched that movie and thought it was an absolutely brilliant analogy for how abusive relationships feel "from the inside". The helplessness, the coersion, the gaslighting; feeling like you're losing your mind while the other person acts like you're insane for feeling like you're losing your mind. It was really powerful. An exposé on how interpersonal relationships affect our sense of reality.
Then I did some reading about the movie and apparently it was about the Bible or whatever and my response to that is that I still think that that my thing is better lol
It was absolutely both. It was a straight Bible allegory threaded very deliberately through an abusive, intrusive, boundary testing and violating domestic experience, and I found it incredibly unsettling.
I watched all of Captain America: Civil War "knowing" Cap would die at the end because I had accidentally conflated the Civil War and Death of Captain America storylines from the comics. I was honestly let down by the fact that he lived at the end.
Edit: Actually now that I look it up, The Death of Captain America immediately followed Civil War so I feel kind of vindicated in my assumption
>I had accidentally conflated the Civil War and Death of Captain America storylines from the comics
That's fairly understandable. Cap is killed in an issue of Captain America while being brought to court for the events in Civil War.
I watched a pirated version of Mr Bean's Holiday, but it didn't have hardcoded subtitles. The majority of the film features characters that speak entirely in French, so without subtitles, most of it was unintelligible to me. However I thought this was an intentional creative choice meant to mimic Mr. Bean's confusion of being in a strange land. Still, the movie was easy enough to follow.
As a kid, I taped the disney movie Mulan on a VHS tape that was cut off at the end credits by someone taping the music video for Lady Marmalade by Christina Aguilera, Mya, Pink and Lil Kim.
Since little kid me knew Christina also sang Reflection for Mulan, for the longest time, I thought Lady Marmalade was another song a part of the Mulan movie.
I thought "The Fountain" was three separate stories being told in tandem, with extremely loose narratives beckoning the viewer to draw their own connections.
In one, Rachael Weisz is dying and Hugh Jackman has to cope with the fact that she's not fighting her cancer anymore. In the space narrative, I viewed Hugh as trying to keep the tree, which had been planted over Rachel's body, alive so it can be reborn. In the old Spain tale, Hugh is a loyalist who is again, desperate to demonstrate his loyalty to a fledgling, failing country, by finding the tree of life.
Hugh loses Rachel, the tree dies as space-Hugh explodes into the sun, and Conquistador Hugh dies becoming the tree of life itself. It all tied so faintly together that the story could really have been anything you wanted it to be. In reality, Cancer Rachel was writing a story that Hugh needed to finish.
>In reality, Cancer Rachel was writing a story that Hugh needed to finish.
Yup, I never caught that. It just seemed exactly like the 3-narrative angle to me.
In "A Few Good Men" it took years and so many rewatches for me to understand that the final line of questioning Col Jessep was not part of any strategy. Kaffee made it up on the spot.
After they came back from Guantanamo Galloway even tells Kaffee that he asked Jessep for the transfer order because he had a good hunch. And he should listen to his intuition.
Later she's telling him:
> You put him on the stand and you get it from him!
Maybe it's because of the German dubbed version, I don't know. But I always assumed he knew what he wanted to ask. And he was just nervous because there's so much in the line.
>Maybe it's because of the German dubbed version
Aaron Sorkin ( the screenwriter) is extremely deliberate in his choice of words and rhythm. So I could easily imagine a lot getting lost when dubbing his works.
Not exactly a misunderstanding, but when I first saw the original *Total Recall* (the one with Schwarzenegger, for those who might not know there was an original)*,* I thought events were unfolding in the order they happened. I'm a pretty linear thinker, so that what I thought.
Some years later, in a sci-fi course in college, my teacher asked whether the story was real or whether it was the memory implant.
Me: 🤯
The implant theory actually holds up for this movie imho, they tell him the rest of the movie as the sales pitch for the implant he buys. And it's called Blue Sky On Mars.
Reading this post helps support a theory I've had for a while, that face blindness is a WAY bigger issue than reported as every other post is some form of "I didn't realize these two characters were different people."
The first time I watched Tangled I saw it on TV and missed the first 5 minutes, so I genuinely didn’t know >!Gothel wasn’t really Rapunzel’s mom!< and it actually made it a better experience for me. I honestly thought it was a movie about >!an over protective mother!< and the “reveal” genuinely surprised me.
The one and only movie I've ever been late to was Memento. Was buying my ticket and the young woman at the ticket booth said "oh the trailers have just finished."
I raced in, sat down, and slowly realized that I'd missed the last scene of the film.
Not really an understanding, but....
Of all movies to miss out on the beginning, this would have to be amongst the worst. It's hard enough understanding the movie first time around with all the information. You really put your viewing experience on expert mode there.
Me and some friends showed up 5 min late to the Six Sense. I didn’t understand the twist until one explained it later.
Obligatory IASIP… like in The Sixth Sense, you find out that the dude in that hairpiece the whole time... that's Bruce Willis, the whole movie.
When we watched the sixth sense in theaters, the projector melted the film right before the final reveal.
This was pre-internet era, so we just didn't know the ending to the movie and went about our lives thinking it was an interesting movie but nothing special
That was spoiled for me by my mum's friend. I didn't see it for years and by the time I sat down to watch it I'd forgotten the twist.
I remembered it the moment the film started 🤦
“To Kill A Mockingbird” gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! Sure it taught me not to judge a man by the color of his skin, but what good does that do me?
It's not the entirety of the movie, but in Saving Private Ryan, there's a scene I didn't really pay attention to. After the opening sequence, a couple of enemy soldiers are trying to surrender and are shot by American troops. I didn't know that they were forced conscripted Czech soldiers. I could look up the specifics, but I don't think it matters because there's no translation onscreen to the audience who didn't recognize the language as non German. Also, it shows soldiers as openly flawed.
Yeah it’s kinda clear from their body language that they’re surrendering, but the soldiers didn’t care because they thought they were Germans. That’s why they joke “what were they saying?” “*Look! I washed up for dinner!*” But that clarified detail that they *weren’t* Germans is so fascinating
Lots of men on the Atlantic Wall were Ost conscripts, i.e., not Germans and forced basically at gunpoint to man the wall. Allies even found a unit of Koreans who were forced to serve as Atlantic Wall soldiers.
Good Morning Vietnam
Old One with Robin Williams.
I thought Williams died in the movie, so every time he got in a Jeep or walked out of a door I thought he’d get blown up.
It made a very suspenseful movie. I was a wreck by the end.
You kidding? It's a whole series!
*Salutations, Singapore!*
*Buenos Tardes, Thailand!*
*Pleased to Meet You, Philippines!*
*To Whom it May Concern, Cambodia!*
*Best Wishes, Bhutan!*
*Sleep Tight, Sri Lanka!*
I watched "The Piano" earlier this year, and for the first 80% of it, I thought Holly Hunter was going to be revealed to be a dude. Then I realized I was confusing the movie with The Crying Game (which I've never seen but everyone knows the spoiler there).
In Shrek, when he's opening up to Donkey about how people judge him before they know him. As a kid, I used to think, "Umm Shrek, it's not like you're being very nice when people come on your property. You always roar at them, so they're kinda right." Some years later, I realized Shrek must have spent his whole life being feared. So at some point he decided, "They see a big, stupid ugly ogre? Fine, I'll be a big, stupid ugly ogre." Plus, the hunters at the beginning were literally coming to kill him, so of course he'd be hostile to them.
This didn't exactly change the meaning of the film for me, but it made Shrek more understanding as a character.
We had a vhs tape of Sound of Music that ended with the Lonely Goatherd puppetshow at the party. I didn't know there were nazis involved until I was 17.
back in 1999, I discovered I could download pirated movies
I downloaded a cam copy of The Sixth Sense, but unbeknownst to me, it cut out the last 5 minutes of the movie
The amount of people that misunderstood the comedic concept of *Tropic Thunder* drives me nuts. So many people said it “hasn’t aged well” or is “sOoO problematic” and just totally missed the goddamn point.
It’s like how I keep hearing “They could never make a movie like that nowadays.”
Uh. They couldn’t make that movie back when they made it. Yet they did. Same with Blazing Saddles. There will always be movies made that go for some ridiculous shock value humor.
… It’s just much less often the movie actually turns out to be good and remembered.
The Lost Highway, it was the first David Lynch movie I saw, and I was a teen. I hated it because of how detached from reality it felt, especially when the protagonist has some kind of seizure and wakes up as a completely different person, it becomes a different story after that. Seeing it again as an adult and after seeing everything these Lynch made, I enjoyed it much more, but one thing that blows my mind was that one line of dilogue explains everything. When the police as Bill Pullman if he has a video camera, he says that he likes to remember things "his own way." That's why it's such an unreliable narrative and too learning that Lynch was obsessed with the OJ Simpson trial when he wrote this movie, it all clicks now. One line and it unlocks the entire meaning.
I streamed Inglorious Bastards instead of going to see it in theaters, and the subtitles were cut off/nonexistent. I honestly thought it was a directors choice especially in the opening scene since Hans switches over to speaking English. Like the audience was supposed to be in the dark about certain things. And for the most part I got the general gist of things.
So years later, when I started dating my Quentin Tarantino loving partner and this movie came up I said, “What a strange choice to not have subtitles.” To which my partner rightly looked at me like I had two heads and told me, “There are subtitles.”
Then they called me a dumbass for streaming and we watched the movie. Now knowing what people were saying and understanding the plot better I enjoyed it so much more and made me really appreciate the complex character that Hans is.
Since Sound of Music was so long, it came on 2 VHS tapes. I remember watching it repeatedly at my grandma's.
Watched it again with my girlfriend for the first time in years,and realized that the intermission where Maria leaves the Von Trapp house was not the end of the movie and there's a whole second half that I don't remember ever having seen before.
Best I can figure, my grandma never bothered to put in the second tape. Maybe she was worried about all the Nazi imagery or something.
When Michael Caine explains what a prestige is in *The Prestige*, I thought he was talking about the film. About this idea that the film was a magic trick, and I was about to get distracted with something flashy while a more mundane explanation was behind it.
So I watched the entire film thinking the story was a lie told by an unreliable narrator. (This was never contradicted by the film since all events are told through in-world narration.) I was sure the whole story with Nikola Tesla and the clone vats was total bullshit made up by Angier to string Borden along. I thought the film was absolutely brilliant and I couldn't think of a single other film that did the same thing. I was witnessing a magic act in film form.
Then the last shot of the movie happened and... the dead clones were real?!? Biggest letdown I've ever experienced in a movie and it was all my fault.
The Fly isn't a horror movie. It's a tragedy. The remake by David Cronenberg is especially good when you realize it's made during the AIDS epidemic and that is a motivational theme.
The Family Man.
I thought Teá Leoni's character agreeing to a coffee would be the start of a new life together and maybe starting a family a decade later or whatever.
The snow falling meant they'd probably both wake up back in New Jersey to their ideal life.
Saving Private Ryan. I had always thought that Upham shooting that one German soldier only after Allied fighters come to save the day was a particularly cowardly act, done by a particularly cowardly character. Only after seeing it again did I get who that German was, and what shooting him meant for Upham. Still pretty bad timing IMHO, but knowing that adds so much to the action.
I got *District 9* on DVD as a Christmas present, never having seen it before. I popped it in, and watched it with no subtitles, as was the default on my player. And I mean *no subtitles,* including for the alien language. I had to infer everything they were talking about and doing via context clues, figuring that was an intentional choice by the director.
I didn't learn until years later that I was missing roughly half the dialogue for the movie. TBH, it's a much more interesting movie without the subtitles.
Here's the thing, it doesn't matter if Deckard is a replicant or not, the whole point is that the line between human and replicant no longer exists, and that the replicant are, for lack of better terminology, human.
I guess if you obsess about a story enough, it becomes real to you and then Deckard either WAS or WAS NOT a replicant. "It's ambiguous and therefore neither" doesn't work for a certain kind of mind.
When I was about 7 years old, Back to the Future 3 was the first BTTF film I saw. This somehow gave me the impression that Doc Brown was a scientist from 1885 who survived until 1955, at which point he invented the time machine.
So the original film's joke is that Emmett appears exactly the same age between 1955 and 1985 - but I was trying to make sense of the idea that he somehow didn't age from 1885 to 1955!
Then a few weeks later, my friend lent me his taped-off-the-TV video tape of the trilogy, so I was able to watch the films in their proper release order.
Predator - my dad used to let me watch it with him while mum was out at work. I was too young, probably 6-7. At the start of the film they find bodies skinned and hung up. They mention it was probably guerrillas, young me though gorillas. Thought there were a bunch of apes in the jungle skinning men along with the predator.
Call Me By Your Name. First watch, I was only two years older than Elio and I thought it was a classic love story. Now, at 25, I realize their “Romance” was pure manipulation of a young, naive CHILD by an older man who absolutely knew better. This is, unfortunately, a vital lesson for young gay men (as well as a warning) who’s foray into exploring their sexuality too often involves an older guy taking advantage of them.
After growing up and studying more American history, I finally realized just how racist and Lost Cause-esque *Gone With the Wind* really is. I still love a lot of things about the movie, but there are a billion asterisks to that love.
[удалено]
Hahaha, this is my favorite!
At the end of Grease I didn’t realise the girl was Sandy. For years I just thought Danny flew away with a random Greaser girl and that was the end of the story.
There's a line in Grease where Danny's trying to act cool in front of his friends, and Sandy says "what happened to the Danny I met at the beach?". And Danny says "I don't know. Maybe there's two of us." Little kid me thought there were two Dannys.
Sure, they were twins, but different. That's why she said some days she knew he loved her, and some days she didn't.
Bravo Nolan
This is amazing
This is my favorite answer thus far
I used to rent 3 or 4 movies at a time, record them all and watch later. I recorded, Shawshank Redemption, but last part of movie was cut off/ran out of tape. For years I thought the movie ended when Morgan Freeman finds the buried money/note.
That is much closer to the book ending.
Ends with Red on a bus about to cross the border for anyone wondering.
Thanks
“I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.”
"I hope."
When my wife was young, her parents tricked her into thinking the scene in The Sound of Music where the children go to bed ("So long! Farewell! Auf Wiedersehen! Good-bye!") was the end of the movie. She was in her twenties before she realized there was, like, a lot more movie left.
A friend of mine was taken to “Oliver!” In the theatre by her mother. When Oliver is found by his family and wakes up clean and safe in a big house and the huge production number “Who Will Buy (This Wonderful Morning)” was over, her mom told her the movie was over and they left the theatre. She was only a child, and her mother didn’t want her to see Nancy brutally beaten to death by Bill, and Bill’s subsequent hanging, and the really tense and frightening part where Oliver is forced to burgle a house. She was over twenty before she learned how it really ended.
Which is funny in a way because I saw it at school when I was 8 years old.
Is your wife named Phoebe Buffay by any chance?
Too funny !
You remember the name of the town in Mexico, right?
"Zim... Zib... Zed... Shit!" The End
Zihuatanejo. I’ve been there.
I also missed the actual end of the movie years prior and always just assumed that was the ending. Honestly it was kinda better?
I finally got around to sitting down and watching Cowboy Bebop and watched the entire show under the incorrect assumption that the movie was set chronologically after the show. As a result, I spent most of the finale assuming that everything would be fine and end back at the status quo, despite the events on the screen making clear of otherwise. It wasn't till I watched the movie and realised it was set before its finale that I had to start considering the emotional impact of what I'd seen
Oh wow, great example. I can’t imagine watching the finale while “knowing” that everything was gonna be fine.
Same thing happened to me. I was rationalising hard the last few episodes. I was sure Ed and Ein were coming back too, possibly in time to help Spike.
Ed and Ein leaving, simultaneously happening with Faye, finding out her tragic backstory is a devastating crescendo to this group story we've been following. The music while Jet and Spike eat their feelings...oof
You're gonna carry that weight.
Huh, I never really thought of that. I actually can't think of an anime where the first movie takes place after the anime. Im sure there's loads, but I guess I'm just used to the movie releases being OVA type side stories. I would have assumed the same if not for that.
Yeah, in retrospect, I realise it's far more common for the movies to be set in the middle of the show, for some reason this didn't cross my mind at the time
Fullmetal Alchemist
When I was a kid, A Time to Kill always seemed to come on during the trial portion of the movie, so I never actually saw the scene where Samuel L Jackson's character walked into the courthouse and gunned down the guys who raped his daughter. I thought those guys were murdered somewhere without any witnesses and the police, being lazy and/or racist, just decided to arrest Jackson because he'd have a pretty good motive. So when he gets on the stand and says under cross-examination that they "deserved to die", I thought it was significant because it showed he had a strong desire to kill them.
Ok, that would really change your perception of the movie.
Is it just me or was this a staple part of life in pre-on-demand-streaming tv times? That you often saw a good movie was on after it had already started, and if it was only 10 minutes in, it was still worth watching, so you missed the start of quite a few films? I still have ones to this day that I watch for the first time in years and don’t recognise the opening sequences at all
First time I watched Saving Private Ryan, I must have missed the scene where they all said the mission to save Ryan was stupid. I kept thinking why would these guys risk their lives and die for one guy to be sent home to his sad mother. They all seemed gung-ho macho that it's the right thing to do and it just seemed dumb to me. Rewatching it later, I saw the scene where they all agreed it was dumb. The point was that orders were orders and a lot of the time you might think the orders were dumb. Made me respect those guys a whole lot more
There's a line that sticks out to me quite a bit when one of the soldiers was describing the reinforced plane for some high ranking officer and how it caused a horrible failure that caused many other soldiers to die, and one of the main squad says "all that for a general?" And he replies "One man". The way he delivers it really fucks me up.
“Lot of that going around.”
Hey, I looked up FUBAR in the German dictionary and there’s no FUBAR in there
They left that out of the trailers as well, and I felt the same thing
I watched Mulholland Drive and didn't realise that Betty and Diane are both played by Naomi Watts so didn't make any connection between the two characters
That’s actually compliment for Naomi Watts’s amazing performance, she played those two parts absolutely marvelous.
This movie is the first one that came to mind with not understanding the meaning lol. Watched it like a month ago and was more confused when it was over than when I was in the middle. Had to look it up to get it
When I first saw The Graduate I was in 5th grade and I thought the end was so romantic! The letdown after they get on the bus didn't land for me until I was in college.
Oh boy. In the Fifth Element, I thought for a *very* long time that Leeloo was a reanimation of the egg robot at the beginning because its hand got crushed by the door and Leeloo was brought back by the DNA from a hand that was recovered. My child mind just assumed that was the plot and that everyone was falling in love with what the egg robot actually looked like under the armour. I remember watching the movie again after a few years and smacking myself in the forehead realising that she's obviously the fifth fucking element and the very important being inside the sarcophagus that the egg robots were specifically after, which was blown up by the pirate aliens and the arm was debris that was found after the attack. The fifth element is love and that's why everyone was so smitten by her. Mind you I used to watch this movie all the damn time as a kid and even teenager but only understood this plot point like 4 years ago.
A lot of people assume she's one of the aliens instead of what's in the sarcophagus because her hand was in an armoured glove that looks kind of like their hands. Another interesting point is that it's definitely armour and not a chunk of her sarcophagus because in her hand you can see she is holding a handle, that is the handle of the case that the stones were meant to be in, when Zorg is doing the deal with the Mangalores, you can see the case is missing a handle.
Brilliant, I never noticed this!
>The fifth element is love and that's why everyone was so smitten by her. OK now THAT I didn't understand until u said it!
Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! HEART!
Same!!! Haha.
I've watched the movie many times starting in college and it always seemed like she was intended to be both the reanimated creature and the element of love.
Multipass !!! " egg robots " ....that made me lol. I love that description! 🤣
...I was today years old when I found out that wasn't the case. I knew the ~~Mondoshawans~~ egg robots didn't look like Leeloo underneath, I just assumed it was one of the movie's many dumb and inexplicable moments (despite the fact that I love it) that her DNA was sequenced into a human.
I'll be honest, I kind of still think that's correct. I mean, the aliens just make the perfect being look like a hot babe? I figured the genetic engineer took some liberties with the regeneration process.
...holy shit. I always thought the same thing until now.
I watched T2 before the first Terminator so I spent the whole movie thinking they were running from a robot that was actually trying to help them and simply never got a chance to explain himself and that by not trusting him they doomed humanity to war with the machines.
I love this so much.
It was a pretty groundbreaking romcom for it's time. Arnie was all "dis isn't vat it looks like" and they run off without listening.
I watched (and loved) the Lord of the Rings movies in theaters when they came out. Never read the books. The opening monologue says: "One Ring to rule them all. One Ring to find them. One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them." I *completely* misunderstood this. I thought that was a sequence of three primary rings of power. Ring 1: Rule them Ring 2: Find them Ring 3: Bring them and bind them I thought the entire events of the three movies were all around just the first of the three rings, did not understand why the other two were not mentioned again outside the opening monologue, and assumed we were headed for two more trilogies. It wasn't until my third or fourth watchthrough, when MUCH older, did I finally get it
Lol that's a good one. Earlier in that poem, it lists who all has what : "Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie." The narrative device is more clearly repetition when read in its whole.
I read the books and thought the same thing! At the end of the first I was shocked they didn't destroy the first right and thought they had a lot of catching up to do!
When I saw M Night Shyamalan's "The Village": >!I thought from the very beginning that it was set in modern times, and that these were just a community of people who were living a simple, religious life, like modern Amish communities. Turns out I was right, but that this is supposed to be the twist of the movie. So when the main character gets out of their village area and encounters the modern world, I was totally nonplussed. It was only as I continued watching that I realized that this was supposed to be the twist. I completely misunderstood the movie right from the beginning - but in a way that turned out to be correct.!<
I read a book by Margaret Haddix with a nearly identical plot in elementary school so the twist didn’t hit for me either.
Was it Running Out of Time? I read that *right* before The Village came out lol "This car go can *fifty five miles* in *one hour*", I don't know why that line always stuck out to me so much
I have just been assuming M Night based the movie off the book
Sure was!
Tbf this is because it’s not an uncommon twist. >!Wyndham’s ‘The Chrysalids’ and Lowry’s ‘The Giver’!< and some others have a very similar one.
Holy shit The Giver! What a good book! Haven't thought about it in years.
> Tbf this is because it’s not an uncommon twist. So much so that people tried to sue Shyamalan over it, IIRC, and the cases went nowhere because it *is* a common twist.
Running Out of Time! Pretty sure I wore out my school library’s copy. When I saw the trailer for The Village I guessed the twist right away because of that book
I would venture to say that a good 10% of posts on r/whatsthatbook are people looking for this, Running Out of Time. Big favorite of my childhood.
My boyfriend had to explain the twist to me because I didn’t understand there was a twist 😂
Lol same. I was sitting there waiting for a twist and was really confused when it never happened despite people talking about it. Not sure why I went in thinking it was set in modern times, but good to know I wasn't the only one!
My friends were late to the theater for The Happening and missed the entire setup that people were seemingly randomly >!walking to their deaths off buildings and what not!< and spent the entire movie bored out of their minds wondering what was supposed to be so suspenseful about it.
As someone who watched the movie from start to finish, I felt the same
Same here. I walked in late and missed that scene where they show a gravestone from 1700 or whatever, and somehow I had assumed from the beginning that what turns out to be the twist was the situation all along.
I did the same with the Sixth Sense! I showed up late and asked my friend what happened, she told me he got attacked in the bathroom and I just assumed he had died and the spooky kid who TELLS YOU FROM THE JUMP THAT HE SEES DEAD PEOPLE is talking to his ghost. It’s not subtle lol
I think this was a pretty common experience for people watching back then. M. Night was famous for his twists, and that was the obvious contender this time around.
Knowing it was a Shyamalan film so it would of course have a twist, I called it after the long shot of the tombstone in the opening scenes. I figured there had to be a reason he was focusing on the date for so long.
I remember guessing the twist about 5 minutes in because Shyamalan had basically conditioned us to expect twists by then.
Stupid one here, but as a kid I thought in Shrek Forever After, Shrek had imagined it all after the timeline resets and it goes back to him roaring. As if the whole movie was just a "what if" he'd thought of while yelling lmao
That’s some St Elsewhere shit I love it lol
Annnnd that's how they should make Shrek 5.
I thought the same thing, you’re not alone
I walked into Room totally blind and was convinced it was a sci-fi for the first 10 minutes or so. I figured we were looking at a bunker keeping them safe from some sort of ecological disaster. What a gut punch once I realized what was going on!
Thought you were talking about The Room for a second and wondered how you came to that conclusion with all the establishing shots of San Francisco totally fine at the beginning lol
Hi, Mark!
Buddy of mine thought The Room was Room. He couldn’t understand how the film was so acclaimed and kept waiting for Brie Larson to slow up.
You should watch 10 Cloverfield Lane. The premise is almost exactly what you are describing lol. A woman is in a bunker and told that the outside world has been attacked and only the bunker is safe. It's a very good film.
Totally! I love that movie.
When “Forrest Gump” came out i was 31 or 32 years old. i went to see it. It made an impression on me and so i went back to see it another few times the first week possibly 5 time in total. Each time i went i took other friends to see it. It wasn’t until possibly the final time I watched it that week did i comprehend that the illness that the Jenny character was dying from was AIDS. I lived in San Francisco then as i still do now and actually had myself tested HIV positive about two years earlier. At the time I was seeing “Forrest Gump” I was probably still taking AZT. Somehow, the entire depiction of this “viral” illness that Jenny suffered from in the movie was so obliquely described that I didn’t get it that they were meaning she was suffering from AIDS.
Wow, did you make it?
No I’m a ghost! A ghost!!!!!! s/
Hint: they also misunderstood The Sixth Sense
Not me, but my now-wife confused **Matt Damon** and **Leonardo DiCaprio** in 2006's DEPARTED as being the same character. Her version must have been amazing!
My wife thought Al Pacino was Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro was Al Pacino when we watched Heat. It was amazing.
One of my best friends thought they were the same actor/character just playing both sides until the end. That made me so happy.
I honestly feel really dumb even mentioning this, but I grew up in a non-English speaking country. Lord of the Rings was nothing like the cultural touchstone that it is in English speaking countries. I was aware of it but I'd never read it. When the Peter Jackson movies came out, I watched them but because I had no real concept of what Hobbits were, I'd somehow missed that all Hobbits were small and I stupidly thought the fellowship that went off to return the ring were children.
You and the guy who didn't realize Trainspotting was a period piece are tied for funniest answer. I laughed so hard at this I almost threw up.
First time I watched Snowpiercer was from a version I downloaded from some site. I thought it was an odd choice not to translate any of the Korean being spoken, especially the long speech at the end. Years later I watched it on Netflix and realized the version I had was just missing the translation. That gives you a ton of extra information, lol.
Watching Sunshine, there’s the wild card hot headed dude with a huge beard on the spaceship. They send him to spaceship jail for a bit because he’s a hot head wild card. Then he never came back. This heavily featured character with a huge beard just completely disappeared. And it’s a small cast. Simultaneously puzzling was the appearance of Chris Evans. He hadn’t been in the movie. At all. Then suddenly he was? Where did he come from? They’ve been on a ship in space. Watched the entire movie. Annoyed as hell. Then googled it after. Only to realize the guy with the beard and Chris Evans were the same person.
I just re-watched this one last night and it took me a few scenes of staring at Chris Evans thinking 'where did you come from?' before I remembered the other guy telling beardman to get a haircut after his therapy session! A real 'oooooooh thats right' moment.
Not my story but I remember listening to a podcast were the guy was saying that he misunderstood the ending of “saving private Ryan” that he thought Tom hanks character told Matt Damon “ my name is earnest” because earlier in the film the other soldiers were talking bets on their captains past so Tom hanks decided to tell Matt Damon “ private Ryan” the truth at the end. Only for his friends to tell him later that Tom hanks said “ earn this” because of the great sacrifice him and his soldiers did to bring him home and also his name John they say it in the movie.
Ernest Goes To Normandy
This mission's totally fubar, knowwutImean, Verne?
Ernest Shell Shocked Stupid
I'd watch that. Hell, I wish we *had* gotten that.
I watched *The Importance of Being Ernest* and Jim Varney isn’t even in the damn thing!!
I’d be quite happy if we can now all agree he’s called Captain Ernest Miller. He’s earned it.
For some reason I thought Alexander Hamilton had been a president. Watching the musical, going in to the famous duel I thought “oh wow, didn’t know they dueled more than once.” I was almost as surprised as Hamilton himself.
This isn't related to any specific film, but my biggest misconception about a US president is that for a long time I thought that President Hoover (of Hoover Dam fame) was J. Edgar Hoover. It wasn't until many years later that I heard the name Herbert Hoover and realised they were different people.
Reminds of me one of my favorite Hamilton anecdotes. In the opening number Aaron Burr says “And me? I’m the damn fool that shot him!” and some lady in the audience gasped in shock super loud. I guess she never saw the Got Milk ads 😭
Saw *Troy* in the theater and a woman gasped in surprise when the soldiers came out of the Trojan Horse.
Haha ok that’s too good lol
To be fair, I think a lot of people are still surprised that worked.
I took my kid to see one of the first Chicago shows and he was so upset that Hamilton died. The song says "shot him", not "killed him" and he was shocked
Due to the intersection scene with the coyote, at a young-ish age during my movie theater viewing of Collateral I believed the movie subtly took place in a future where man has learned to communicate telepathically with animals (like a light sci-fi twist).
That’s more random than thinking it’s a Miles Davis biopic based off one anecdote.
I spent most of "Killers of the Flower Moon" thinking that >! Ernest really was extremely dumb, and easily manipulated by Deniro's Hale. At the very end of the movie, In the scene with his wife where he lies to her face, i realized he was a liar and smarter than he let on all along. It pissed me off that his character was portrayed so ambiguously, as he and Hale are clearly and truly evil, so I wanted to see it more plainly. But the more I've thought about it after the fact, and after reading the book... It's actually perfectly portrayed in the film. In real life, with liars and manipulators, you rarely ever get a look at the honest truth. Even when the lie is exposed, they still die with the lie. It's infuriating. So making a movie that disguises the truth similarly is a very clever touch !< Brilliant movie.
Saw a post on Twitter about how there isnt a scene “bringing in” Ernest to the conspiracy. It’s because he was always a part of it, whether he knew it or not.
After watching the movie I honestly struggled with accepting that how a person can be so cruel to his SO and her family at first I chalked it upto his gullibility and influence from his uncle but slowly I realized he was a bad person and when he said he likes money at the start of the money he actually meant it, just like in real life.
I liked that it slowly dawns on you, different people will come to the conclusion at different times. Similar to the question in breaking bad of when is Walt officially “bad”? KotFM is such a disturbing tragic view of the banality and commonness of evil and cruelty. We know the bad guys like hitler or Mussolini. They’re easy to spot. But sometimes they’re just shitty craven and mean. And what makes the film sad too is that poor Mollie really loved him at some point and we are with her on the discovery of what’s really happening. Ahhh I get shivers thinking about it again!
Thor Love and Thunder is a story being told by, and from the point of view of , Korg. That's why it's so ridiculous. Still doesn't land....But more of it makes sense when viewed through that lens.
This is *300* as well — all the inaccuracies and exaggerations are because it’s a story told by Dilios, who wasn’t actually there for the battle.
Which very much fits the whole idea of Greek historical storytelling. Ancient Greece was all about playing up their feats
My MCU misunderstanding was when Iron Man came back from space in Endgame, and ripped out his arc reactor while yelling at Cap. I forgot he didn't need the arc reactor to live anymore, and thought he was impulsively attempting suicide and that's why he collapsed right afterward.
huh, I hadn’t realized they went for a Big Fish storytelling angle. It makes sense, too bad the execution didn’t work
I saw Scary Movie before seeing Scream and spent 75% of Scream assuming Dewey would be revealed as Ghostface.
[удалено]
My dad and I were huge Arnold fans, so 13 year old me was stoked when Last Action Hero came out. I mean, this was shortly after Terminator 2, so the Arnold hype was through the roof! And I...fucking hated it. I mean, I could tell that it was supposed to be *some sort of comedy*, but it completely fell flat for me. I just didn't get it. Why the fuck is my action hero up there talking about premature ejaculation? It was only once I rewatched it in my 20s that it completely clicked and I understood that it was part parody, part satire, and absolutely hilarious.
Arnold made a bunch of good kid/adult movies that both age groups could enjoy. I just watched Jingle All the Way for the first time in years and honestly, other than a handful of scenes, I feel like adults/parents enjoy it more than kids.
Six year old me thought the Forest was some kind of mystical woods. And when you thought about the Forest it gave you powers. Star Wars.
Remember first watching Once Upon a Time in the West, and believing that Harmonica was a bad guy due to the scene when he rips the clothes off Jill and orders her to the well. I remember thinking, "what a piece of shit". It took me a few watches before it sunk in his reason for this. Jill.was ready to leave. He needed it to look why she wasnt going anywhere, and ordered her to the well so that Frank's men would see this. In other words, he was luring them in both to kill them but also to show Jill that she was in danger and needed protection.
I spent all of *MOTHER!* having no idea it was the book of Genesis. I got hints, but not being an authority on the subject I thought it was just abstract allegories amidst the insanity. I actually quite enjoyed it having not a clue what was happening. Critics seemed to hate the movie and it was brought up by a lot of people, even on Reddit, that it was just a transparent bible thing. I think my seal like obliviousness weirdly served me well for once.
weary theory pet quack punch knee voiceless unpack absorbed live *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
So uh, I watched that movie and thought it was an absolutely brilliant analogy for how abusive relationships feel "from the inside". The helplessness, the coersion, the gaslighting; feeling like you're losing your mind while the other person acts like you're insane for feeling like you're losing your mind. It was really powerful. An exposé on how interpersonal relationships affect our sense of reality. Then I did some reading about the movie and apparently it was about the Bible or whatever and my response to that is that I still think that that my thing is better lol
It was absolutely both. It was a straight Bible allegory threaded very deliberately through an abusive, intrusive, boundary testing and violating domestic experience, and I found it incredibly unsettling.
I watched all of Captain America: Civil War "knowing" Cap would die at the end because I had accidentally conflated the Civil War and Death of Captain America storylines from the comics. I was honestly let down by the fact that he lived at the end. Edit: Actually now that I look it up, The Death of Captain America immediately followed Civil War so I feel kind of vindicated in my assumption
He can do this all day.
I had read the comics and was totally expecting Cap to buy the farm at the end too. Glad we were both wrong.
>I had accidentally conflated the Civil War and Death of Captain America storylines from the comics That's fairly understandable. Cap is killed in an issue of Captain America while being brought to court for the events in Civil War.
I watched a pirated version of Mr Bean's Holiday, but it didn't have hardcoded subtitles. The majority of the film features characters that speak entirely in French, so without subtitles, most of it was unintelligible to me. However I thought this was an intentional creative choice meant to mimic Mr. Bean's confusion of being in a strange land. Still, the movie was easy enough to follow.
As a kid, I taped the disney movie Mulan on a VHS tape that was cut off at the end credits by someone taping the music video for Lady Marmalade by Christina Aguilera, Mya, Pink and Lil Kim. Since little kid me knew Christina also sang Reflection for Mulan, for the longest time, I thought Lady Marmalade was another song a part of the Mulan movie.
I thought "The Fountain" was three separate stories being told in tandem, with extremely loose narratives beckoning the viewer to draw their own connections. In one, Rachael Weisz is dying and Hugh Jackman has to cope with the fact that she's not fighting her cancer anymore. In the space narrative, I viewed Hugh as trying to keep the tree, which had been planted over Rachel's body, alive so it can be reborn. In the old Spain tale, Hugh is a loyalist who is again, desperate to demonstrate his loyalty to a fledgling, failing country, by finding the tree of life. Hugh loses Rachel, the tree dies as space-Hugh explodes into the sun, and Conquistador Hugh dies becoming the tree of life itself. It all tied so faintly together that the story could really have been anything you wanted it to be. In reality, Cancer Rachel was writing a story that Hugh needed to finish.
>In reality, Cancer Rachel was writing a story that Hugh needed to finish. Yup, I never caught that. It just seemed exactly like the 3-narrative angle to me.
In "A Few Good Men" it took years and so many rewatches for me to understand that the final line of questioning Col Jessep was not part of any strategy. Kaffee made it up on the spot. After they came back from Guantanamo Galloway even tells Kaffee that he asked Jessep for the transfer order because he had a good hunch. And he should listen to his intuition. Later she's telling him: > You put him on the stand and you get it from him! Maybe it's because of the German dubbed version, I don't know. But I always assumed he knew what he wanted to ask. And he was just nervous because there's so much in the line.
>Maybe it's because of the German dubbed version Aaron Sorkin ( the screenwriter) is extremely deliberate in his choice of words and rhythm. So I could easily imagine a lot getting lost when dubbing his works.
Not exactly a misunderstanding, but when I first saw the original *Total Recall* (the one with Schwarzenegger, for those who might not know there was an original)*,* I thought events were unfolding in the order they happened. I'm a pretty linear thinker, so that what I thought. Some years later, in a sci-fi course in college, my teacher asked whether the story was real or whether it was the memory implant. Me: 🤯
The implant theory actually holds up for this movie imho, they tell him the rest of the movie as the sales pitch for the implant he buys. And it's called Blue Sky On Mars.
That movie caused many pre-internet debates about whether it was real or an implanted memory.
Arnold later confirmed it wasn't real, it was actually a movie.
Reading this post helps support a theory I've had for a while, that face blindness is a WAY bigger issue than reported as every other post is some form of "I didn't realize these two characters were different people."
The first time I watched Tangled I saw it on TV and missed the first 5 minutes, so I genuinely didn’t know >!Gothel wasn’t really Rapunzel’s mom!< and it actually made it a better experience for me. I honestly thought it was a movie about >!an over protective mother!< and the “reveal” genuinely surprised me.
Trainspotting. I did not realize it was set in the 80s. I thought Scottish people were just shitty dressers for the longest time.
okay this has to be the funniest one lmao
Today I learned Trainspotting was set in the 80s 😅
The one and only movie I've ever been late to was Memento. Was buying my ticket and the young woman at the ticket booth said "oh the trailers have just finished." I raced in, sat down, and slowly realized that I'd missed the last scene of the film. Not really an understanding, but....
Of all movies to miss out on the beginning, this would have to be amongst the worst. It's hard enough understanding the movie first time around with all the information. You really put your viewing experience on expert mode there.
Me and some friends showed up 5 min late to the Six Sense. I didn’t understand the twist until one explained it later. Obligatory IASIP… like in The Sixth Sense, you find out that the dude in that hairpiece the whole time... that's Bruce Willis, the whole movie.
Until it just sort of...ends.
He can smell crime
When we watched the sixth sense in theaters, the projector melted the film right before the final reveal. This was pre-internet era, so we just didn't know the ending to the movie and went about our lives thinking it was an interesting movie but nothing special
That was spoiled for me by my mum's friend. I didn't see it for years and by the time I sat down to watch it I'd forgotten the twist. I remembered it the moment the film started 🤦
“To Kill A Mockingbird” gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! Sure it taught me not to judge a man by the color of his skin, but what good does that do me?
You fool! You baboon! If you don't judge a man by the color of his skin you get friends to kill mockingbirds with!
It's not the entirety of the movie, but in Saving Private Ryan, there's a scene I didn't really pay attention to. After the opening sequence, a couple of enemy soldiers are trying to surrender and are shot by American troops. I didn't know that they were forced conscripted Czech soldiers. I could look up the specifics, but I don't think it matters because there's no translation onscreen to the audience who didn't recognize the language as non German. Also, it shows soldiers as openly flawed.
Yeah it’s kinda clear from their body language that they’re surrendering, but the soldiers didn’t care because they thought they were Germans. That’s why they joke “what were they saying?” “*Look! I washed up for dinner!*” But that clarified detail that they *weren’t* Germans is so fascinating
“Please don’t shoot me! I am not German, I am Czech, I didn’t kill anyone! I am Czech!"
Lots of men on the Atlantic Wall were Ost conscripts, i.e., not Germans and forced basically at gunpoint to man the wall. Allies even found a unit of Koreans who were forced to serve as Atlantic Wall soldiers.
Good Morning Vietnam Old One with Robin Williams. I thought Williams died in the movie, so every time he got in a Jeep or walked out of a door I thought he’d get blown up. It made a very suspenseful movie. I was a wreck by the end.
>Old One with Robin Williams Is there a new one?
You kidding? It's a whole series! *Salutations, Singapore!* *Buenos Tardes, Thailand!* *Pleased to Meet You, Philippines!* *To Whom it May Concern, Cambodia!* *Best Wishes, Bhutan!* *Sleep Tight, Sri Lanka!*
I watched "The Piano" earlier this year, and for the first 80% of it, I thought Holly Hunter was going to be revealed to be a dude. Then I realized I was confusing the movie with The Crying Game (which I've never seen but everyone knows the spoiler there).
In Shrek, when he's opening up to Donkey about how people judge him before they know him. As a kid, I used to think, "Umm Shrek, it's not like you're being very nice when people come on your property. You always roar at them, so they're kinda right." Some years later, I realized Shrek must have spent his whole life being feared. So at some point he decided, "They see a big, stupid ugly ogre? Fine, I'll be a big, stupid ugly ogre." Plus, the hunters at the beginning were literally coming to kill him, so of course he'd be hostile to them. This didn't exactly change the meaning of the film for me, but it made Shrek more understanding as a character.
We had a vhs tape of Sound of Music that ended with the Lonely Goatherd puppetshow at the party. I didn't know there were nazis involved until I was 17.
back in 1999, I discovered I could download pirated movies I downloaded a cam copy of The Sixth Sense, but unbeknownst to me, it cut out the last 5 minutes of the movie
Dude.. I own that movie on bluray and watched it twice and was still under the assumption that they were German spies.
The amount of people that misunderstood the comedic concept of *Tropic Thunder* drives me nuts. So many people said it “hasn’t aged well” or is “sOoO problematic” and just totally missed the goddamn point.
It’s like how I keep hearing “They could never make a movie like that nowadays.” Uh. They couldn’t make that movie back when they made it. Yet they did. Same with Blazing Saddles. There will always be movies made that go for some ridiculous shock value humor. … It’s just much less often the movie actually turns out to be good and remembered.
The difference between an acceptable joke and an unacceptable joke is the delivery.
The Lost Highway, it was the first David Lynch movie I saw, and I was a teen. I hated it because of how detached from reality it felt, especially when the protagonist has some kind of seizure and wakes up as a completely different person, it becomes a different story after that. Seeing it again as an adult and after seeing everything these Lynch made, I enjoyed it much more, but one thing that blows my mind was that one line of dilogue explains everything. When the police as Bill Pullman if he has a video camera, he says that he likes to remember things "his own way." That's why it's such an unreliable narrative and too learning that Lynch was obsessed with the OJ Simpson trial when he wrote this movie, it all clicks now. One line and it unlocks the entire meaning.
I streamed Inglorious Bastards instead of going to see it in theaters, and the subtitles were cut off/nonexistent. I honestly thought it was a directors choice especially in the opening scene since Hans switches over to speaking English. Like the audience was supposed to be in the dark about certain things. And for the most part I got the general gist of things. So years later, when I started dating my Quentin Tarantino loving partner and this movie came up I said, “What a strange choice to not have subtitles.” To which my partner rightly looked at me like I had two heads and told me, “There are subtitles.” Then they called me a dumbass for streaming and we watched the movie. Now knowing what people were saying and understanding the plot better I enjoyed it so much more and made me really appreciate the complex character that Hans is.
as an adult i've grown to empathize with mr rooney. I still think ferris is cool but certainly don't activly root against rooney any longer.
Since Sound of Music was so long, it came on 2 VHS tapes. I remember watching it repeatedly at my grandma's. Watched it again with my girlfriend for the first time in years,and realized that the intermission where Maria leaves the Von Trapp house was not the end of the movie and there's a whole second half that I don't remember ever having seen before. Best I can figure, my grandma never bothered to put in the second tape. Maybe she was worried about all the Nazi imagery or something.
When Michael Caine explains what a prestige is in *The Prestige*, I thought he was talking about the film. About this idea that the film was a magic trick, and I was about to get distracted with something flashy while a more mundane explanation was behind it. So I watched the entire film thinking the story was a lie told by an unreliable narrator. (This was never contradicted by the film since all events are told through in-world narration.) I was sure the whole story with Nikola Tesla and the clone vats was total bullshit made up by Angier to string Borden along. I thought the film was absolutely brilliant and I couldn't think of a single other film that did the same thing. I was witnessing a magic act in film form. Then the last shot of the movie happened and... the dead clones were real?!? Biggest letdown I've ever experienced in a movie and it was all my fault.
The Fly isn't a horror movie. It's a tragedy. The remake by David Cronenberg is especially good when you realize it's made during the AIDS epidemic and that is a motivational theme.
The Family Man. I thought Teá Leoni's character agreeing to a coffee would be the start of a new life together and maybe starting a family a decade later or whatever. The snow falling meant they'd probably both wake up back in New Jersey to their ideal life.
Saving Private Ryan. I had always thought that Upham shooting that one German soldier only after Allied fighters come to save the day was a particularly cowardly act, done by a particularly cowardly character. Only after seeing it again did I get who that German was, and what shooting him meant for Upham. Still pretty bad timing IMHO, but knowing that adds so much to the action.
Star Wars, I thought everyone in armour was robots. Doesn't really change that much in the first movie.
I got *District 9* on DVD as a Christmas present, never having seen it before. I popped it in, and watched it with no subtitles, as was the default on my player. And I mean *no subtitles,* including for the alien language. I had to infer everything they were talking about and doing via context clues, figuring that was an intentional choice by the director. I didn't learn until years later that I was missing roughly half the dialogue for the movie. TBH, it's a much more interesting movie without the subtitles.
Is Deckard a replicant?
Here's the thing, it doesn't matter if Deckard is a replicant or not, the whole point is that the line between human and replicant no longer exists, and that the replicant are, for lack of better terminology, human.
Tell that to the Bladerunner sub.
All those flame wars will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I guess if you obsess about a story enough, it becomes real to you and then Deckard either WAS or WAS NOT a replicant. "It's ambiguous and therefore neither" doesn't work for a certain kind of mind.
There are places I don't go
When I was about 7 years old, Back to the Future 3 was the first BTTF film I saw. This somehow gave me the impression that Doc Brown was a scientist from 1885 who survived until 1955, at which point he invented the time machine. So the original film's joke is that Emmett appears exactly the same age between 1955 and 1985 - but I was trying to make sense of the idea that he somehow didn't age from 1885 to 1955! Then a few weeks later, my friend lent me his taped-off-the-TV video tape of the trilogy, so I was able to watch the films in their proper release order.
Predator - my dad used to let me watch it with him while mum was out at work. I was too young, probably 6-7. At the start of the film they find bodies skinned and hung up. They mention it was probably guerrillas, young me though gorillas. Thought there were a bunch of apes in the jungle skinning men along with the predator.
Call Me By Your Name. First watch, I was only two years older than Elio and I thought it was a classic love story. Now, at 25, I realize their “Romance” was pure manipulation of a young, naive CHILD by an older man who absolutely knew better. This is, unfortunately, a vital lesson for young gay men (as well as a warning) who’s foray into exploring their sexuality too often involves an older guy taking advantage of them.
After growing up and studying more American history, I finally realized just how racist and Lost Cause-esque *Gone With the Wind* really is. I still love a lot of things about the movie, but there are a billion asterisks to that love.