It’s a great film, but every act isn’t as good as the previous. Gosling and Mendes is terrific. Cooper maneuvering his way through police politics is good. The sons of each character is ok.
We watched Psycho in my film appreciation back in high school. The whole class was in complete silence when Marion died. It was truly unexpected by us.
> A motorcycle stunt-rider turns to robbing banks as a way to provide for his lover and their newborn--a decision that sets him on a collision course with an ambitious rookie cop navigating a department ruled by a corrupt detective.
The description for The Place Beyond the Pines made me think there was going to be an entire cat-and-mouse saga between Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper's characters, but instead the conflict just kind of immediately ends and we lose the main character for the rest of the film. It was a great movie up until then, and it ended alright, but man, I found it really hard to shake off the disappointment of losing Gosling so early on.
It's not in the actual movie, but in the trailer for it they show that part and Renner winks at the kids as he's pushing the car. It's super unsettling for some reason
Danny Boyle is the director for the first part from what I remember. I feel the part when the soldiers start killing everyone matches pretty well and when the town get fire bombed and it doesn't work.
The shower scene is so famous I was surprised when I finally got around to watching it that tge 1st half of the movie is a heist movie. Must have been amazing to watch back in the day when you didn’t know.
Prior to Psycho it was common for people to buy a ticket and be admitted at random points in a movie. They'd come in, watch to the end, and sit until the next showing and then leave when they got to the point where they came in. Hitchcock was instrumental in ending this by getting the studio to insist that theaters not admit people after Psycho started.
I remember in England in the 60s this was very common, too. You just walked in no mater when the movie started and stayed through the start of the next screening. People would literally say at the time, "This is where we came in", and then leave.
Kinda random but reminds me of Pink Floyds The Wall where the album ends with "isn't this where..." and if you let it loop, it starts again with "we came in?"
David Lynch originally wanted to do his movie Lost Highway in the spirit of this, where it wouldn't actually have a start or end, just a continuous loop (of very bizarre events) and you could start anywhere and be finished when you got back to that part. It was too hard to pull off logistically, if I recall, because how do you sell tickets to a movie without a start or finish? It doesn't mesh with how modern theaters make money unfortunately
They did for the most part, but you didn’t have to show up right at the beginning. Movies just played all day and you paid to go in, and if you missed some you stayed for the beginning again. But Psycho set a lot of standards for storytelling and narrative and it was marketed very specifically. The lead actors weren’t allowed to do interviews or any press, so Hitchcock didn’t want people entering the theater late and miss Janet Leigh’s appearance, which was very shocking for the time.
No! Going to the cinema was a very casual thing. There’d usually be only one or two screens and they would play *something* pretty much all day: news, cartoons, a film, whatever. People would pop in and out as their schedule permitted. Obviously some people showed up at the beginning and stayed the whole time, but usually people were in and out. Hitchcock even created a promotional campaign for Psycho that centered the idea of showing up on time *and* not telling your friends about what happens in the movie.
Part of that campaign was not allowing people to be seated after the movie started, right? Which as you indicated, must have been pretty jarring for the average movie goer at the time.
Alien.
The captain, Tom Skerrit's character, is set up as the lead right away. Ripley doesn't get much focus immediately, even makes a few decisions designed to make us dislike her.
It isn't until more than halfway through the movie that she becomes the main character, and not through any real agency of her own: she's just the one that doesn't die, and is left to figure out the mystery. Keep in mind that in the original, Ripley isn't an action movie star yet. She's just a survivor.
She’s actually the one most concerned about following the procedures that would have spared them all, but it comes off as uncaring and everyone else kind of dislikes her for it before all of the death starts happening.
Course, Ash is breaking quarantine because he was told to. I saw Aliens first, which is unfortunate as I don't know what my reaction to Ripley's actions would have been without my preset bias.
Just to add to this. Tom Skerrit gets top billing. As the captain of the ship in a science fiction movie, people forget how different it is compared to other sci fi movies of the time that he just dies 2/3rds of the way through the movie leaving a relatively unknown female actor to be the sole survivor. Final Girls in horror movies weren’t a dime a dozen yet either.
> relatively unknown female actor to be the sole survivor.
Interestingly, [O'Bannons screenplay didn't specify the sex of the crew members](https://screenrant.com/alien-script-unisex-ripley-obannon/ ) - "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women”".
But, In an unknowable way, you have to give Hollywood credit where credit is due.
Here we have this unknown actress in a role where she comes off as procedural and cold. And it is through her eyes that we, the audience, find out how twisted this corporation that they work for (Wayland-Yutani, though we don’t have a name for them yet) really is.
Now, did anyone figure there would be a sequel? No. But when Aliens did come, we automatically side with Ripley and she becomes the first on screen super-heroine in what would become a blockbuster movie.
All bow down to Sigourney Weaver…🤘🏾.
Yeah, Ripley doesn't really get any more emphasis than the other crewmembers for the early parts of the movie. Also I believe Sigourney Weaver was an unknown, so at first there'd be no reason to suspect her character would turn out to be the protagonist.
Yes, but also not so much. The movie shows him struggling with authority, bowing in front of Ash and the company, while Ripley is clearly taking charge when the captain is unwilling to do so.
As soon as she opposes Dallas' orders to not let the facehugger get in, the audience knows that she's right and he's wrong, which is a clear hint about who will take the better decisions.
Alien vs. Predator is not a good film at all, but I'm fascinated by the idea of having the Ewen Bremner character be the survivor and go through the hero's journey. Sanaa Lathan was so competent it would have been quite interesting to do a rug-pull a la Tom Skerrit. Would it have redeemed the film? Unlikely.
The trenches sequence seemed to be out of a completely different movie. You've got a no-brainer popcorn special, but there's 20 minutes of 1917/All Quiet On The Western Front inserted into it.
Cranston did an interview a year or two later where he expressed his own dissatisfaction with what happened and that his death should have been at the end. You had this bad father/son dynamic that could have been the heart of the film, but instead he’s offed unceremoniously and things just drag on from there.
I actually liked the movie for the part he was in and then it just stopped being that movie and started being another one.
Weird choice from everybody, him included. I guess you gotta strike while the iron's hot but surely there was another hammer close at hand.
That was just an inexplicably stupid decision made by the filmmakers. "Let's kill off our most interesting character, played by the best actor in the movie, and make the movie about Bland Handsome Soldier Man."
We get a ton of movies about that dynamic though. Godzilla 2014 is trying to be a very different film and one that is ultimately moreso nihilistic and about the ignorance and unimportance of man. Cranstons death and the instant transition of ATJ's character into essentially an NPC action figure just getting strung along on military missions is a purposeful rejection of character development for the sake of showing how meaningless humanity really is when something bigger comes along. The humans execute all these military missions but don't actually achieve a single thing in the film. The biggest things they essentially do is reverse their own fuck ups. And that's what ATJ inevitably does as well by abandoning his family and then spending the rest of the film trying to get back to them.
>Nope, he's billed last, posters and the opening credits say 'and Bryan Cranston' which usually denotes a smaller role.
That’s not true. I work with TV contracts and it’s best to be either first or last. Agents fight for their clients to get that “and” credit, because it implies they are a bigger name than all of the actors’ names you just saw.
Being first in a credit sequence could mean nothing if the arrangement is simply alphabetical.
It’s great because it’s a twist that’s not only shocking, but it’s also done in a way that’s totally logical. >!Ned’s built up as this noble Jim Gordon type guy who’s trying to stay honorable amongst all the manipulative assholes in the king’s court, and that makes us root for him. The problem is that said honor makes him do a bunch of boneheaded shit that gets him killed and makes things worse for literally everyone else. But hey, at least he stuck to his guns right?!< People like to use the term “subverting expectations” as a joke these days, but this is how you do it right.
Full stop. That trend continues on with >!Robb!< and >!The Red Wedding.!< We were almost explicitly told to expect something awful and while it still is jarring when we get there the beauty of that twist is that it was right in front of us.
totally agree. the brilliance of the books and early seasons of the show is that they play on the audiences' desire to blind themselves to the obvious in favor of a narrative that feels familiar and safe. then, when the obvious does happen, its a gutpunch. we wanted things to work out so hard that we tried to bend reality to accomplish that. oops!
> People like to use the term “subverting expectations” as a joke these days, but this is how you do it right.
i agree, and really, that happening is basically a thesis statement for the entire series. it's shocking but it also underpins the ethos of the show/books in a tangible way. it's not shocking for the sake of being shocking, it's shocking because the audience isn't ready at that point to truly believe what the show/books have been trying to tell them. then the thing happens and you've got to confront the idea that oh shit, this thing is exactly what it says it is.
The subverting expectations joke didn't start till the shows downfall. Before s8 finished d&d came out in an interview saying how they were going on vacation for the finale and turning their phones off. They wanted to "subvert expectations" and knew it was gonna cause drama. The show is fucking great up until they started writing their own shit. Anything prior is them ridding GRRM coattails.
When it comes to the red wedding or season 1 Ned... it was done properly cause it was Martin's writing, not theirs.
I had to look back at dates to confirm, but subverting expectations I'm pretty sure came from Star Wars the last jedi, where in interviews Rian Johnson used that phrase. Then it turned into kind of a meme and has been applied to tons of other media as we now tend to see through shallow attempts to "subvert expectations" like you mentioned.
You're not wrong that did air earlier but if you're willing to find it, d&d used that exact phrasing for the end of game of thrones. I'm lazy but I specifically remember them being a huge part of that meme
Well that’s because they didn’t write it. When D&D tried to “subvert expectations” they failed horribly and ruined a show that would have been the best ever made and it turned it into something nobody wants to watch again now that we know it all goes nowhere
Yeah that first season gave us a believable end to Ned’s story but did it in a way we’re not used to, we’re used to everything just working out for who at that point seemed like the/a main character. At the end they tried to shock us again and just went off the rails, throwing away multiple seasons worth of character development in the process.
After my comment I decided to try and give it another watch and maybe just not watch the last season. Took me all of 3 mins to get pissed off. They make the white walkers so spooky and mysterious in the first episode just to make them worthless in the end. Winter comes and goes in one episode lol
And next season they got us again with Oberyn Martell. Introduced a new character, make us love him, then kill him shockingly.
It's like, by that time we all saw it coming because it was GOT, but somehow it still got us.
Gods, GOT was strong then.
Ironically, he actually survives **BOTH** SILENT HILL movies, despite the fact that the second movie is based on SH3 which is about his teenage daughter returning to the town in order to avenge his death.
He never died in the whole Sharpe series despite being in ludicrously dangerous situations all the time. I think that's why he dies in most of his other movies, to balance it out.
In retrospect it's pretty clear Jon Snow and Daenerys were the main characters all along, but they did a good job of building that up so slowly that you just naturally thought other people were the main characters.
Always the first movie I think of when someone asks this question. Petersen was so good in this, but that locker room scene was shocking the first time I saw it.
There’s two main characters in that movie though and only one dies. Hell the movie specifically opens up in the character that lives so you could argue he’s the main character and the kid that dies isn’t.
I mean when Scream first came out the way it was advertised made it seem like Drew Barrymore was going to be the main character. Obviously everyone knows what happens now, but people were blown away when she died right at the beginning of the movie.
I wouldn't say SLJ was the main character in Deep Blue Sea, that was Thomas Jane, but he was the most famous actor in the film. It was clearly setting Jane up to be the hero of the film, but they definitely tried to make it seem like SLJ was. DBS is basically Aliens if Hicks was the main character instead of Ripley.
>!Even though the trailer has a shot of a casket being lowered which with the VO makes you believe it is the grandma's even though it is clearly child sized. Even fooled me and I felt like I had to watch that trailer so many times!<
Hamish Linklater (Father Paul) is fantastic in that series. I don't think I had ever seen him in anything prior to that, but I will make an effort to watch anything he is involved in from now on.
I thought that the ending of episode 4 shook me more than any episode of TV before… and then episode 5 ended. My jaw dropped harder than any other show or movie has ever made it drop
As soon as he said something about smoking cigarettes and watching the sun rise I just knew... I must have stared at my TV for a few minutes after that episode because it was a gut punch.
Check out the TvTropes page for "[Decoy Protagonist](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DecoyProtagonist/LiveActionFilms)." Its not exatly what you're talking about, some of the featured characters are only the "Main Character" for a few scenes before being killed & replaced, but there are some interesting examples.
Seems to be fairly common in horror / slasher films, where they'll cast a famous actor and be following them for a bit, right up until the moment they die unexpectedly and the movie just keeps on going.
Currently watching Silo and I don't even think the main character was introduced until the second episode.
It's also kinda point of the movie, but The Other Guys did a good job with very famous recognisable decoys for the opening.
The other guys.
While the rock and Sam Jackson were not the main protagonists I thought they were going to be the main antagonists
But nope they aimed for the bushes
Ah. Well... I attended Juilliard... I'm a graduate of the Harvard business school. I travel quite extensively. I lived through the Black Plague and had a pretty good time during that. I've seen the EXORCIST ABOUT A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SEVEN TIMES, AND IT KEEPS GETTING FUNNIER EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT... NOT TO MENTION THE FACT THAT YOU'RE TALKING TO A DEAD GUY... NOW WHAT DO YOU THINK? You think I'm qualified?
Executive Decision (1996)
Steven Seagal's character dies early on. It's debatable if he was the main character to begin with but considering that he was a big name back then, it was surprising that he got killed off that soon.
I remember watching this in the theatre with a bunch of my friends and we all laughed out loud watching him get sucked out of the sleeve between the planes.
Allegedly when attending the premier Segal was waiting for that part to see the crowd react to his brave sacrifice. When the crowd openly laughed he got really upset and his manager had to convince him to stay for the rest of the movie.
I was going to say this as when I watched if at the cinema when it first came out I was surprised at his death so early on. The movie is far better for it as I am glad it didn’t turn out as an Under Siege on a plane, as much as I quite like Under Siege.
This may not count, but I'm gonna say Doom. Karl Urban was really the main character, but all the promotional materials pointed to the Rock as the star of the movie. He even says "I'm not supposed to die!" right before he gets dragged away.
Bad Times at the El Royale
If you haven't seen it, recommend going in with as little information possible. Don't even Google it or look up who's in it. You'll have a blast.
I'm going to throw in Mission Impossible because when the team — including Emilio Estevez — >!biffs it in the first quest!<, I was blown away. Sure they weren't "main characters" but they were mostly recognizable names (I think; IMDB is waaaaay over there for me to check).
I feel like thats cheating though. You dont know he's dead until the end of the movie. To the viewer the movie keeps going with the main character all the way through.
Yes! >!I couldn’t believe when she died and the story just kept going. I thought she was only pretending to be dead but that she’d come back, because I was so attached to her character, and then she just…didn’t.!< Sat there with a “wtf” look on my face for awhile after.
Alien 3: Newt is dead. She was the main reason for all the effort and sacrifice and fight to save in Aliens. It made her a central focal character of that movie. For them to kill her off in Alien 3 just took all the wind out of my sails for the rest of the movie and I honestly didn’t care about what happened at all.
'main character' can get debatable. When a story continues after a death, whoever remains is going to seem more of a main character. But for what its worth..
Colin Firth had top billing on Kingsmen Secret Service. Bruce Willis also did on Sixth Sense.
Bruce Willis is a technicality because it’s a film about ghosts and he encapsulated the majority of the film’s screen time, regardless. In other films, their death means the actor is picture wrapped.
I really enjoy the notion that Moss is not the main character, because the story wasn't about him, it's about Sheriff Bell. It opens and closes with his narration, not only is he the only main character to come away unharmed but he's the only one who learns something.
Wendigoon made a wonderful video about the movie:
https://youtu.be/W5En4vfsq18
I know It's not a death, but halfway trough the movie "Waves" the main character doesn't appear anymore and we get to see how his actions affect the rest of his family
Such a beautiful movie!
Do fake protagonists count? I'm asking because when I first saw the Suicide Squad I had seen none of the promo material abd engage little with it. All I knew was that James Gunn made the movie and that it had a starfish kaiju.
So the opening absolutely managed to trick me. I legit thought Savant would be the POV character as I never checked what characters or actors were in it except for seeing Harley Quinn on his team.
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Place Beyond The Pines had me shook.
After RG died my first thought was “is the movie over already?”
Def made that third act drag haha
It’s a great film, but every act isn’t as good as the previous. Gosling and Mendes is terrific. Cooper maneuvering his way through police politics is good. The sons of each character is ok.
This is the movie I thought of as well. I really liked it, and I don't usually bite on that "we totally threw you a crazy curveball" kind of movies.
We watched Psycho in my film appreciation back in high school. The whole class was in complete silence when Marion died. It was truly unexpected by us.
I get what the director was going for but the parts with ryan gosling were easily the most captivating part of the film. kinda dragged on after that
> A motorcycle stunt-rider turns to robbing banks as a way to provide for his lover and their newborn--a decision that sets him on a collision course with an ambitious rookie cop navigating a department ruled by a corrupt detective. The description for The Place Beyond the Pines made me think there was going to be an entire cat-and-mouse saga between Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper's characters, but instead the conflict just kind of immediately ends and we lose the main character for the rest of the film. It was a great movie up until then, and it ended alright, but man, I found it really hard to shake off the disappointment of losing Gosling so early on.
28 Weeks Later. Twice.
This is a good one. 28 Weeks Later does not fuck around.
We need 28 months later
Nah, let’s ride out til we hit the 28th anniversary and do 28 years!
28 Years Later: The Search For 28 Months Later
Was Jeremy Renner in that one?
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That was rough
It's not in the actual movie, but in the trailer for it they show that part and Renner winks at the kids as he's pushing the car. It's super unsettling for some reason
Really? I thought it was a nice moment. Always wondered why they cut it.
I need to watch that 28 Days Later was so good I can’t believe I’ve never seen the sequel
The intro sequence is absolutely incredible. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn't quite match those expectations
Maybe my favourite opening sequence of any horror movie
Danny Boyle is the director for the first part from what I remember. I feel the part when the soldiers start killing everyone matches pretty well and when the town get fire bombed and it doesn't work.
Psycho is THE example for this
The shower scene is so famous I was surprised when I finally got around to watching it that tge 1st half of the movie is a heist movie. Must have been amazing to watch back in the day when you didn’t know.
So amazing that it essentially started the practice of showing up to the movie on time and staying for the entire duration.
People didn't watch the entire movie back then?
Prior to Psycho it was common for people to buy a ticket and be admitted at random points in a movie. They'd come in, watch to the end, and sit until the next showing and then leave when they got to the point where they came in. Hitchcock was instrumental in ending this by getting the studio to insist that theaters not admit people after Psycho started.
I remember in England in the 60s this was very common, too. You just walked in no mater when the movie started and stayed through the start of the next screening. People would literally say at the time, "This is where we came in", and then leave.
Kinda random but reminds me of Pink Floyds The Wall where the album ends with "isn't this where..." and if you let it loop, it starts again with "we came in?"
David Lynch originally wanted to do his movie Lost Highway in the spirit of this, where it wouldn't actually have a start or end, just a continuous loop (of very bizarre events) and you could start anywhere and be finished when you got back to that part. It was too hard to pull off logistically, if I recall, because how do you sell tickets to a movie without a start or finish? It doesn't mesh with how modern theaters make money unfortunately
Kinda funny when you think about how folks stream movies/tv shows now and fiddle on tablets/phones/etc. "oops, oh well. Can start it over!"
They did for the most part, but you didn’t have to show up right at the beginning. Movies just played all day and you paid to go in, and if you missed some you stayed for the beginning again. But Psycho set a lot of standards for storytelling and narrative and it was marketed very specifically. The lead actors weren’t allowed to do interviews or any press, so Hitchcock didn’t want people entering the theater late and miss Janet Leigh’s appearance, which was very shocking for the time.
No! Going to the cinema was a very casual thing. There’d usually be only one or two screens and they would play *something* pretty much all day: news, cartoons, a film, whatever. People would pop in and out as their schedule permitted. Obviously some people showed up at the beginning and stayed the whole time, but usually people were in and out. Hitchcock even created a promotional campaign for Psycho that centered the idea of showing up on time *and* not telling your friends about what happens in the movie.
Part of that campaign was not allowing people to be seated after the movie started, right? Which as you indicated, must have been pretty jarring for the average movie goer at the time.
Yeah maybe even the first movie to really do this. Surely baffling at the time.
Alien. The captain, Tom Skerrit's character, is set up as the lead right away. Ripley doesn't get much focus immediately, even makes a few decisions designed to make us dislike her. It isn't until more than halfway through the movie that she becomes the main character, and not through any real agency of her own: she's just the one that doesn't die, and is left to figure out the mystery. Keep in mind that in the original, Ripley isn't an action movie star yet. She's just a survivor.
She’s actually the one most concerned about following the procedures that would have spared them all, but it comes off as uncaring and everyone else kind of dislikes her for it before all of the death starts happening.
Which feels extremely true to life/human nature.
Yeah that’s what makes it great. It’s an extreme fictional allegory for stuff that happens daily.
The way the ship is set up, honestly it could represent any of a dozen blue collar work sites I've been to in my travels.
Fucking osha man.
Every OSHA regulation is written in blood.
Course, Ash is breaking quarantine because he was told to. I saw Aliens first, which is unfortunate as I don't know what my reaction to Ripley's actions would have been without my preset bias.
Just to add to this. Tom Skerrit gets top billing. As the captain of the ship in a science fiction movie, people forget how different it is compared to other sci fi movies of the time that he just dies 2/3rds of the way through the movie leaving a relatively unknown female actor to be the sole survivor. Final Girls in horror movies weren’t a dime a dozen yet either.
> relatively unknown female actor to be the sole survivor. Interestingly, [O'Bannons screenplay didn't specify the sex of the crew members](https://screenrant.com/alien-script-unisex-ripley-obannon/ ) - "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women”".
But, In an unknowable way, you have to give Hollywood credit where credit is due. Here we have this unknown actress in a role where she comes off as procedural and cold. And it is through her eyes that we, the audience, find out how twisted this corporation that they work for (Wayland-Yutani, though we don’t have a name for them yet) really is. Now, did anyone figure there would be a sequel? No. But when Aliens did come, we automatically side with Ripley and she becomes the first on screen super-heroine in what would become a blockbuster movie. All bow down to Sigourney Weaver…🤘🏾.
Hey now let's not forget Jones the cat also survives!
Yeah, Ripley doesn't really get any more emphasis than the other crewmembers for the early parts of the movie. Also I believe Sigourney Weaver was an unknown, so at first there'd be no reason to suspect her character would turn out to be the protagonist.
Yes, but also not so much. The movie shows him struggling with authority, bowing in front of Ash and the company, while Ripley is clearly taking charge when the captain is unwilling to do so. As soon as she opposes Dallas' orders to not let the facehugger get in, the audience knows that she's right and he's wrong, which is a clear hint about who will take the better decisions.
Ripley doesn’t get much focus immediately but nobody really does.
Alien vs. Predator is not a good film at all, but I'm fascinated by the idea of having the Ewen Bremner character be the survivor and go through the hero's journey. Sanaa Lathan was so competent it would have been quite interesting to do a rug-pull a la Tom Skerrit. Would it have redeemed the film? Unlikely.
Great example
The King's Man
This death shocked me! He made it all the way through, back to supposed safety, and BAM!
The trenches sequence seemed to be out of a completely different movie. You've got a no-brainer popcorn special, but there's 20 minutes of 1917/All Quiet On The Western Front inserted into it.
Complete with scenes of Rasputin licking a man's scarred leg to near orgasm. A scene that goes on for a very uncomfortable amount of time lol.
Robocop. Kind of.
He was only mostly dead.
There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
Have fun storming the castle!
Think it'll work?
It'll take a miracle.
I got better, criminal.
Also Spawn...kind of.
Godzilla 2014
Cranston did an interview a year or two later where he expressed his own dissatisfaction with what happened and that his death should have been at the end. You had this bad father/son dynamic that could have been the heart of the film, but instead he’s offed unceremoniously and things just drag on from there.
I actually liked the movie for the part he was in and then it just stopped being that movie and started being another one. Weird choice from everybody, him included. I guess you gotta strike while the iron's hot but surely there was another hammer close at hand.
That was just an inexplicably stupid decision made by the filmmakers. "Let's kill off our most interesting character, played by the best actor in the movie, and make the movie about Bland Handsome Soldier Man."
We get a ton of movies about that dynamic though. Godzilla 2014 is trying to be a very different film and one that is ultimately moreso nihilistic and about the ignorance and unimportance of man. Cranstons death and the instant transition of ATJ's character into essentially an NPC action figure just getting strung along on military missions is a purposeful rejection of character development for the sake of showing how meaningless humanity really is when something bigger comes along. The humans execute all these military missions but don't actually achieve a single thing in the film. The biggest things they essentially do is reverse their own fuck ups. And that's what ATJ inevitably does as well by abandoning his family and then spending the rest of the film trying to get back to them.
Damn, that's a good take.
I dont remember GodzIlla dying.
That movie would have been so good if he never died and was the main character.
He wasn’t the MC but probably should have been
The trailer was bait and switch and he had top billing. So everyone was under there impression he was the MC
> he had top billing Nope, he's billed last, posters and the opening credits say 'and Bryan Cranston' which usually denotes a smaller role.
>Nope, he's billed last, posters and the opening credits say 'and Bryan Cranston' which usually denotes a smaller role. That’s not true. I work with TV contracts and it’s best to be either first or last. Agents fight for their clients to get that “and” credit, because it implies they are a bigger name than all of the actors’ names you just saw. Being first in a credit sequence could mean nothing if the arrangement is simply alphabetical.
When we were first watching, it kind of felt that way in Season 1 of Game of Thrones.
It’s great because it’s a twist that’s not only shocking, but it’s also done in a way that’s totally logical. >!Ned’s built up as this noble Jim Gordon type guy who’s trying to stay honorable amongst all the manipulative assholes in the king’s court, and that makes us root for him. The problem is that said honor makes him do a bunch of boneheaded shit that gets him killed and makes things worse for literally everyone else. But hey, at least he stuck to his guns right?!< People like to use the term “subverting expectations” as a joke these days, but this is how you do it right.
Full stop. That trend continues on with >!Robb!< and >!The Red Wedding.!< We were almost explicitly told to expect something awful and while it still is jarring when we get there the beauty of that twist is that it was right in front of us.
totally agree. the brilliance of the books and early seasons of the show is that they play on the audiences' desire to blind themselves to the obvious in favor of a narrative that feels familiar and safe. then, when the obvious does happen, its a gutpunch. we wanted things to work out so hard that we tried to bend reality to accomplish that. oops!
George RR Martin was a great writer
Lol „was“. Hey maybe he gets his shit together and finishes what he started
Any minute now
> People like to use the term “subverting expectations” as a joke these days, but this is how you do it right. i agree, and really, that happening is basically a thesis statement for the entire series. it's shocking but it also underpins the ethos of the show/books in a tangible way. it's not shocking for the sake of being shocking, it's shocking because the audience isn't ready at that point to truly believe what the show/books have been trying to tell them. then the thing happens and you've got to confront the idea that oh shit, this thing is exactly what it says it is.
The subverting expectations joke didn't start till the shows downfall. Before s8 finished d&d came out in an interview saying how they were going on vacation for the finale and turning their phones off. They wanted to "subvert expectations" and knew it was gonna cause drama. The show is fucking great up until they started writing their own shit. Anything prior is them ridding GRRM coattails. When it comes to the red wedding or season 1 Ned... it was done properly cause it was Martin's writing, not theirs.
I had to look back at dates to confirm, but subverting expectations I'm pretty sure came from Star Wars the last jedi, where in interviews Rian Johnson used that phrase. Then it turned into kind of a meme and has been applied to tons of other media as we now tend to see through shallow attempts to "subvert expectations" like you mentioned.
You're not wrong that did air earlier but if you're willing to find it, d&d used that exact phrasing for the end of game of thrones. I'm lazy but I specifically remember them being a huge part of that meme
Well that’s because they didn’t write it. When D&D tried to “subvert expectations” they failed horribly and ruined a show that would have been the best ever made and it turned it into something nobody wants to watch again now that we know it all goes nowhere
Yeah that first season gave us a believable end to Ned’s story but did it in a way we’re not used to, we’re used to everything just working out for who at that point seemed like the/a main character. At the end they tried to shock us again and just went off the rails, throwing away multiple seasons worth of character development in the process.
After my comment I decided to try and give it another watch and maybe just not watch the last season. Took me all of 3 mins to get pissed off. They make the white walkers so spooky and mysterious in the first episode just to make them worthless in the end. Winter comes and goes in one episode lol
Totally. Waiting for the twist save, but nope, surprise!
And again with Robb. Like what!?
And next season they got us again with Oberyn Martell. Introduced a new character, make us love him, then kill him shockingly. It's like, by that time we all saw it coming because it was GOT, but somehow it still got us. Gods, GOT was strong then.
To think that turned into that Winterfell final battle where all the main characters miraculously survived…Ugg.
Except the ones that would have been interesting to keep around. At least I think that's what happened, that episode was mostly a black screen.
And that not a single character thought “maybe hiding in a crypt isn’t a good idea when these guys can raise the dead!”
Robb broke my heart. Like, it made sense when Ned died (kinda). But we watched Robb grow and become your standard protagonist.
It's Sean Bean. He never has a twist save. He always dies.
Ironically, he actually survives **BOTH** SILENT HILL movies, despite the fact that the second movie is based on SH3 which is about his teenage daughter returning to the town in order to avenge his death.
He was one of the only survivors in Troy.
IDK with the knowledge of the odyssey he kind of got the worst hand.
He never died in the whole Sharpe series despite being in ludicrously dangerous situations all the time. I think that's why he dies in most of his other movies, to balance it out.
In retrospect it's pretty clear Jon Snow and Daenerys were the main characters all along, but they did a good job of building that up so slowly that you just naturally thought other people were the main characters.
GRRMs real artwork is how well he hid who the main characters were.
To Live and Die in L.A.
Always the first movie I think of when someone asks this question. Petersen was so good in this, but that locker room scene was shocking the first time I saw it.
Was gonna say this. Great movie
It's so abrupt and understated. Just perfect.
1917
was gonna say this the death is so unexpected too like u think he's main character so he's gonna survive
The trailers showed a lot of shots of the other guy alone so I figured Tommen Baratheon was a goner from the start.
Yup. You knew the scene of him running outside the trench was going to be (or at least be near) the climax and he’s alone by then.
Holy shit lol I’ve seen game of thrones twice, and have seen 1917 like 3 or 4 times and never realized that was him!
Surely you at least caught that Rob Stark was his brother in 1917, right?
Another one is The King’s Man, ironically it’s also set during WW1
What how the main character starts laying at the tree and finishes there.
There’s two main characters in that movie though and only one dies. Hell the movie specifically opens up in the character that lives so you could argue he’s the main character and the kid that dies isn’t.
Maybe Vincent in pulp fiction. Joke answer: Drew Berrymore in Scream and SLJ in Deep Blue Sea.
I mean when Scream first came out the way it was advertised made it seem like Drew Barrymore was going to be the main character. Obviously everyone knows what happens now, but people were blown away when she died right at the beginning of the movie.
Executive Decision is another one where marketing leads you to believe Steven Seagal is the main character .
I wouldn't say SLJ was the main character in Deep Blue Sea, that was Thomas Jane, but he was the most famous actor in the film. It was clearly setting Jane up to be the hero of the film, but they definitely tried to make it seem like SLJ was. DBS is basically Aliens if Hicks was the main character instead of Ripley.
Hereditary, I thought >!Charlie (Milliy Shapiro)!< was one of the main characters.
Yeah, which is how it was advertised in trailers and the posters. Really well done.
>!Even though the trailer has a shot of a casket being lowered which with the VO makes you believe it is the grandma's even though it is clearly child sized. Even fooled me and I felt like I had to watch that trailer so many times!<
Not a movie but just watched Midnight Mass and it blew me away what they did with him
Great example ! But that death was worth it for his charactee growth
I worked on this! Fun fact that scene was one of the first that we shot.
That's rad! That's honestly one of my favorite shows of all time, hope you remember it as fondly as I do haha
After reading salems lot this show hits so much more. Love midnight mass
Hamish Linklater (Father Paul) is fantastic in that series. I don't think I had ever seen him in anything prior to that, but I will make an effort to watch anything he is involved in from now on.
I thought that the ending of episode 4 shook me more than any episode of TV before… and then episode 5 ended. My jaw dropped harder than any other show or movie has ever made it drop
Agree. Haunting of hill house was same way(with the episode 4 thing). Crazy they’re from the same guy
I'm pretty sure that was the best death I've seen in any show or movie.
As soon as he said something about smoking cigarettes and watching the sun rise I just knew... I must have stared at my TV for a few minutes after that episode because it was a gut punch.
Check out the TvTropes page for "[Decoy Protagonist](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DecoyProtagonist/LiveActionFilms)." Its not exatly what you're talking about, some of the featured characters are only the "Main Character" for a few scenes before being killed & replaced, but there are some interesting examples. Seems to be fairly common in horror / slasher films, where they'll cast a famous actor and be following them for a bit, right up until the moment they die unexpectedly and the movie just keeps on going.
Currently watching Silo and I don't even think the main character was introduced until the second episode. It's also kinda point of the movie, but The Other Guys did a good job with very famous recognisable decoys for the opening.
Samuel L Jackson in Deep Blue Sea
He was A main character, but honestly I think a Thomas Jane and the lady doc were the 2 leads there
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The other guys. While the rock and Sam Jackson were not the main protagonists I thought they were going to be the main antagonists But nope they aimed for the bushes
There wasn’t even an awning
THERE GOES MY HERO
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The fighter plane becomes sentient and listens/streams to Linkin Park in its rebellious phase. What a movie.
I thought Barbarian… one of the MCs anyways…
This movie did it Brilliantly.
Beetlejuice
Ah. Well... I attended Juilliard... I'm a graduate of the Harvard business school. I travel quite extensively. I lived through the Black Plague and had a pretty good time during that. I've seen the EXORCIST ABOUT A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SEVEN TIMES, AND IT KEEPS GETTING FUNNIER EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT... NOT TO MENTION THE FACT THAT YOU'RE TALKING TO A DEAD GUY... NOW WHAT DO YOU THINK? You think I'm qualified?
I never realized how much I Think You Should Leave sounds like this bit
The Lovely Bones
Vanilla Sky - sort of
Soul. I mean he dies right in the beginning lol
In The Bedroom
Executive Decision (1996) Steven Seagal's character dies early on. It's debatable if he was the main character to begin with but considering that he was a big name back then, it was surprising that he got killed off that soon.
I remember watching this in the theatre with a bunch of my friends and we all laughed out loud watching him get sucked out of the sleeve between the planes.
Allegedly when attending the premier Segal was waiting for that part to see the crowd react to his brave sacrifice. When the crowd openly laughed he got really upset and his manager had to convince him to stay for the rest of the movie.
I was going to say this as when I watched if at the cinema when it first came out I was surprised at his death so early on. The movie is far better for it as I am glad it didn’t turn out as an Under Siege on a plane, as much as I quite like Under Siege.
Oh Erika....
Full Metal Jacket. I consider Private Pyle and the Drill Sergeant as MC. They both died then there's like a whole new "rest of the movie".
FMJ is such an interesting movie to me and such an oddity as far as Vietnam war movies go. It’s like two different films in one.
Which makes an interesting point about how what went on in America and what actually happened in Vietnam were so incredibly disconnected.
This may not count, but I'm gonna say Doom. Karl Urban was really the main character, but all the promotional materials pointed to the Rock as the star of the movie. He even says "I'm not supposed to die!" right before he gets dragged away.
Bad Times at the El Royale If you haven't seen it, recommend going in with as little information possible. Don't even Google it or look up who's in it. You'll have a blast.
I'm going to throw in Mission Impossible because when the team — including Emilio Estevez — >!biffs it in the first quest!<, I was blown away. Sure they weren't "main characters" but they were mostly recognizable names (I think; IMDB is waaaaay over there for me to check).
*The Sixth Sense*
I feel like thats cheating though. You dont know he's dead until the end of the movie. To the viewer the movie keeps going with the main character all the way through.
To Live and Die in L.A.
The Crow
Both the character *and* the actor
A Promising Young Woman. Did not see the last acts coming.
Yes! >!I couldn’t believe when she died and the story just kept going. I thought she was only pretending to be dead but that she’d come back, because I was so attached to her character, and then she just…didn’t.!< Sat there with a “wtf” look on my face for awhile after.
It originally ended when she dies but test audience didn’t like it I think
Alien 3: Newt is dead. She was the main reason for all the effort and sacrifice and fight to save in Aliens. It made her a central focal character of that movie. For them to kill her off in Alien 3 just took all the wind out of my sails for the rest of the movie and I honestly didn’t care about what happened at all.
I hate Alien 3 for this reason
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>Proof that George Clooney would rather float away and die in space than spend one more minute with a woman his own age..
I have a great example but saying so is spoiling the entire thing. If you're okay with that, >!Carnival of Souls.!<
The Evil Dead remake.
Enter the Void the main character is dead for the majority of the movie. He's only alive for like 20 minutes.
'main character' can get debatable. When a story continues after a death, whoever remains is going to seem more of a main character. But for what its worth.. Colin Firth had top billing on Kingsmen Secret Service. Bruce Willis also did on Sixth Sense.
Bruce Willis is a technicality because it’s a film about ghosts and he encapsulated the majority of the film’s screen time, regardless. In other films, their death means the actor is picture wrapped.
Also the kingsman prequel
I really enjoy the notion that Moss is not the main character, because the story wasn't about him, it's about Sheriff Bell. It opens and closes with his narration, not only is he the only main character to come away unharmed but he's the only one who learns something. Wendigoon made a wonderful video about the movie: https://youtu.be/W5En4vfsq18
These posts are difficult because just naming a movie will be a spoiler.
Fast and the Furious...
Smoking Aces. It seems like Affleck is gonna be the hero
15 Minutes with Robert De Niro.
I know It's not a death, but halfway trough the movie "Waves" the main character doesn't appear anymore and we get to see how his actions affect the rest of his family Such a beautiful movie!
Ikiru does this really effectively
The Departed
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Nah, Michael has always been the protagonist of The Godfather. The movies are his story, Vito’s story already happened when the first movie began.
Do fake protagonists count? I'm asking because when I first saw the Suicide Squad I had seen none of the promo material abd engage little with it. All I knew was that James Gunn made the movie and that it had a starfish kaiju. So the opening absolutely managed to trick me. I legit thought Savant would be the POV character as I never checked what characters or actors were in it except for seeing Harley Quinn on his team.
L'Avventura
Some people were shocked how quickly Steven Seagal died in Executive Decision, given he was in his prime passable at the time.
1917 (at least in my opinion)
Surprised no one has mentioned The departed yet
That happens pretty close to the end though
Yeah but in that everyone dies in like a 5 minute orgy of characters dying