10 Best "Everything You Know Is A Lie" Moments In Movies
When the penny drops in totally mind-blowing fashion.
As viewers, who among us doesn't love being taken on a wild ride where we eventually learn what we held to be true was in fact total bull? When the writing is smart enough and boasts the execution to match, it can result in a mesmerising, jaw-dropping movie moment.
Considering how savvy audiences are these days, it's becoming increasingly tricky to pull these narrative sleights of hand off, but when they work, they really work, and will ensure you'll want to immediately watch the movie again.
It's fascinating watching a protagonist learn that what they believed to be their reality is in fact completely wrong, and what they held to be true in their core is actually a pure lie.
Sometimes the lie is small and deeply personal, and other times it's epic and has wide-reaching implications for humanity, but whatever the scale, these films did a fantastic job of pulling the veil back for both the character and the audience.
Again, it's extremely difficult to pull these storytelling ticks off, especially nowadays given that these movies are all firmly regimented in the minds of film buffs the world over...
10. Neo Takes The Red Pill - The Matrix
The Matrix is an especially interesting example given that, unlike most movies on this list, the big revelatory moment for the protagonist comes not at the conclusion of the entire story, but the end of the first act.
Neo's (Keanu Reeves) life changes forever when he's taken to meet the legendary Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who offers him a choice: take the red pill and learn the truth, or take the blue pill and go back to "normality."
Neo takes the red pill of course, at which point his reality begins to dissolve, and he wakes up in a gooey pod alongside countless other pods.
He's then rescued by Morpheus and brought aboard his ship, where Morpheus reveals that Neo has been living inside of a simulation, The Matrix, where humankind is enslaved by machines who use them as batteries. Oh, and it's actually 200 years further into the future than Neo believes.
The "it was a simulation the whole time" twist has never been done better, and it's largely because it isn't saved for a climactic rug-pull, but effectively serves as the instigating shock that tees up the rest of the movie and indeed franchise.