10 Greatest Unspoken Movie Plot Points
Aldo Raine's neck scar hints at a brutal backstory.
A great piece of cinematic storytelling typically consists of a compelling main plot and a number of worthwhile subplots which meaningfully dovetail into the overarching narrative.
As much as we all love to know exactly what's going on when watching a film, it can also be tremendously rewarding to discover new things every time you revisit a movie, such as subtle plot points and flecks of character backstory that are shown and implied rather than spoken aloud.
Excessive exposition can be one of the worst things in any movie, and so smart filmmakers may choose to show rather than to tell, by hinting visually at a sliver of character development or low-key morsel of story advancement.
And yet, the vast majority of audiences never picked up on these creative, insightful, hilarious, and straight-up weird plot points, which rewarded the most attentive and keen-eyed viewers while flying clean over the heads of everybody else.
So, give yourself a firm pat on the back if you figured these plots out for yourself, because the filmmakers embedded them in such a way that audiences were basically left to intuit them...
10. Time Travel Exists In The Gremlins Universe - Gremlins
Gremlins is hardly a massively grounded movie, but did you know that it secretly confirms the existence of time travel within its own universe?
Time travel is a theoretical possibility in every universe of course, but in Joe Dante's classic creature feature we actually see it subtly carried out.
Half-way through the film, eccentric inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) calls home from an inventors' convention, where in the background eagle-eyed viewers might notice the iconic prop time machine from the 1960s film adaptation of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine.
That's all well and good, but when we cut back to Randall after cutting to his wife Lynn (Frances Lee McCain), the machine has miraculously disappeared, leaving behind scorch marks, smoke, and an audience of shocked observers.
This is easily missed no matter how many times you've seen Gremlins over the last near-40 years, and nods to Dante's penchant for ridiculous, wink-wink humour which he amped up considerably in the wonderfully wacky sequel.