10 Awesome Sci-Fi Twists You Never Saw Coming

The twist in 12 Monkeys comes at the end of the film, and it's one of those twists the audience didn't see coming but felt completely sidelined by when it happened. The movie follows the time-traveling adventures of Cole, a convict from the future who travels to the past for research.

He comes from a dystopian world, where humanity has been forced underground to survive, thanks to a virulent plague that swept across the planet sometime in the recent past. His mission is to determine the source of the outbreak, so future scientists can potentially engineer a cure based on the information gathered in the past.

Cole doesn't have an easy time of it, as he's committed, and flung back and forth through time. Ultimately, he convinces a psychiatrist to help him, when it becomes clear he truly had traveled in the past. Now, you might think that the twist revolves around the "12 Monkeys," turning out not to be a terrorist organization who released the virus, but that's just a red herring.

The twist comes at the end of the film when Cole and Kathryn are going through airport security shortly before the outbreak occurs. At this moment, Cole is killed, and the twist is revealed when a young Cole is in the same area. He witnessed his own death, which was an event that haunted him his entire life, though he never realized it was himself whom he saw killed when he was a child.

The ending became a self-fulfilling prophecy, though without the intention of Cole or anyone else.