10 Insane Movie Moments You Couldn't Believe Directors Actually Went There
For better or for worse, these filmmakers certainly caught audiences off-guard.
While some directors approach their work with a sense of nuanced restraint, there are others who like a more gung-ho, erratic, oft-insane approach with their films. In fact, certain directors have made a career for themselves off the back of how much they're willing to go against expectation in the most bizarre and unbelievable of ways.
It's some of those directors that the attention is on here, with a spotlight being shone on times when, regardless of us thinking otherwise, a filmmaker really did go to an extreme length to either shock us, baffle us, or to make us shrink into our seats due to the sheer cringeworthy nature of what's playing out on our screens.
For the films featured here, they absolutely caught audiences off-guard, with some doing it in a great way and others in a, well, not so great way. Either way, the one guarantee is that at least the scenes in question were, for better or worse, memorable.
As a heads-up, there are major spoilers for Roland Emmerich's currently-in-cinemas Moonfall featured at the end of this list.
So, with all of that in mind, then, here are ten sequences where, yes, filmmakers really went where we weren't expecting them to go.
10. Ed Furlong Returns As John Connor... Just To Get Immediately Terminated
When it was announced by producer James Cameron that Ed Furlong would be returning to the Terminator franchise for 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate, many were eager to see Furlong back as the saviour of mankind, John Connor.
Frustratingly, Furlong's return to the series was merely to do one day's worth of motion capture work in order for movie magic to create an accurate John for a flashback sequence to 1998 - three years after the events of T2: Judgment Day.
Within less than two minutes of Dark Fate's runtime, John Connor was dead.
For long-time fans of T2 and of Furlong, it was a gut punch to see the 13-year-old John fatally gunned down at a Guatemalan beach hut by a T-800 unit. After waiting 18 years to see Furlong back in a role that had also been taken on by Nick Stahl, Thomas Dekker, Christian Bale and Jason Clarke, this was such a letdown as Dark Fate did what appeared to be the unthinkable.
Since the first Terminator movie in 1984, audiences had been conditioned that the adult John Connor is the person who leads humanity in its war against Skynet. As such, John's death simply wasn't possible in the established narrative of the franchise.