10 Insane Recent Movie Moments Nobody Saw Coming
9. The Closing Montage Of Cinema - Babylon
Damien Chazelle's Babylon is unquestionably one of the most ambitious and unhinged movies of the past year - a debauched three-hour fever which appears to reach peak insanity when protagonist Manny (Diego Calva) is brought to an underground place of revelry called "The A**hole of Los Angeles."
But the most bizarre and unexpected moment comes right at the very end of the film, when Manny returns to Los Angeles after roughly 20 years away, and heads to a local cinema to watch a screening of the newly released Singin' in the Rain.
Manny is moved to tears by the musical's iconic, titular sequence, while remembering his own past in Hollywood.
And then, the scene transitions into a montage celebrating the most technologically groundbreaking films in cinema history, spanning all the way from Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon to The Jazz Singer, The Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, Tron, Terminator 2, and perhaps most jarringly of all, Avatar.
The montage ends with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it meta flourish - a glimpse of a slate from Chazelle's own film - before cutting back to a tearful Manny for a few seconds, and then finally rolling credits.
Some found the montage to be a glorious, triumphant celebration of cinema while others felt that a world-class filmmaker ending his movie on a "glorified YouTube supercut" was a tacky, uninspired choice.
Either way, nobody saw this coming. Nobody expected to see the Na'vi in Chazelle's period Hollywood epic.