10 Massive Movie Twists That Were Secretly Obvious
7. The Birds Spell It Out - The Prestige
The Prestige contains several tough-to-predict twists. Chiefly, we eventually learn that Christian Bale's character Alfred Borden achieves the impossible The Transported Man trick using his secret twin brother. Hugh Jackman's Robert Angier achieves his imitated version by repeatedly cloning himself and disposing of the duplicates.
Now, at the start of the film, Michael Caine shows who we learn is Borden's daughter the disappearing bird trick (which constitutes killing a dove every time the trick is done), there's one big tease of whats to come. When the trick is repeated later on, a boy responds to the concluded trick by saying "But where's his brother?", essentially telling you the twist before you've even started thinking about it.
In fact, there are teases throughout that Bale is playing two different characters: disparate behaviour towards the two women in his life; his diary entry that refers to two young men at the start of a great career, two young men devoted to an illusion (wrongly assumed to refer to Angier and Borden, not the two Bordens); and the fact that his fingers keep bleeding long after they were shot off (the second Borden had to chop them off, later on, to match the wounds). We really should have seen that one coming.