10 More Best Movie Twists You Genuinely Never Saw Coming
9. The Planet Was Earth All Along - Planet Of The Apes (1968)
Much like The Crying Game, Planet of the Apes' plot twist was such a game-changer that it spent decades being satirised across vast swaths of pop-culture, yet if taken on its own terms it's easy to appreciate why.
Protagonist George Taylor (Charlton Heston) spends the movie stranded on a planet in the distant future where apes have evolved into intelligent humanoids, only to make a horrifying discovery in the final scene.
George reaches the planet's shoreline where he finds the remains of the Statue of Liberty, confirming that this strange planet is actually a future Earth, obliterated beyond recognition by nuclear war.
If you saw Planet of the Apes without knowing what was coming, this was an all-timer twist for sure - one that so brilliantly reconfigured the audience's expectation of "alien," while also handing them a savage warning about humanity's instinctual tendency towards self-destruction.