10 Movies That Cleverly START With Huge Twists

5. Moon

Moon Sam Bell clone Sam Rockwell
Sony Pictures Classics

The opening scenes of Moon show space-miner Sam Bell going about his work. Employed by Lunar Industries to harvest fuel from the moon's soil, Sam's job means that he's completely isolated, living out of the Sarang Mining Base until his three-year contract ends.

While the operation is running smoothly, Sam has started suffering from headaches, and you get the sense that he's slowly losing the plot due to his mundane daily routine, and the fact that his only source of conversation is a robot AI, GERTY, who helps him out around the base.

But - as revealed by the film's early twist - Sam isn't as alone as he thinks he is.

Shortly after he crashes his lunar rover, he encounters a doppelganger of himself, learning that Lunar Industries has been cloning the original Sam Bell (and killing them once their contract expires) in order to avoid the hassle of training new staff.

The great thing about putting this twist so early in the film is that you'd normally expect a "he's a clone!" reveal to come in the end portion of the story. By placing it near the start instead and creating such a seismic shift in Sam's perception of his own little world, Moon felt truly unpredictable - and fittingly, the rest of the story unfolds in a whole host of startling ways.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!