5 Reasons Why Spectre's Big Twist Doesn't Work

4. It Only Does Half Of What A Good Twist Should Do

The key to a good twist isn't just for it to be shocking - it's for it to be unexpected. A jump scare is twice the more effective if you don't know it's coming, and the same's true of a narrative one. Psycho has one of the best twists ever, but if I tell you ahead of time there's a last minute shocker you'll never buy that a frail old woman is really a shower killer and be immediately more suspicious of the pathetic Norman Bates (oh, retroactive spoiler alert). The same is true of any big movie - many claim the twist of Shutter Island is painfully obvious, and while that's in part down to Scorsese's purposefully throwback direction, I think a big part of that is down to how the marketing presented it as a movie with a shocking mystery to be solved. Now, to its credit, Spectre itself does a good job of making the Blofeld twist feel unexpected - there's no wink-wink nudge-nudge foreshadowing (bar that cat) and there's even the earlier, still-seismic twist that Oberhauser is Bond's brother to lull the audience into a false sense of security (something akin to the Keaton-Verbal sleight-of-hand in The Usual Suspects). If you had managed to avoid all of the clues, it may have come as something unexpected. But then if you didn't see it coming, then it's probably not going to fill the initial clause - you have no reason to be surprised. And that's really the problem; no matter angle you come from, it's not actually that shocking. If you hadn't guessed it, then the twist does is show the film's villain has changed his name from one to another to hide his identity that nobody seems to know because he's presumed dead. Big whoop.