8 Abandoned Plot Twists That Almost Ruined Famous Movies

6. The Chinese Got There First - Interstellar

The plot of Interstellar concerns Matthew McConaughey's loveable hick, Cooper, a former astronaut turned farmer who lives on a not too distant future Earth that is on its way out: crops aren't growing, resources are scarce, and everything is, really, really dusty. Cue a sudden and unexpected plot development, lots of exposition, and a bunch of scenes with Michael Caine, and Cooper is suddenly off on a dangerous mission into the far reaches of space. His goal? To enter a wormhole in order to find a new planet where the inhabitants of Earth can relocate to. In the original film, you'll remember that Cooper investigates a planet before joining another expedition (that goes horribly wrong thanks to a crazy Matt Damon). When he wrote the first draft of the movie back in 2008, however, Jonathan Nolan (Christopher's brother) had a far weirder vision of what should happen to Cooper... That's to say, a mid-film plot twist would have seen Cooper and his companions landing on a planet only to find out that - shocker - Chinese astronauts had already arrived 50 years earlier! Though all the Chinese astronauts have since been killed by radiation poisoning, it's then that Cooper discovers a secret underworld complete with a secure base that - wait for it! - the surviving Chinese robots have built for humans to inhabit. It then turns out that said Chinese robots have been programmed to defend the base at all costs (especially from meddling Americans), and so a large portion of the script is dedicated to Cooper fighting off said Chinese robots in an attempt to escape. Interstellar has its flaws, of course, but you have to be kind of thankful that Nolan decided to discard most of this stuff; none of it really suits the tone of the film, and there was a risk that politicising things with said plot twist might have resulted in much attention being taken away from what really mattered: the wormholes.