I got into a HUGE fight over spoilers a million years ago.
It was specifically, over the Jodie Foster movie “Flightplan”. (Warning: will contain Flightplan spoilers.)
Here’s the trailer, if you don’t remember it:
Pretty straightforward, right? A thriller that takes place on a snakeless plane. Sure, the trailer gives away the whole freakin’ movie except for the specifics of what happens, but, meh, you can forget that, right? Except that this news story comes out. “Airline staff urge Flightplan boycott”, it says.
I casually mention that if the Flight Attendant People are upset about the movie, it gives away a major plot point of the movie. And, wouldn’t you know it, I’m in an argument. “It’s a thriller movie! They’re trying to gaslight Jodie Foster! But she’s too smart for that! Of course the airline attendants are in on it! You see one of them cry IN THE TRAILER!!!”
But it was no longer about that. It was about my bringing up a news article about a protest about a movie and how that spoiled it. Well, if the flight attendants people wanted a boycott, they couldn’t have done better than by communicating that they were unhappy with how flight attendants were portrayed.
Which brings me to one of the problems with spoiler-proofing oneself.
If you want to spoiler-proof yourself for some M. Night Shyamalan movies, just know that you should dump now. See them in the order they came out. There.
If you’re still here, it’s at your own peril.
M. Night Shyamalan recently came out with a movie. This movie was called “Glass” and I thought that it was, finally, the sequel to Unbreakable that ain’t it cool news has been talking about since 2002 or 2003. But then I saw in an ad for the movie that talked about how it was completing the “trilogy”.
Wait, what? Trilogy? What the heck are you talking about? So I got on the googles and found out that, yes, there was an M. Night Shyamalan movie that came out in 2016 called “Split” about a bad guy. As it turns out, the big spoiler for this movie is that, tah-dah, it takes place in the SAME UNIVERSE AS UNBREAKABLE! The big twist was that YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING A SEQUEL TO UNBREAKABLE THE WHOLE TIME!!!
Which, now that I think about it, is pretty awesome. And it’s too bad that Lady in the Water and The Happening were so blah. (And how come none of the grownups in The Village could go to “the towns”? How come they had to send the blind chick?) Because those movies made me not want to bother with future movies of his… but, and this is weird, I would have freaked out to be watching Split and then see that I’ve been watching a sequel the whole time.
But there’s no way that I would have wanted to see the movie without being told the major spoiler.
Which is a pretty dumb bind to be in. About as dumb as The Happening.
Anyway, so one of the things I’m going to have to do, if not this weekend, one of the upcoming weekends is get Unbreakable, Split, and Glass and make a marathon about it.
Probably not this weekend, though. This weekend is devoted to cocooning.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Christmas Sled” by London Looks. Used under a creative commons license.)
Aside from deliberate, malicious attempts to spoil things for people, I figure you’re mostly on your own to remain spoiler-free. The ones that make me laugh are the people who use their social media platforms to berate people for posting spoilers on their social media platforms. Hey man, if you didn’t want the big surprise in this week’s “The Walking Dead” to be spoiled for you, then what the fish are you doing on the facebooks while everyone else is watching?Report
When The Village came out I was super-excited to see it and the day of the release I accidentally read the first few sentences of a review, which I almost never do. The reviewer said, “The movie takes place in what appears to be a 19th century village…”
I lost my shit and then spent the next few hours trying to track down his email address for a strongly-worded response.Report