HOLLYWOOD HAS FORGOTTEN THE ART OF THE TWIST – AND APPLE’S SUGAR PROVES IT
It’s the worst thing to happen to Colin Farrell since he turned into Johnny Depp at the end of the first Fantastic Beasts movie. Until this weekend, the actor had been motoring along in his enjoyable LA noir detective series, Sugar, on Apple TV +.
But then came the sixth episode and a shock reveal that has been widely denounced as one of the worst small screen bombshells since a supposedly dead Bobby Ewing turned up in a shower in Dallas and an entire season was written off as a fever dream of his ex-wife Pamela.
The twist left audiences stunned, annoyed, and baffled. “I wasn’t sure if it was real or some kind of drug hallucination,” wrote one viewer of the show’s big swing.
The big surprise is that Farrell’s hard-bitten PI, John Sugar, isn’t merely spaced out in the hippy-dippy, LA sense. He is literally an alien – a blue-skinned visitor from another world slumming it as a sleuth to further his understanding of humankind.
The reveal has proved controversial, to say the least. Some viewers have applauded the show’s willingness to take a gamble. But many others are asking why Apple couldn’t have just stuck to the original premise of Colin Farrell as a gumshoe in morally ambivalent LA straight out to James Ellroy? The show was fine. Why mess with a successful formula?
The Colin Farrell-is-an-alien pivot also raises a more profound question: Why can’t TV and cinema pull off big twists anymore? Recall the surprise 11 years ago to Game of Thrones’s Red Wedding, when half the Stark family attended a fancy nuptials and didn’t live long enough to suffer through the following morning’s hangover? It was a genuine shock (unless you were one of the millions who had read the original books) and an example of a twist executed to perfection.
The Red Wedding worked because it didn’t feel contrived. With hindsight, it was perfectly obvious the Starks were walking into a trap. They had put the noose around their necks when Robb Stark backed out of an arranged marriage to the daughter of minor nobleman Walder Frey – and nominated his useless cousin to tie the knot in his place.
Robb’s strategic blunder led Walder to strike a secret deal with the Starks’s mortal enemies, the Lannisters. So, in a way, the Red Wedding wasn’t a bombshell but a reminder of the brutal reality of Game of Thrones, where power is the ultimate currency and weak, decent men such as Robb Stark invariably end up on the chopping block.
The Sugar twist is the precise opposite. Yes, there are some vague hints earlier in the season that there is more to John Sugar than meets the eye. He suffers random headaches while cruising around LA and reveals in a previous episode that his unusual metabolism means he cannot get drunk. Nonetheless there was considerable pushback against the Colin-as-ET plot line, producer Simon Kinberg has admitted.
“There were a lot of places that were scared of this reveal, that it felt like the blending, or mashup of the genres, was too risky,” Kinberg told Deadline. Several streamers and networks expressed doubts about the twist, he said. For them, it was a deal-breaker.
“Why can’t it just be a detective show? There were a lot of places that were scared of this reveal, that it felt like the blending, or mashup of the genres, was too risky,” he said.
In the end, it was Apple which gave the green light to the Sugar-Is-Starman plot. “Apple was the strongest in supporting that vision that not everybody saw,” said Kinberg.
Kinberg may be satisfied that Sugar pulled off its big bombshell. Others, however, will despair of the clumsy reveal and wonder why Hollywood has in a more general sense forgotten the art of the twist.
Consider Olivia Wilde’s 1950s relationship drama Don’t Worry Darling, in which Florence Pugh’s character finally realises she is trapped in a VR simulation where her husband has imprisoned her against her will. Or Knives Out: Glass Onion where Janelle Monáe’s Andi turns out to be her twin Helen – a shocker that came out of nowhere and understandably caught viewers off guard. Both twists drop into the audience’s lap out of nowhere. Rather than enriching the script, they cheapen it. There is a sense of the filmmakers wanting to be clever for the sake of it instead of adding meaningfully to the plot.
One filmmaker who enjoys a good pivot is M Night Shyamalan, who hopes to subvert audience expectations all over again with this year’s Trap, in which Josh Hartnett plays a serial killer who accompanies his daughter to a pop concert only to realise police are pursuing him.
Will Shyamalan yank the rug from under us once more? He can already claim to have delivered the greatest cinematic twist of the past 30 years with The Sixth Sense, with its stunning revelation that Bruce Willis’s character was a ghost.
The golden rule, says Shyamalan, is that a twist should not be a shock arriving from nowhere but a missing piece of a puzzle you did not realise was incomplete until the very last moment. Far from confusing audiences – as Sugar did – it should make sense.
“What you’re left with at the end of the movie should tell you what you saw…. When you stick the landing you’re giving them the keys to say, ‘This is how to interpret everything that you watched,’” he said.
There are many examples of this trick executed to perfection. The 2001 Nicole Kidman ghost story The Others, where it is revealed Kidman and her children are the spooks haunting a family, not the other way around. Edward Norton in Primal Fear, in which his innocent choirboy routine turns out to be an act that hoodwinked his oblivious, smarmy defence lawyer (Richard Gere). Kevin Spacey as Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects – a twist delivered not via blue alien makeup but by a simple change to the character’s gait.
These twists have one thing in common. In the moment, they are unexpected. But the longer we think about them, the more sense they make. That’s quite unlike Sugar and Farrell’s fake-out – a betrayal both of Farrell’s great performance and the audience’s investment in a grounded detective story that turned out to be science fiction damp squib.
Twist and Shout: Five Great On Screen Surprises
The Others
It was the part Nicole Kidman was born to play – a mother who lives in a creepy house on the island of Jersey, where her children’s sensitivity to daylight requires her to keep the curtains closed. At night, her character, Grace, hears strange noises that lead her to believe the dwelling is haunted. It is but, in a devastating closing flourish, it is revealed Grace and her kids are the spooks and that she has repressed her memories of killing her offspring and then turning the knife on herself.
The Sixth Sense
“I see dead people,” says Haley Joel Osment’s psychic schoolboy early in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 blockbuster. Bruce Willis’s character – a child psychologist who empathises with the traumatised kid – becomes a friend and confidante. But when he gets to the bottom of the boy’s ailment he discovers he really does see dead people – and he (Willis’s protagonist) is one of them.
Game of Thrones
House Lannister’s favourite party-tune, the Rains of Castamere strikes up and suddenly Catelyn Stark understands it’s a trap. The wedding of Edmure Tully and Roslin Frey was just a ruse by Walder Frey to get back at the Starks after her son Robb backed out of an arranged marriage. In hindsight it makes perfect sense. But that isn’t much use to the Starks who are cut down by Freys and Lannisters before they’ve even had a chance to finish the wedding banquet in this 2011 episode that became an immediate sensation.
The Usual Suspects
Who is Keyser Söze is the question haunting everyone in Bryan Singer’s labyrinthine 1995 thriller. Only in the final minutes is the truth revealed: Kevin Spacey’s shy, tangle-tongue “Verbal” Kint is the one pulling the strings – a shock that made the film the word-of-mouth smash of the summer.
The Planet Of The Apes
Throughout this 1968 sci-fi adventure, Charlton Heston’s character has wondered where in the galaxy he has ended up. The devastating reveal comes in the final scene as he sees the Statue of Liberty poking from the sands. The dystopian world dominated by talking, horse-riding gorillas and chimps is… Earth!
2024-05-07T16:01:37Z dg43tfdfdgfd