Why We Should Have Seen It Coming:

Wait, "Pollux"? That can't be a real name. That sounds more like a rejected bee-themed supervillain from Captain Planet. In reality, the Troys' monikers are a reference to Castor and Pollux, two brothers from Greek mythology who make up the Gemini constellation, which is Latin for "twins." In the movie, Troy and Archer sort of become each other's twin, and suddenly, BAM, you're in John Woo's symbolism land!

Paramount Pictures, Buena Vista International

Castor and Pollux were also brothers of Helen of Troy and the protectors of sailors, which featured prominently in the movie finale when Archer chased Troy in a speedboat.

Paramount Pictures, Buena Vista International

More importantly, though, according to the ancient Greeks, Castor met his end after the Gemini bros got into a feud with their cousins, Lynceus and Idas, which ultimately led to Idas killing Castor ... by impaling him with a spear. Then, a few centuries later, John Woo took that idea, added "gun" to the end of it, and had his ending to Face/Off, which the more observant audience members could've guessed the second the name "Castor Troy" was first mentioned in the film.

Does this ruin Face/Off? No, mainly because it's scientifically impossible to ruin anything that crazy and awesome. There is reality and there is Face/Off, and never the two shall meet.

Why We Should Have Seen It Coming:

You know what did capture those nuances, though? Angela Hayes' surname, because "Hayes" sounds just like "Haze," as in "Dolores Haze," the titular character of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which immediately draws plenty of weird parallels between the novel and the movie.

DreamWorks Pictures

The Samuel Goldwyn Company

Lolita tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar with two failed marriages under his belt and very cruel parents, who kidnap-adopts (kidnopts) a sexualized child because she reminds him of his first love. Similarly, Lester Burnham is a magazine executive in a failing marriage who turns a sexualized child into a symbol of the life he thinks could finally make him happy. Unlike Humbert, Lester eventually sees Angela for the kid that she is, but his obsession still leads to someone getting shot to death. In the movie, that someone is Lester, who gets killed by his neighbor Colonel Frank Fitts for not returning the secretly gay Fitts' advances.

This bears some resemblance to a scene in Lolita where Humbert shoots a man named Clare Quilty for kidnapping Dolores and doing weird things to her. (So ... he pretty much shoots him for plagiarism.)

DreamWorks Pictures

MGM, Turner Entertainment Co.

Both endings deal with the same bizarrely specific formula where a sad middle-aged man lets his sexual frustrations escalate until he pumps lead into a guy whom he believes took advantage of him. Also, there's an underage nymphet involved in it somehow, which you can apparently spoil with a simple spelling variation of "Haze," just like the movie did.

Why We Should Have Seen It Coming:

In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos, fell in love with a warrior named Theseus, and helped him defeat the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. She did it by giving Theseus some thread so he could navigate the Labyrinth and kill the beast without getting lost in it, which is subtly referenced in the movie when Cobb first meets Ariadne and outright asks her to draw him a maze.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Consequently, when Cillian Murphy's Robert Fischer gets shot in the dream world and falls into limbo, an infinite area of his subconscious mind, it is Ariadne who convinces Cobb to go down there and look for him. Once they reach limbo, it's once again up to Ariadne to rescue Fischer and bring him back to a higher dream level so the rest of the team can implant the idea in his head that he should dissolve his company and then go put on a rubber bat costume.

But in order to save Fischer, Page's character first had to save Cobb by shooting his imaginary dream wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), which is just another way of saying that Inception's Ariadne ended up protecting a guy lost in a maze from being killed by a fantastical creature whose name starts with an "M." Man, no wonder John Woo only gave the movie 6 out of 10 doves. He must have seen that ending coming a mile away.

In the movie, the bad Indy stand-in is named Joe Sullivan, aka Sky Captain (Jude Law), an ace fighter pilot trying to stop the evil Dr. Totenkopf from launching a rocket that will incinerate the whole planet. By the end, it turns out that the mad scientist has actually been dead the entire time, and that his plans were being carried out by his army of lifeless automatons.

Paramount Pictures

Why We Should Have Seen It Coming:

"Totenkopf" is the German word for "skull," but it was also the name of the insignia worn by the SS, which kind of makes it sound like the name "Totenkopf" was chosen because "Dr. Nazi" performed poorly with test audiences. However, when you break the word down to "toten" and "kopf," it literally means "death's head," which, granted, is a pretty great word for a skull, alongside "calcium brain helmet" and "zombie fiesta bowl." But in the context of the movie, it starts to sound a bit spoilerish when you consider that the dead Totenkopf first appears on screen as a giant floating head:

Paramount Pictures

Paramount Pictures

Admittedly, Dr. "Death's Head" was "portrayed" by old recordings of Laurence Olivier, who himself had been dead for more than a decade when the movie premiered, but it didn't necessarily mean that his character would be dead as well. (Hey, if Jude Law can play an action hero, then Olivier's corpse can totally pull off a non-dead guy.) Maybe the creators of Sky Captain thought that their movie would be such a giant success that they didn't need to make it marketable to German-speaking countries.

Unfortunately, for all the work put into it, Sky Captain was a commercial and critical flop, because even if there had been a demand back then for a bad movie clumsily based on old film serials, most people were apparently willing to wait a couple of years and just go see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull instead.