WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (plus Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel)
When it comes to movies, there are twists and then there are TWISTS.
Spider-Man: Far From Home's main twist — that Quentin Beck was the villain and not a fellow superhero from a parallel universe —was a good one, but it's one you would've seen coming if you're semi-familiar with the comics where Mysterio is traditionally a villain.
So his duplicity wasn't a massive surprise to quite a few moviegoers.
The real twist in Spider-Man: Far From Home comes after the credits roll, and it's one that almost no one would've seen coming, even if it had no direct impact on this story, but will on the next gazillion Marvel movies you're going to watch.
It's the reveal that we haven't been watching Nick Fury and Maria Hill this whole movie. Whoa.
Instead, it's been Captain Marvel character Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and a female Skrull who has used the alien species' shapeshifting powers to impersonate the former agents of SHIELD, and at the behest of Fury who's off-world on some secret Avengers mission.
Talos says to Fury on the phone, "Everyone kept asking me where the Avengers are and I don't know what to say." That totally clocks with the scene earlier in the movie where Peter asks where Captain Marvel and Thor are.
If you were paying really, really close attention, you may have picked up on the tiny breadcrumb the filmmakers laid about a third of the way in.
There's a one-word clue in the scene where Fury is introducing Peter to Beck, explaining multiverses (which turns out to be a total lie made up by Beck).
That scene is in the trailer, and Fury says to Peter, "Beck is from Earth, just not from ours."
Well, they sure fooled us, because in the finished version of the movie, there's one word of dialogue that's changed and it makes all the difference.
What Fury now says is, "Beck is from Earth, just not YOURS."
It's a Freudian slip from Talos-as-Fury, because Talos is a Skrull so he's not from Earth. Hence, the YOURS (from Talos' experience) instead of OURS (the real Nick Fury's experience).
Well played, Spider-Man. Well played.
The folks at Marvel and Sony kept Ben Mendelsohn's cameo very under wraps. Photo / Supplied
Obviously, the powers-that-be couldn't have included the "your" line in the trailer because trailers are watched, rewatched and dissected for every little clue by the fandom and by media, so it would've been too easily recognised.
Including that line in the trailer with the "our" line was actually worked in the favour of keeping the twist a secret and because by the time someone has plonked their butt in the seat at the cinema, they've probably seen that Far From Home trailer at least half a dozen times.
And when we're familiar with a line of dialogue, we pre-empt it, hearing what we've already heard before instead of really listening.
I only picked up on the word change on the second viewing, after already knowing that I was watching Talos and was deliberately looking for cues that might've given the game away.
But there's more to this than shock value or the questions about just what Talos has been doing in the 20-plus years between the 1990s-set Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Far From Home, or his meta-commentary about filmmaking and storytelling in general.
Or whether Talos has stepped in for Nick Fury at other points in the past two decades.
The clever folks at Marvel swapped out one word in the trailer for another in the movie. And it makes all the difference. Photo / Supplied
This is the scene that directly sets up the MCU's Phase Four, or what it has got planned now that the so-called Infinity Saga is officially over.
After Captain Marvel, there was fan speculation that the next big story arc Marvel has planned might be taken from the Secret Invasion storyline from the comics.
In Secret Invasion, there was a Skrull plan to invade Earth by secretly replacing humans with their shapeshifted doppelgangers, leading to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust — who was really themselves and who had been replaced?
But Captain Marvel has established the Skrull as being kind of the good guys, especially compared to the blue-hued Kree who have been villains in Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy and MCU TV series Agents of SHIELD.
In an earlier scene in Far From Home, Fury (who we now know was Talos) says to not-Maria Hill, "I thought Kree having sleeper cells was top secret information."
The Skrull-Kree war is a big part of the Marvel comics and it seems like it might be in the MCU in Phase Four and beyond.
