The trailers for Vin Diesel’s new comic book movie Bloodshot made the mistake of spoiling a major plot twist from the end of the first act. Directed by Dave Wilson and based on the character from Valiant Comics, Bloodshot stars Diesel as Ray Garrison, a Marine who returns home from fighting only to get captured and forced to watch as his wife, Gina (Talulah Riley), is brutally murdered. Ray is killed as well, but his body is sold by the military to an advanced tech company and resurrected with nanites that give him super-strength and healing.
The set-up will be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched an action movie or read a comic book before. The origin story of a hero returning from the dead to seek revenge was also used in The Crow, Spawn, Moon Knight, Darkman, and The Spirit – among others. Meanwhile, the trope of having the hero’s wife and/or family and/or dog killed off as their motivation is so overused that Birds of Prey recently spoofed it by having Harley Quinn motivated by the tragic death of her beloved egg sandwich.
With all that in mind, Bloodshot may seem like the most generic action movie in the world on the surface… which may be why Sony decided to give away the movie’s big plot twist in the trailers.
Bloodshot’s Story & Villain Twist Explained
Initially it appears that Bloodshot‘s main villain is Martin Axe (Toby Kebbell), a crime boss trying to get answers from Ray about who tipped off the military during his last mission. After being killed by Axe, Ray wakes up at the RST corporation with no memories of his previous. Dr. Emil Harting (Guy Pearce) explains that his memories have been removed because he was in the military, and therefore they are classified. However, while Ray is sharing a drink with his new team member KT (Eiza González), the Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer” is played over the radio, triggering his memories (since the last time he heard it was when he saw Gina killed). Ray goes rogue, steals a car and then a plane, and embarks on an unstoppable vendetta to kill Axe – along with anyone unlucky enough to get in his way.
After Ray succeeds in this mission, he returns to RST. Though Ray’s nanites allow him to withstand a huge amount of damage, they are also finite and need to be replenished. However, as Ray is lying immobilized and waiting for his nanites to be restored, his malicious team member Dalton (Sam Heughan) reveals the horrible truth to him: Ray’s memories of his last mission, his return home to Gina, and Gina’s death are a complete fabrication. Not only are those memories a simulation, everything that has happened since he woke up at RST has been carefully scripted – from “Psycho Killer” being played, to Dr. Harting’s reactions to Ray “going rogue.”
To make matters worse, this is not even the first revenge rampage that Ray has been on. Dr. Harting has been using him as an assassin to take out his former colleagues, in order to ensure that he is the only one left with a claim on the nanite technology. Each time Ray is put through the simulation his wife’s killer is given the face of a different target. The process turns him into the perfect assassin: one who believes that he’s killing of his own volition and will stop at nothing to get the job done, even if it means destroying himself in the process.
Why Bloodshot’s Twist Works So Well
Though Bloodshot may not be receiving the most glowing reviews, its twist on familiar action and superhero movie tropes is easily one of its best elements. It opens with a story set-up that’s painfully generic, but not enough to give the game away (especially since so many films still use this set-up unironically). Then, when the truth is revealed, it is used to poke fun at some of the laziest storytelling tropes of the genre, with programmer Eric (Siddharth Dhananjay) mocked for packing so many clichés into Ray’s fake memories – from a villain dancing to a pop song, to setting an interrogation scene in a random abattoir.
Bloodshot‘s early plot twist functions on a deeper level than just explicit call-outs of movie clichés, however. RST’s plan for Ray, and the movie’s premise, is built around the idea of action movies heroes having the ultimate superpower: plot armor. As long as Ray is following the “script” of a vengeful vendetta, he can accomplish any task and overcome impossible odds. Of course, the rest of the film ends up falling into similar clichés, with Ray surviving the final battle with Dr. Harting despite having no nanites left to restore his body in an ending that’s never properly explained. But setting Bloodshot up as one film and revealing it to be something else is still a cool trick – and one that should have been left as a surprise.
Revealing Bloodshot’s Twist in the Trailer Was a Mistake
Bloodshot‘s plot twist is a pretty good hook, which is probably why Sony chose to reveal it in the trailer. After all, in a release calendar that’s crowded with other, better-known comic book superheroes, it can be difficult to stand out. Trailers face the challenge of offering enough to entice audiences without giving away the best moments and surprises of the movie, and Bloodshot isn’t the most egregious example of a movie that came down on the wrong side of the line. In the last decade alone, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice‘s trailer showed the arrival of Doomsday, How To Train Your Dragon 2 spoiled the reveal that Hiccup’s mother was still alive, and Terminator: Genisys‘ trailers gave away the twist that John Connor becomes an evil cyborg.
Still, while it may not be the worst example of a trailer showing too much, Bloodshot is a perfect example of how a trailer can harm a movie in the process of trying to reel audiences in. Instead of the revelation that Ray’s memories are false being a game-changing moment, it instead simply becomes something that viewers are waiting for from the start.
