I was thinking about the Sandy Hook Promise: Gun violence warning signs video where a stereotypical teen romance story plays out and in the background someone gives off warning signs that they’re going to go on a shooting spree and it’s made me wonder if there are movies that follow a similar setup of building something up in the background just to have it completely overtake the main story line.
Like an average city girl following in love with a prince but you see protests and other signs of civil unrest in the background and the prince gets assassinated at the wedding. Maybe some kind of story that ends in 9/11 or the Cold War turning hot. Some kind of discount M. Night Shyamalan-style twist.
For exactly that, there’s 2010’s “Remember Me” with Robert Pattinson. Haven’t personally seen it, but for most of it it’s apparently a mid level romance/drama, then bam, date is revealed in on the blackboard of the main character’s sister’s school and the main character is looking out the window of his dad’s office which turns out to be in the North Tower. Idea behind it may be something like “each of the victims had their own ongoing story that was suddenly cut short” or something, but a lot of people felt that was shoehorned in for shock value or something
Somewhat similar, in A Christmas Story, there’s breadcrumbs around the movie that it takes place just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor