Eureka Moment / Live-Action Films

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• Played with in π. Mathematician Max consults with his mentor Sol about a numerical sequence he's trying to solve. Sol tells him the story about Archimedes (see below). Which leads to this exchange:
  Sol: So what's the lesson?
  Max: That an answer will come.
  Sol: No, it's the wife! You have to relax!
• 21st Century Serial Killer: When Aaron sees the ring on Charles' finger, he remembers that the Serial Killer he's been looking for had one just like that on his own finger. It leads him to realize Charles is the killer.
• In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Ace gets his Eureka Moment when his dog lies across the forehead of a picture of Miami Dolphins kicker Ray Finkle, who he suspects is connected to police lieutenant Lois Einhorn... and the way the dog's hair falls gives him his epiphany... and his entire week's food consumption...
  • In the sequel, When Nature Calls, Ace tries to figure out what the Hollywood Natives have that would drive someone to provoke a genocidal war by stealing their sacred bat. He resorts to meditation and contacts his Tibetan temple master through telepathy for help. Talk turns to the medallion Ace received at the beginning of the film, and Ace admits he lost in the bat's cave. "You wanna know where it is? It's probably lying in a big pile of...Guano! They have guano!" It's explained later that bat guano is valuable as a fertilizer, and the Big Bad was planning on harvesting it once the tribes wiped themselves out.
• In Aladdin (2019), when Aladdin starts taunting Jafar about how he'll always be weaker than the Genie, the Genie is initially confused and horrified, but then his expression displays visible comprehension and an "I got you" wink when he realizes that Aladdin is goading Jafar into turning himself into a genie, with all of the rules and restrictions that implies.
• Back to the Future:
  • In the first film, the 1955 Doc has a panic attack after he sees his 1985 self explaining that the time machine requires 1.21 gigawatts of electricity produced by plutonium. Doc says that since plutonium is out of the question, the only natural source of power that can generate 1.21 gigawatts is a bolt of lightning. That's when Marty remembers he has the flyer given to him by the woman campaigning to save the clock tower and realizes that the bolt of lightning that stopped the clocktower can be harnessed to give the time machine enough power to send it back to 1985.
  • In Part II, when Marty realizes he got Biff's dirty magazine in Strickland's office (and that Biff still has the Almanac), Marty laments to Doc over the walkie talkie that he has no idea what to do now or how he's going to find Biff... only to hear the sound of a certain struggle going on in the parking lot.
    Marty: OF COURSE! (to Doc) I gotta go, I got one chance, my old man is about to deck Biff!
• Batman (1989):
  • Vicki Vale is already beginning to suspect something about Bruce Wayne, but the penny finally drops about who he really is when she discovers his parents were murdered.
    Knox: What do you suppose something like that does to a kid?
  • Bruce himself seems to have one when confronting Joker in Vicki's apartment. After Joker asks the question, “You ever dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight?”; it snaps Bruce out of his Let's Get Dangerous! moment. A flashback later on reveals what Bruce realized: that Joker/Jack is the one who killed Thomas and Martha Wayne; he asked the same question to young Bruce.
• A Beautiful Mind:
  • Nash develops his theory out of his friends' fighting over a girl.
  • There's a more serious case later in the movie: Nash realizes he hallucinates when he realizes in all the years he's seen them, the little girl never ages.
• In Beaches, there's Bette Midler's satirical song about the — apocryphal — inventor "Otto Titsling", who supposedly invented the brassiere.
• The Big Short has the scene where Mark Baum talks to Wing Chau, and puts on a massive Oh, Crap! face as Baum realizes the market for insuring mortgage bonds is significantly larger than the market for the mortgage loans themselves, and thus the whole world economy would suffer when that bubble burst.
• In Blazing Saddles, Hedley Lamarr's evil plans all come as a result of these.
• In Blood Work, the detective realizes the meaning of the Code Killer's message ("903 472 568") while looking at a check he wrote for his neighbor, after someone else pointed out that the message doesn't contain a 1.
• In The Cannonball Run, J.J. and Victor debate what to drive in the race while driving around in a boat. They get into an accident and are taken to the hospital in an ambulance. J.J. asks the doctor how long it's going to take them to get to the hospital. The doctor explains that the ambulance can easily slip through traffic due to being an emergency vehicle. Guess what they end up driving in the race.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022): When Ellie is tied up in Sweet Pete's bootlegging facility, Captain Putty forces her to call Dale and tell him that she's fine. However, Ellie tells him something that is supposed to be a coded message for help: that her favorite episode of Rescue Rangers is "When You Fish Upon a Star". Dale watches said episode and, through his bizarre train of thought, manages to correctly guess what's really going on.
  Dale: Alright, think, Dale! Think! Gadget is stuck in a lantern. Lanterns provide light... by using fire! Fire is really cool... but also really dangerous. Someone is in a dangerous situation! Like that time I dropped a bowling ball on my toe. (gasp) Ellie has ten toes! And she probably likes Thai food! Ellie is tied up and in danger! And Chip is with her! It was Putty working with Sweet Pete the whole time! I cracked it! I'm coming, guys!
• Clegg: When Col. Sullivan facetiously suggests that maybe Wildman hired prostitutes to carry out the assassinations, Harry suddenly realises that this is exactly what Wildman has done. Or rather, one specific prostitute.
• Conjoined: When Jerry asks if they would separate Alina and Alisa before prosecuting the latter, it gives Stanley the idea to perform the surgery himself.
• In Death Walks on High Heels, Inspector Baxter has one about how the crime could have been committed when The Coroner makes a comment about the freezer at the morgue.
• In Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond runs through a quick list of locations of Whyte properties Blofeld might be using to run his satellite operation. He and Willard Whyte both realize where it is when he mentions an oil rig off the coast of Baja California.
  Willard Whyte: Baja? I haven't got anything in Baja!
• Die Hard has this a few times:
  • In Die Hard, John McClane is talking to Al on "getting help from the guy upstairs." It then hits John that Hans was near the roof when they ran into each other, and he starts to wonder what Hans was doing up there.
  • Die Hard 2 has McClane chasing Stuart's team and using a machine gun he took from one of them, but it has no effect. McClane wonders how he could have missed at that range and checks the gun to find it's filled with blanks. McClane realizes this means the terrorists were using blanks in their "firefight" with Grant's Special Forces team. Which means they knew the soldiers were using blanks too... which means Grant and Stuart are working together.
  • In Die Hard with a Vengeance, running into a band of under-aged looters alerts McClane that the villain's apparent plan is likely a distraction.
    Kid: All the cops are into something! It's Christmas! You could steal city hall!
• Dogma has one of these near the end; Jay tells Bethany (while trying to get it on, because the world's about to end) about a boardwalk he once took a girl to on a date. Bethany, after learning that the boardwalk has Skeeball, realizes that "John Doe Jersey," of whom her minister was sermonizing about earlier, is God, trapped in a comatose mortal body. Hey, Jay was a prophet (or is that profit?), after all.
• Evolution has some egregious examples:
  • The revelation that the aliens reproduce quicker with fire is brought about by Orlando Jones' character dropping a lit cigarette into a petri dish, seconds after explaining how he hasn't smoked in years.
  • The alien's weakness to selenium is discovered by Julianne Moore taking off her jacket, revealing her periodic table of elements t-shirt.
    • Note that Evolution was, in fact, a pastiche of these kinds of movies.
• A Face in the Crowd: "Oh, if only they heard the way that psycho really talks." Fortunately someone in the sound room heard him and set up the Engineered Public Confession that doomed "that psycho".
• In A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise briefly halts a brainstorming session with the rest of the defense team to look for his lucky baseball bat, which Demi Moore has innocently placed in the closet. Staring into the closet prompts a Eureka Moment that reveals an important fact about the case — the murder victim's clothes were hanging in his closet; if he had really been due to transfer to another post the next morning — as his CO has claimed — his things would have been packed, and his closet empty. Prompting the line "he really does think better with that bat."
• At the end of The Fugitive U.S. Marshall Gerard is having doubts as to whether Dr. Richard Kimble is guilty of killing his wife and has doubts about Dr. Charles Nichols and one-armed man former cop Sykes. So he has his deputies check the phone records for a connection but nothing comes up. Then a deputy notices that a call was made to Sykes from Kimble's car phone right around the time Nichols was driving to give Kimble his keys back, and around the time that Kimble's wife was killed.
• In Ghostbusters II, after the proton packs have no effect on the slime encasing the art museum, Egon figures out it's powered by all the negative emotion in the city. He starts to talk about needing a massive infusion of positive energy to shatter the shell.
  Egon: We need something that everyone in this town can get behind. [looks down] We need... a symbol!
  Ray: Something that appeals to the best in each and every one of us.
  Egon: Something good.
  Winston: Something decent.
  Peter: Something pure.
  [close up of the Statue of Liberty image on Ecto-1A's license plate]
• An unexpected source: in Godzilla vs. Biollante, a scientist works out the flaw of a recent attempt to neutralize Godzilla via Applied Phlebotinum by seeing dry ice hauled about for emergency refrigeration in the wake of the unthwarted monster attack.
• In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron are unable to get through the barrier at King's Cross to get on the Hogwarts Express, and are wondering what to do. At a loss, Harry suggests they just go back and wait by the car, which gives Ron the idea to use his dad's flying car to get to Hogwarts.
• High School Musical: A villainous example from Sharpay, when she gets an idea to make it so that Gabriela can't make it to the auditions.
  Sharpay: Okay, so the decathlon and the basketball game are on Monday, and the auditions are on Friday. Too bad all of these events weren't happening all on the same day... at the same time.
• In Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Chance's "if I don't survive" speech helps Shadow figure out a way to get rid of the cougar chasing them.
  Shadow: Seesaw? Seesaw! Chance, you're a genius!
  Chance: I am not!... What's a genius?
  Shadow: Never mind.
• The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit: When Suzie hears that Aspercel jumped over a seven-foot fence, she realizes that the horse has the potential to compete in the International Horse Show and not just the teenage circuits right when Helen wants to stop taking Aspercel show-jumping but the Boltons need the horse to keep winning competitions.
• In Hot Fuzz, Nicholas Angel's suspicions are stumped by the question of how one person could be in multiple places at once. When he and Danny Butterman go visit the convenience shop, the conversation that takes place between Danny and the clerk causes Nicholas to suspect multiple killers. What's more, the shop clerk who triggered the Eureka Moment is one of the killers herself. Oops.
• The Hunt for Red October:
  • During the briefing for Jeffrey Pelt on Soviet captain Marko Ramius, Jack Ryan realizes today's the anniversary of his wife's death, thus Ramius' real goal isn't attacking the United States, but defecting to them, instead. When he figures this out, Ryan quietly mutters "You son of a bitch...", before saying it loud enough for everybody else to hear, leading Pelt to quip "You wish to add something to our discussion, Dr. Ryan?"
  • Later, Ryan tries to mull over how Ramius would manage to get the rest of his crew off the sub as part of his plan to defect.
    Jack: We don't have to figure out how to get the crew off the sub. He's already done that, he would have had to. All we gotta do is figure out what he's gonna do. So how's he gonna get the crew off the sub? They have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub....
• In Independence Day, a scientist's father tells him to get up off the floor so he doesn't catch a cold, which gives him the idea to disrupt the aliens' force fields by uploading a virus into the mothership's computers in a reference to The War of the Worlds. This scene is parodied in the "Cancelled" episode of South Park. However, this parody is itself not an example of Eureka Moment, but of Bat Deduction.
• In Inside Man, a chance comment a rookie cop makes to Denzel Washington's character allows him to figure out how exactly the hostage takers were able to stay ten steps ahead of the police.
• Happens in Interstellar when Murph finds out her father is actually the "Ghost" that contacted her in her childhood and also when discovering the solution to Brand's equation. She even shouts "Eureka!" out of joy, throwing her papers everywhere after writing the solution on them.
• In the Line of Fire: Clint Eastwood's character figures out the meaning of a word with seven letters after a chance remark by a character played by Joshua Malina.
• I, Robot features several effective examples of this trope including... "...the right man for the job...?" "...follow the bread crumbs..." "...I think my father wanted me to kill you..." etc, etc.
• In K-9 Dooley is growing frustrated with a case he's working. His girlfriend Tracy told him that he needed to relax, and the answer would come to him. Not much later, things are getting romantic between the two, when lo and behold, Dooley has an epiphany and must rush out the door with his four-legged sidekick.
• In Kid Detective (2020), Abe is well and truly stumped on the entire mystery until a childhood friend explains that he was wrong about one his very first cases. This makes Abe realize that case was a setup and the culprit behind it is the one he should be investigating.
• L: change the WorLd has one character hiding clues in math problems. L figures out the solution when accidentally given a clue.
• In the first Legally Blonde movie, when Elle is defending her client, a fitness guru accused of killing her husband to get ahold of his business assets, she's a nervous wreck while asking the stepdaughter what she was doing that day. Elle gets her second wind when the witness states that she took a shower after her bi-yearly permanent hair treatment, and Elle surprises the entire court by mentioning that taking a shower after a permanent will render the chemicals' effect on the hair ineffective. After some more questioning its revealed that the stepdaughter was waiting to ambush his father's wife, but accidentally shot him dead, and pinned it on her stepmother.
• In The Mad Magician, Alice Prentiss experiences her Eureka Moment when her husband is reading her details of an unrelated murder in Fall River, and says that a neighbour saw the killer but he was masked. This makes he realize that the man she thought was Ormond could have been Gallico wearing a Latex Perfection mask.
• Major League: The Indians' manager is about to send hopelessly wild pitcher Ricky Vaughn to the minor leagues. During their conversation, the manager off-handedly mentions another pitcher who went down to the minors and had a successful career and points at his photograph. Vaughn squints in the pitcher's direction, and the manager suddenly realizes all his problems are related to poor vision.
• Crossed with Oh, Crap!; In Man of Steel, Lois tells Clark that they gave her a Mind Probe and learned all her secrets. Clark replies that Zod was inside his head as well... then he connects the dots and realizes they know where he lives, probably enforced by him cocking his head slightly like he was listening.
• In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Ben McKenna follows the lead of spy Louis Bernard's dying words, "Ambrose Chappell", to search for the kidnappers of Ben's son. Ben visits a taxidermy shop owned by a man named Ambrose Chappell, only to learn that Mr. Chappell has no association with the criminals. As Ben's wife, Jo, waits anxiously for him to return to their hotel room, one of her friends, Val, asks her the name of the person Ben's searching for. Val mistakenly calls him "Church", so after Jo corrects him with the word, "Chappell", she pauses, then exclaims, "It's not a man, it's a place! It's Ambrose Chapel!" Jo's friends proceed to help her find the address of this chapel in the phone directory, before she leaves them to search there.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Iron Man 2: While trying to perfect the arc reactor, Tony suddenly finds inspiration in his father's miniature model of the first Stark Expo. Of course, his dad did that quite on purpose during the video he left behind for Tony.
    Howard Stark: This is the key to the future, Tony.
    [camera cut to the City of the Future]
    [camera cut to the Unisphere]
    [camera cut to a prototype arc reactor]
  • It seems that they did some research on the missing element. The element in question (118) does exist as "Ununoctium" though it is radioactive and only lasts for a very short time before decaying. It can only be synthesized with the help of a particle accelerator.
  • Happens to Tony again in The Avengers, when he realizes that Loki is using Stark Tower to launch the alien invasion.
    Tony Stark: He knows he has to take us out to win, right? That's what he wants. He wants to beat us, he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience.
    Steve Rogers: Right. I caught his act in Stuttgart.
    Tony Stark: Yeah. That's just previews, this is... this is opening night. And Loki, he's a full-tilt diva. He wants flowers, he wants parades, he wants a monument built to the skies with his name plastered... Son of a bitch.
  • Spider-Man: Homecoming: Used by Adrian Toomes as he drives his daughter and Peter to the homecoming dance. His first clue was when Peter tried to bluff that he was at a party his daughter was at, the same night he and Spider-Man met, but she interrupts and says that he was barely there. Then he follows it by talking about the elevator incident in DC, with Peter himself confirming he wasn't up there, but remarking it was lucky that Spider-Man saved them.
    Toomes: [as the light ahead of him turns green] Good old Spider-Man.
  • Nonverbal one in Avengers: Endgame. As Thanos regains control of the Gauntlet and about to dust the universe again, Tony looks at Dr. Strange as if asking "what are we going to do now?". Strange wordlessly raises his finger, trembling all the time, and at that moment Tony understands that he will have to make the ultimate sacrifice to turn the battle around, the only one out of millions of outcomes where they actually win.
• Master and Commander: "Let me guess. A stick?"
  Midshipman Blakeny: It's a rare phasmid, sir... It's an insect that disguises itself as a stick in order to confuse its predators.
  [later]
  Captain Jack: A nautical phasmid, Doctor... I intend to take a greater interest in the bounty of nature from now on. I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare! Now to pull this predator in close and spring our trap.
• Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus: After having sex the two scientists realize pheromones are the key. To capturing the monsters, that is.
• Men in Black:
  • Men in Black:
    • The title characters have been racking their brains trying to figure out where the "Galaxy" is. Their only hint is that they were told it's "on Orion's Belt" by a dying alien^note this confuses the Agents because they think the alien is referencing the constellation Orion, but that "belt" has no galaxies on it. When Agent J sees Frank barking at a cat on the street, he realizes the alien meant collar: the alien had owned a cat named Orion, and the "Galaxy" is a trinket the size of a marble attached to its collar. (This is foreshadowed when the prince is eating with his countryman right before Edgar attacks, and uses words that aren't quite the right English terms.)
    • And it happens again later on, when the MIB are trying to figure out where the Bug might get a ship, and Jay spots the mural of the 1964 World's Fair, where they'd stashed a pair of flying saucers decades before and passed it off as an avant garde art installation.
  • Double Subversion in Men in Black II, where Agent J starts to decode a ridiculously complicated chain of arrows in a pizza shop which leads him nowhere, because he missed a much more obvious clue at the first arrow. However, the free-association links he found do turn out to be quite close to the actual plot.
  • Discussed in Men in Black 3. In 1969, Jay and the young Kay are trying to find Boris, Kay suggests heading to the nearby diner and getting some pie, saying "My granddaddy always said: 'If you got a problem you can't solve, it helps to get out of your head.' Pie. It's good." While at the diner, they see some disgruntled New York Mets fans.
    Jay: (sotto, to Kay) That's funny. The Mets actually win it all this year.
    Young Kay: Oh, yeah.
    Jay: No, I'm serious.
    Young Kay: I'm sure.
    Jay: Look, three months from now, your buddies down there are gonna be calling them "the Amazing Mets" and "the Miracle Mets"...
    (beat)
    Young Kay: What? What you got there, hoss?
    Jay: The Archanan said, "It's amazing! It's a miracle! I'll see you at the game." I know where he is.
    Young Kay: (smiling) Told you to trust the pie.
• In Mortal Engines, when Hester sees the shrine to Medusa in Shan Guo, realises the central eye is the same as the locket her mother gave her, and opens it to discover the crash drive for the MEDUSA system.
• In Murder!, Sir John realizes when he takes a sip of his brandy cocktail that if Diana had been lying about having drunk the brandy, she wouldn't have been so equivocal in her denial of the murder.
• William has one in The Name of the Rose book considering the secret of the library. Adso remembers how Salvatore said "tertius equi", which is Canis Latinicus for "The third of horse" (when he meant "the third horse"). William concludes: "the first and the seventh of the four" really means "the first and the seventh of the word four", and "four" is "quattuor" in Latin, so you have to push the letters Q and O!
  • They had a minor one earlier, when Adson dreamed a story similar to the "Coena Cypriani", a kind of The Bible parody. Which helps William to remember that there was a book in the library consisting of four texts, one of them a comment for the Coena Cypriani, another one the book they're looking for.
• National Treasure:
  • The entire plot hinged on the protagonist's ability to solve puzzles and uncover secrets in this manner. Granted, the hint was invariably directly related to the solution ("Pass and Stow" was written on an ad for the Liberty Bell, the correct time was drawn on a famous picture of the building it was stored in, etc), far more so than typically for this trope.
  • The Big Bad also had a few of these, such as his realization that the reason why the word "Silence" is capitalized in a coded message is because it's a name (Ben Franklin's pen name) or when they arrive to the Liberty Bell exhibit only to realize that he's supposed to look where the bell was originally located not where it was moved 100 years later.
• In Oz the Great and Powerful, Oscar is starting to feel overwhelmed by the knowledge that he has to fight two witches armed with very real magic that he doesn't have, and the only thing behind him is an army of craftsmen. While tucking in the China Girl at bed time, he tells her about Thomas Edison, and that he could use his knowledge of natural science to create wonders and realizes that he can use his own knowledge of special effects and theatrics to basically bluff the witches into submission.
• In Philomena, Martin realizes that Michael was aware of — and took pride in — his Irish ancestry.
• Towards the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, as Neal Page is finally heading home to his family in Chicago, he starts thinking about having Thanksgiving dinner with them. This segues into thinking about his time with Del Griffith, specifically one cryptic comment Del made: "I haven't been home in years...". Neal suddenly realizes the truth about Del, and he returns to the train station to confront Del, who confesses he's been a homeless drifter since his wife Marie died 8 years earlier.
• In Real Genius, Knight's frustration at his sabotaged laser failing leads him to a freezer, where he realizes "It must be frozen..." and invents an entirely new and better laser using a frozen core.
• Based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga, the Chinese movie Red Cliff has Boisterous Bruiser Zhang Fei, not known for his tactical genius, but still unwittingly blurting out vital insights more than once. Towards the end of the movie, his comment on the enemy battle fleet ("those ships could give us more firewood than we'll use in our lifetime") leads to Zhou Yu's plan to set the entire fleet on fire.
• In Seven (1979), Cowboy is trying to work out how to deal with Kimo's bulletproof limo when he spots a couple of kids pitching horseshoes in the park. A light bulb goes off and exclaims "That's it! Horseshoes!", much to Jenny's confusion.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The title character is given a staff and told to "Follow Rana. The staff will lead you to Totenkopf".
  Polly: Have you looked at this? There's markings on it, like a ruler. And there's a moon and a star.
  Joe: "And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by." A star. He wasn't talking about a place, he was talking about a star! Rana is a star! Ancient sailors used to navigate by using the night sky. They could determine their position by the moon and the stars. The Vikings were known to create maps for certain stars, latitude tables that required a key to decipher them. The key was called Jacob's staff. This has to be the key!
• The Sniper: Lt. Kafka experiences a minor one (in that it does not immediately bust the case) while complaining to Sgt. Ferris about the tips coming from the public, including one from the woman in the dunk tank talking about Miller hurling baseballs at her.
  Lt. Kafka: "A letter from a man who says..." <Beat> "Baseballs?" (gets a thoughtful look on his face and gets up and hurries from the room)
• Snowball Express: John gets his idea about turning the mountain into a ski resort when Wally talks about riding all over it in his snowmobile.
• In Some Guy Who Kills People, the sheriff is struggling to find a connection between the victims aside from them all coming from the same town. His Clueless Deputy, who has a habit of making inappropriate jokes, remarks that if there were six more of them, they'd have a baseball team. That gives the sheriff his lightbulb moment as he grabs the yearbooks and discovers the victims had all been on the high school basketball team.
• In Spies Like Us, Austin Millbarge muses over accidentally launching an ICBM and apparently starting World War III, saying "And to think my guidance counselor said I'd never amount to anything...". After which, he suddenly says "GUIDANCE!? SOURCE PROGRAMMABLE GUIDANCE!" and thinks up a plan that saves the day.
• In The Film of the Book The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the burnt-out British spy Leamas is seconds away from successfully competing an assignment to destroy an enemy agent when stupid mistakes by his service in London destroy the entire plot, allowing the enemy agent to escape. You look into his face and you realize that the entire plan was about saving that agent who has come over to the British and killing the man who suspects him. Leamas was just a pawn.
• After two weeks of poring over a cartouche in the original Stargate movie, Daniel Jackson finally figures out that the symbols aren't hieroglyphs, but star constellations when he sees a picture of Orion on a guard's newspaper and recognizes the shape as one of the symbols.
• In Stranger Than Fiction, the author figured out how to kill off the main character after seeing someone drop an apple. She mentions she'd never be able to explain the connection. It makes sense when you see it.
• In the 1974 film The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the police car carrying the ransom money crashes on the way to the hijacked subway train. With no time left to spare before the hijackers kill a hostage, Garber manages to do some quick thinking when he realizes that the hijackers, who are underground and only in contact with the outside world through his dispatch terminal, don't know that the car has crashed.
  Police officer: If they know the truck is wrecked, how can they expect us to be on time?
  Garber: They don't know anything down there. How can they know anything when they... that's it.
  <switches on the radio with Mr. Grey>
  Garber: Pelham One-Two-Three, the money has arrived. I repeat, the money has arrived!
• In Tell No One, Alexandre has received a mysterious e-mail from someone claiming to be his dead wife, Margot, who's left him a username and password to answer another e-mail that's being sent later. Alexandre can't access the account no matter how he tries, much to his frustration. That night, he's out walking the dog when he hears "With or Without You" playing, and realizes what the username and password are really *supposed* to be, allowing him to go to an Internet cafe and access the account.
• In Thank You for Smoking, Nick hits upon his strategy for the congressional hearing while watching Bobby eat apple pie covered with cheese.
• To Catch a Killer (2023): Eleanor cracks the case, while sitting in a bathtub no less. One of the people they had interviewed earlier knows the killer, but was afraid to tell the police because of his own illegal hiring practices.
• Tremors. The main characters are desperately trying to figure out a way to escape from the Graboids, which perform a Dig Attack. Valentine says "We need a helicopter. Or a goddamn tank!" Earl realizes that they can use a bulldozer to pull an open semi-trailer and carry everyone to safety.
• At the end of The Usual Suspects detective Kujan lets Verbal Kint go after interrogating him about the ship massacre, convinced by Kint's story (told in flashbacks that make up most of the movie) that Dean Keaton is legendary criminal Keyser Soze. After Kint leaves, Kujan comments on the sloppiness of his partner's desk, and his partner says the mess makes sense if you take a step back and look at the whole thing. Kujan chuckles, drinks his coffee, looks at his evidence board and realizes Kint made up the whole story based on things tacked on the board, complete with Kujan dropping his coffee mug and it shattering in slow motion.
• WarGames
  • While trying to figure out the password to log onto the WOPR computer, David and Jennifer watch a short film featuring Falken and his son. David asks about the son's name, and when she answers that it's "Joshua", he mutters "It can't be that easy..." It does indeed turn out to be the password.
  • During the tense final scene, when Falken tries to access Joshua with his password and finds it's been taken out, David asks what they're going to do. Falken says "I don't know. Do you?", then for some reason, Jennifer says "I told you not to play games with that thing". So, David thinks for a moment, then says "It's games. GAMES!", and proceeds to play games with Joshua.
• In We're the Millers David conceives his "let's pretend to be a family" plan after seeing a police officer helping out a family in a RV.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
  • As Eddie Valiant leaves a movie theater, a newsreel tells the news of how Maroon Cartoons was sold to Cloverleaf Industries, the same company that bought the Red Car trolley line and bid for ownership of Toontown. He runs back in and shouts, "That's it! That's the connection!"
  • He has another one following Doom's comment to the weasels about "laughing yourselves to death". You can literally hear the light bulb go on in his head.
• Yves Saint Laurent: Yves thumbs through an art book and sees a Mondrian painting...the rest is history.

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