10 Exact Moments Awesome Movie Directors Stopped Trying

9. It Was All A Dream - Oliver Stone

Much like Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone's best days as a filmmaker are literally decades behind him.

The director of sure-fire classics such as Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers hasn't made a generally well-received film since 1995's Anthony Hopkins-starring Nixon.

While some might point to Stone's career tanking irredeemably with the high-profile, big-budget failure of Alexander, there are at least moments of invention within the sloppy whole which suggest a director taking a hard swing (and yes, a miss) at the material.

After the watchable-but-mediocre trio of World Trade Center, W., and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Stone confirmed he'd creatively sputtered out with his 2012 thriller Savages.

If the script's attempt to make the word "wargasms" a thing wasn't embarrassing enough, Stone underlined his own creative bankruptcy with the film's head-smackingly awful ending, in which the apparent deaths of protagonists Ophelia (Blake Lively), Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and Chon (Taylor Kitsch) are revealed to be nothing more than a dream.

And so, Stone literally rewinds the movie to give the "heroes" another go-around, this time allowing them to survive.

It's a narrative device which has been hokey since at least the '90s, and so for Stone to invoke it in a 2012 movie shows just how thoroughly he's stuck in the past.

Since then, Stone has delivered a forgettable Edward Snowden biopic and, er, been hanging out with Vladimir Putin.