10 Movies That Secretly Revealed Their Endings

3. Saving Private Ryan - The Airborne Division 

Steven Spielberg's epic war tale Saving Private Ryan recounts the acts of a squad of American Army Rangers, in the days following the 1944 Invasion of Normandy. Tom Hank's stars as Captain Miller, the man tasked with leading the Rangers on a mission to rescue a certain member of the American Airborne (Matt Damon).

The movie opens with a short sequence showing an old veteran wondering around a cemetery before finding a specific grave. The camera does not reveal the name of the fallen solider and instead focuses on the veteran's face who is overcome with grief. The frame then cuts to the beaches of Normandy, and the first face we see is that of Captain Miller. The nature of the transition leads the audience to believe that the elderly man is indeed Captain Miller remembering his days as a solider. Once we find out Miller's mission is to rescue a young paratrooper, the audience immediately thinks he must have failed in his task, given the elderly man's earlier reaction to the grave.

The movie feels as though it's moving towards a moment of failure, but low and behold, Miller winds up giving his life to save Private Ryan. The old man is then revealed to be Ryan himself. It was a clever bit of misdirection, but for anyone who spotted the old man's Airborne badge on his lapel, it would have been obvious he was Ryan all along.