10 Awful Plot Twists That Completely Ruined Great Movies
1. Saving Private Ryan
The Movie
Ripping WWII yarn for which the opening battle sequence changed war at the movies, Spielberg's Oscar-winner features an American-as-apple-pie army captain (Tom Hanks) and a ragtag soldiering bunch searching across Normandy for the eponymous Private Ryan (Matt Damon). A
fter Hanks' Capt. Miller finds Ryan, and they together make a failed last stand against a superior German force in an abandoned village, it looks like Ryan won't be saved after all. Hundreds of Germans versus a pre-Bourne Matt Damon and a crippled Tom Hanks is not typically good odds.
The Awful Twist
Ruining your own film right at the end really should be known as the Spielberg Special.
At the end of Private Ryan, our protagonists are dying, or facing certain death. Spielberg's point is made - war is futile. There are no winners. Then, suddenly, just as Tom Hanks starts to die like everyone else, Allied aircraft appear from nowhere and bomb the living Deutsch out of the enemy. For some reason, this prompts the hundreds of still fighting-fit German soldiers to surrender to the four or so U.S. troops remaining, and America wins.
Because, according to Spielberg, when a vastly superior force is about to decimate its enemy, it immediately gives up as soon as a couple of bombers appear.
So disappointing is this finale (along with the revelation that an older Private Ryan was reliving the entire story - D-Day landings included - in his head, despite not being present until the last third of the film), the only way to rescue the film is to eject the disc just after Hanks is taken down, and directly before the air support illogically arrives. It improves the film considerably; you can imagine all kinds of better endings on your own, or just pretend the film simply ends there.
The 'Berg has ruined many of his own pictures at the finish-line, but Private Ryan's unbelievable, split-second turnaround is possibly his worst. Without this climax, Private Ryan on the whole would have been regarded much higher than it already is, and not just remembered largely for its first 25 minutes.