10 Exact Moments Awesome Movie Directors Stopped Trying
2. Rollerball's Night Vision Scene - John McTiernan
From the mid '80s through to the mid '90s, John McTiernan was one of Hollywood's go-to action directors, responsible for card-carrying genre classics such as Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, Last Action Hero (yes, it's a classic), and the supremely underrated Die Hard with a Vengeance.
In 1999, McTiernan appeared to spread himself a little thin by helming both the well-received remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and the historic box office dud The 13 Warrior, the latter of which grossed barely one-third of its obscene $160 million budget.
Though the film's failure signalled bigger problems for McTiernan, at the time it seemed more like an unfortunate blip than a career-derailing dud.
Sadly he followed it up with another over-budgeted slice of mediocre schlock - a $70 million remake of 1975 cult sci-fi film Rollerball.
While the film's troubled production and sloppy end result made it abundantly clear that McTiernan no longer had the mettle to handle a project of this scale, there's a single scene which truly confirmed how thoroughly the director had lost his touch.
This is, of course, the infamous 7-minute night vision chase sequence - to be clear, that's an entire chase sequence shot in night vision. For seven agonising minutes.
Hilariously, this scene was actually a reshoot, as the original filmed version was found to be too dark, with the reshoots ultimately delaying the film's release by six months.
Budgetary issues prevented the scene from being completed to satisfaction, and so McTiernan just decided to slap a green tint on the footage to make it night vision...despite this stylistic choice never being explained within the movie itself.
The director attempted to bounce back the following year with the star-studded thriller Basic, but it was mauled by both critics and audiences, and before he could make another movie, McTiernan was implicated in an illegal wiretapping scandal which eventually saw him sent to prison for 10 months.
McTiernan is currently attempting to get a new action film, Tau Ceti Four, off the ground, though it's safe to say that his Hollywood esteem has all but evaporated.