10 Famous Movies That Were Derailed By A Single Character

2. Rachel Ferrier - Dakota Fanning (War of the Worlds)

Why They Derailed The Movie: Gave Us A Mind-Numbing Headache We've all spent enough time watching Steven Spielberg movies to know that the guy loves a) kid characters and be) kid characters who are precocious and maybe even smarter than the adult characters and hell, even the audience. That's okay, I guess, because we can't fault the man for just wanting to include characters who children can relate to (he makes family movies, you know), but he's never been great at striking the right balance. I still think Jurassic Park would have been greatly improved had somebody opted to take out the kids, or, like, have them eaten at the end. So take Rachel (though to be fair, I could have easily picked her intolerable douche of a brother Robbie instead), another Spielberg-esque daughter embodied with exhaustive authority by Dakota Fanning, and a character who exists only to send smartass remarks back at her tired and doing-his-best father Tom Cruise - and scream the hell out of the runtime of the movie! In a movie about aliens from Mars, did we really need to go on a ride with this kid? Instead of watching a blockbuster about alien invasion, it felt like we'd all been forced to babysit. Ugh.