10 Moments That Ruined Amazing Movie Scenes
When something wild derails an otherwise incredible scene.
Making a great movie is an absurdly difficult task, and pulling off even a single fantastic scene is rife with challenges, as directors attempt to coordinate all the separate disciplines into something that just works.
But it's pure movie magic when filmmakers get it right, and oh-so-agonising when they fall a hair short by getting one element so damn wrong.
Sometimes one aspect, even one moment from a scene will be so fundamentally off that it unbalances the entire sequence, making it tough to take seriously and perhaps even rendering it a genuine laughing stock.
And that's absolutely the case with these 10 movie scenes, each of which had everything they needed on paper to be genuinely brilliant, unforgettable moments, only for a seemingly minor quibble to come along and derail all the hard work.
Are we being dramatic? Not really - these puzzling moments distracted audiences and got them thinking about anything except what the filmmakers actually wanted them to be.
It's all the more maddening as most of these issues could've actually been remedied relatively trivially during post-production with some fairly simply edits...
10. Xenomorph Jazz Hands - Alien
The moment that we first catch a fleeting glimpse of the adult Xenomorph in Alien is one of the most pant-filling jump scares in horror history. Or it would be, if not for the fact that Ridley Scott opted to pose the grotesque creature in such a bloody daft way.
The Nostromo's intrepid captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) ventures into the ship's air ducts to flush out the alien, and at the end of a gut-wrenchingly suspenseful sequence, he comes face to face with the Xenomorph, as it leaps out in front of him, a loud screech is heard, and Dallas' feed abruptly cuts off.
It's an almost perfect scene, except for the horrendously goofy shot where the alien thrusts out its jazz hands in front of Dallas while pulling a face which can be best compared to your average Saturday night reveller gurning when the good stuff kicks in.
That the Xenomorph just seems to be randomly reaching into the darkness without actually grabbing hold of Dallas makes it that much worse. With some sneaky editing magic, namely cutting away earlier, it probably wouldn't seem quite so silly.