10 Movie Scenes Everyone Always Gets Wrong

One of the many, many disturbing sequences in Saving Private Ryan sees Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) paralysed with fear while his comrade Private Mellish (Adam Goldberg) is overpowered and slowly stabbed to death by a German soldier.

The common audience response to the scene, sadly, is to find Upham's actions inexplicable, that his failure to save his teammate is an act of abject cowardice, and that we the audience would never behave in such a way.

Except, we almost certainly would.

The entire point of the scene, as is missed by so many, is that the average human being thrust into war would likely freeze up just as Upham did.

Our knee-jerk revulsion to his inaction only underlines the parts of our selves we'd prefer not to confront, that in a traumatic situation, heroism would be the last thing on our minds.

To say that Upham picks up the "idiot ball" in this scene is to bafflingly gloss over the effects of trauma on the human psyche.