10 Movies That Could Have Been Truly Awesome (With A Single Change)

1. Saving Private Ryan

Fourteen years later, Steven Spielberg was in a position to make far more ambitious films. He still made genre movies, but was now seen as a serious filmmaker thanks to The Color Purple and Schindler's List. The boy who never grew up turned out to be an adult after all, as much John Ford as George Pal.

Saving Private Ryan, for the most part, is a prime example of why the Spielberg name is synonymous with the word "blockbuster." It was a long film that feels much shorter, thanks to the usual qualities that make Spielberg a respected commodity. It's an exciting adventure, a dramatic clinic, and poignant love letter to soldiers everywhere. Even Vin Diesel's good in it.

Then ILM gets involved, and what could have been a successor to Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One winds up looking like a SyFy Pictures Original. Young Private Ryan (Matt Damon), slowly ages and turns into his present-day self (Harrison Young). At the time, the morphing technique was an overused staple of Hollywood sci-fi films, and had even made its way into television and low-budget productions. It's a tech nerd's version of a dissolve or match-cut, two far more tasteful techniques. The scenes before and after are stirring, but the morph in between only draws attention to itself. Spielberg the dramatist is interrupted by Spielberg the futurist, leaving a flaw in what could have been a cinematic diamond.