No Country For Old Men caused a lot of movie fans to feel frustrated on account of its ambiguous plot strands, the first of which decided to not show our main protagonist - Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss - in his dying moments. Instead, the Coens simply cut away and cut back to a time when he's already dead, depriving us of the scene in which he's gunned down by Mexicans. But the vague, dreamy ending left people feeling even more annoyed. Which is to say, No Country For Old men chooses to culminate in a way that purposely intended to provoke debate amongst movie-goers, with Tommy Lee Jones' defeated Sheriff Ed Bell recounting a coupe of dreams he had the night before, whilst eating breakfast on the first day of his retirement. After lamenting that - in one dream - he took a torch from his father, he says: "And then I woke up". We cut to black, wondering what it all really means.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
