• 21 hours ago
No flag for Neil Armstrong?! Captain America didn't die for this!

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00:00Movies love playing with audiences expectations. Directors know what you want to see and often will spend 90 minutes or more
00:07hyping up one big moment.
00:10However, sometimes that moment or the money shot as I'm going to refer to it from here on out is either cut out or
00:17purposefully withheld, leaving audiences just kind of scratching their heads. With that in mind then I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com
00:25And these are eight movies that missed out the money shot. Number eight, the heist, Reservoir Dogs. Now, yes, of course
00:31it's the entire point of
00:33Reservoir Dogs that you don't actually get to see the heist that the entire rat's nest plot blossoms around.
00:39But that doesn't mean that it's not a hugely conspicuous absence nonetheless.
00:44Quentin Tarantino has often been accused of self-indulgence in the amount of dialogue that he stuffs into his films.
00:50But he also usually balances it with action and copious lashings of hyper violence.
00:56But in stark contrast to his later films which unflinchingly crowned those violent sequences as the jewels in the story,
01:03early Tarantino preferred to instead keep some of his cards hidden.
01:07And like I said, it somewhat suits the story since it means that it's harder to tell what the true story of what went down
01:13is and so we have to follow Mr. White's lack of clarity.
01:16It would have been a delightfully Tarantino-esque sequence after all given the testimonies about it.
01:22Number seven, Frank Abagnale's last escape, Catch Me If You Can. Catch Me If You Can is a pretty packed story already with some of
01:30Frank Abagnale's exploits leaving Jaws firmly on the floor.
01:33But what if you were to find out that Abagnale's greatest ever moment and his most
01:38unbelievable criminal achievement didn't actually make it into the film?
01:43Well, you need not wonder on that reality much longer because that is exactly what happened in this film.
01:49So, in the real world after his arrest, somehow Abagnale had his detention commitment papers forgotten and was then
01:56mistaken for an undercover prison inspector with all the inherent privileges that come with that.
02:02Naturally, he took advantage of this and got an accomplice to pose as his fiancée to smuggle him a business card
02:09belonging to a so-called
02:11Inspector CW Dunlap of the Bureau of Prisons that she had stolen.
02:15So, all Frank had to do from there on out was reveal his undercover
02:19secret, show his card and give the doctored card to his guards as proof of his handler.
02:25Then his accomplice would answer and she was able to organize an unsupervised meeting allowing Abagnale to flee from
02:32Washington where he again evaded escape when he was recognized by claiming to be an FBI agent.
02:37So, yeah, it's a mad, mad story and surely one that deserved to be in the finished film.
02:43Number six, The Kraken's Death, Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End.
02:47Just like we had a little game of imagination in the last entry, this time
02:51I want you to imagine a world where a film franchise sets up an absolutely unstoppable force
02:56so powerful that it's able to kill the lead character part of the way through his own film series and
03:02then the next time that we see the same deadly force, it's just a corpse washed up on a beach somewhere.
03:09Well, that's exactly the sad, frustrating tale of the Kraken from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise,
03:15which ended a dead man's chest eating Jack Sparrow and settling his debt to Davy Jones in the process.
03:22After we'd watched the beast out-muscle Jaws and take out ships like they were made of twigs on the high sea,
03:28its killing of Sparrow was the perfect escalation and confirmation of its threat.
03:33This was clearly the real deal and we had a whole other Pirates film to see how the Kraken would be defeated.
03:40But then the legendary beast was just sacrificed in order to make the East India Trading Company look more formidable and uncompromising.
03:48So, the Kraken went from a legendary figure to just an afterthought dumped on a beach
03:54and we didn't get an answer to Dead Man's Chest's most pressing conundrum.
04:01Not only did George Millet basically invent special effects and cinema as we know it,
04:06just so that someone could eventually get Scary Movie 5 made, hooray I guess,
04:12but he also invented intelligent restrained filmmaking as well.
04:16In 1900, the grandfather of film made Joan of Arc,
04:19shooting over 200 meters of film and 12 different sets, which was a huge amount back then,
04:25but even he knew his limits.
04:27Thanks to the prohibitive cost then,
04:30Millet was forced to leave out one of the single most definitive moments in Joan of Arc's entire life,
04:35bar, you know, her death, that being the victory at the Siege of Orleans.
04:40Truthfully, the director just realized that he didn't have the space nor the budget to do the battle justice,
04:45so he simply left it out.
04:46And yeah, this one might have been the better choice,
04:48as better to leave us wanting more than to give us an unsatisfying replacement.
04:56On the surface, The Grail looked as though it was going to be a fairly conventional
04:59man versus beast creature film,
05:01with a group of survivors relentlessly pursued by a pack of man-eating wolves
05:05until a smaller group of them fought back, with Liam Neeson winning the day.
05:09In reality though, it's far more of an exercise in philosophical musings
05:13and a harrowing experience that builds towards a crescendo that never actually arrives,
05:19at least not fully anyway.
05:21See, Neeson's casting was very much designed to foreshadow him being the ultimate survivor,
05:26who would take the fight to the wolves.
05:28And then, in the final flick, that climactic fight between man and wolf simply didn't happen.
05:34We got to see him preparing by making his weapon, yeah sure,
05:38but then the movie cuts to credits,
05:40and all we see afterwards in The Stinger is the sight of the combatants lying in the snow.
05:49In George Miller's exceptional Mad Max reboot,
05:51the titular character is very much a man of few words and lots of action,
05:56even when it's sometimes fairly reluctant.
05:58If he's forced to do extreme things to save situation,
06:01or the wives in his and Furious' protection,
06:04he absolutely will, and it'll usually end up being pretty violent.
06:09Or at least that's what you'd expect if you knew the character from the older Mad Max films.
06:14In actuality, Fury Road consciously refuses to show Max's biggest opportunity
06:19for a violent flourish.
06:21When threatened by the bullet farmer when the war rig ends up stuck in the mud,
06:25Max takes it upon himself to deal with the threat,
06:28taking a knife and a can of fuel, and walking towards danger into the fog.
06:32But instead of us seeing him take on insurmountable odds,
06:36all we get to see is Furiosa watching an explosion in the fog,
06:40and then seeing Max walk back out of it covered in the blood of his enemies,
06:43and dragging a haul of weapons.
06:45That was Max's big moment, and it ends up being completely hidden.
06:49Sure, again, the gag works in the context of the movie,
06:52but it still does feel like we missed out on a seriously good time.
07:02Cyclops may be an enjoyable character in the comics,
07:05but in Fox's original X-Men series, he was a little dweeb.
07:09Actor James Marsden did do his best with the material,
07:12but the writing just wasn't there,
07:14and the team's supposed leader was continually sidelined in favour of Wolverine.
07:20It's no surprise then that Marsden wasn't too bothered about the role,
07:24and opted to star in Superman Returns when the opportunity came up.
07:28This meant that his character had to be written out of X-Men 3,
07:31and thus Cyclops became the first real victim of the Dark Phoenix, aka Jean Grey.
07:37In the movie, when Cyclops sees his presumed dead lover and moves to kiss her,
07:42Jean uses her Phoenix powers to obliterate him mid-snog.
07:46Sadly, though, the movie cuts away before the actual act,
07:49cutting to Cyclops' sunglasses with his body nowhere to be seen.
07:53In the context of the movie, it's such a throwaway death the way it's filmed,
07:57as it's not even given the grandiosity of happening on screen,
08:00like, come on guys, this could have started the movie off with a bang,
08:04but instead it just leaves everyone scratching their heads.
08:09After breaking the entire world's hearts with the devastating end of La La Land,
08:13Damien Chazelle took the next natural step in his Price of Dreams trilogy,
08:18which I have unofficially just titled literally just this second,
08:22and managed to upset a smaller but far more vocal group of people.
08:26Chazelle's big crime happened when he decided to leave out
08:29the American flag planting scene from Neil Armstrong's first walk on the moon.
08:34Now, the flag does appear in some shots,
08:36but the actual planting of it is omitted as a conscious decision,
08:40as Chazelle has explained in interviews, saying quote,
08:43I show the American flag standing on the lunar surface,
08:46but the flag being physically planted into the surface
08:49is one of several moments that it chose not to focus upon.
08:52To address the question of whether this was a political statement, the answer is no.
08:56My goal with this movie was to share with audiences
08:58the unseen, unknown aspects of America's mission to the moon, end quote.
09:03Now, regardless of the reason, it is pretty obvious that the flag planting
09:07is a big money shot of the entire sequence arguably,
09:11and it was one that was intentionally skipped over.
09:14So, that's our list.
09:15I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below.
09:17What do you think about not getting to see these moments?
09:19Do you think it was a missed opportunity,
09:21or do you think it actually makes the films better,
09:23leaving it up to our imagination?
09:25Let us know, and while you're down there,
09:26could you also please give us a like, share, subscribe,
09:28and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
09:33Even if you don't though, I've been Josh,
09:34thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.

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