Kill Your Darlings

Samir Mehta | March 20, 2017
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Scott Hardie | March 20, 2017
Great question, though I confess that your title got a song stuck in my head. :-)

It's been much too long since I've seen A.I. for me to remember whether that final act is really essential to the story and the themes. I do remember it being quite sad that the kid, through no fault of his own, still just wants his mother because that's how he's been programmed, destruction-of-all-civilization-on-Earth-millenia-ago be damned. Regardless of the intellectual point of the film, the emotional point to me was our responsibility to the technology that we create, that it not suffer in our service like he did. There's a bit of The Little Prince in there.

I can think of a few movies that had extra scenes at the end that were unnecessary but basically harmless. Some semi-recent cases: Lincoln focused so narrowly on just the few days where the 14th amendment was being passed and not the rest of Lincoln's life that the epilogue, which jumped ahead to his death months later, was out of place. Lee Daniels' The Butler was so focused on the main character's career in the White House and how it affected his family that it didn't need to include a tear-jerker scene set well into retirement that felt totally inessential. Captain America: Civil War had such a brutal ending uncharacteristic of the MCU that it was a shame that the epilogue portrayed a turn towards reconciliation; we all knew one was inevitable but it didn't have to be shown then and there.

But when I think of movies ruined by a scene at the end -- I'm talking about movies whose entire point is completely nullified, not just where the heroes' work is undone but where their entire cause is proven wrong -- there's one ultimate example that comes to mind for me: American History X. (I can't get into specifics without spoilers, obviously.) Many people praise that movie and still more consider it underrated and underappreciated. Me, I find it wasteful of its own assets, the greatest of which is Edward Norton's bracing lead performance. He is so intense in his racial hatred at the beginning of the movie, that it feels truly remarkable that he changes over the course of the movie and gradually convinces his younger brother Edward Furlong not to be racist, and not to see black men as thugs or enemies -- right up until the shocking ending when a random black thug murders Furlong. What the fuck? How does a movie portray its Klansmen villains as being right and enjoy this kind of laudable reputation?