10 EXACT Moments Movies Self-Destructed

When Steven Spielberg nuked the fridge, he nuked the movie too.

By Jack Pooley /

June 16, 2023

Very few movies are ever truly broken by a single terrible moment, but sometimes a scene will prove to be so viscerally objectionable as to finally erode the audience’s goodwill altogether.

Just as Bart Simpson could pinpoint the precise moment that Ralph Wiggum’s heart ripped in half, we too can nail down the exact second that these 10 movies all firebombed any remaining interest the audience had in watching them.

Perhaps they committed a cardinal franchise sin like killing off a beloved character, dropped an unbearably awful one-liner, or served up an ill-advised set-piece nobody could take seriously.

Whatever the content, these 10 moments cemented these movies’ place in history as woefully disappointing duds.

Up to this point, viewers were most likely already on the fence about these films, but these scenes left them throwing up their hands in despair, finally appreciating that the movie was a lost cause.

While many films have managed to recover from one woefully executed scene, these moments were simply too objectionable, and ultimately too indicative of the movie as a whole, to facilitate any redemption whatsoever…

10. The Video Game Scene – The Beach

Danny Boyle’s The Beach is a plenty flawed movie and not-particularly-good adaptation of Alex Garland’s novel, but it well and truly loses itself at the end of the second act, when protagonist Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) finds himself being pursued through the jungle by Thai farmers.

This might sound like the sort of taut set-piece that Danny Boyle could knock out in his sleep, but Boyle decided instead to get real weird with it – and not good weird.

Suddenly, Richard imagines himself in a low-poly video game, running through the jungle complete with a HUD containing lives and points, while he attempts to avoid awful CGI animals.

Though the intent was clearly to show Richard’s descent into madness, the end result is ultimately more goofy than unsettling, largely due to the horrible effects and Leonardo DiCaprio’s exaggerated movements and facial expressions.

It feels embarrassingly like what somebody who’s never played a video game in their life thinks games are, and though games are also mentioned by Richard in the novel, this nevertheless smacks of something a studio exec insisted be shoved into the movie in an attempt to seem “down with the kids.”

Even when the movie released back in 2000, people found it soul-destroyingly cringe-worthy, and that sentiment has only grown over the near-quarter-century since.