It's 2019. There's an authoritarian in the White House whose worst urges are only curtailed by the fact that he can't remember to carry them out. The oceans are coming to swallow the best parts of the country. But some of us have real problems, like not liking the end of the 2006 film The Departed.
One movie buff is raising money to digitally erase the rat from the final scene of the movie. For those who might not remember, Martin Scorcese chooses to end his movie about rats in the Boston police and criminal underworld with a shot of a rat crawling across the balcony in front of the Massachusets State House. Adam Sacks thinks the shot is "painfully on the nose," so he's asking for funds to "fix" the film's ending.
"If you've seen The Departed, you know it's a great Scorsese film," he wrote. "Unfortunately, The Departed has one huge problem. The movie ends with the painfully on the nose metaphor of an ACTUAL RAT crawling across screen. It's always bothered me that a movie as good as The Departed has such a cheesy ending, and I recently realized it could be fixed by digitally erasing the rat from the last shot."
Sacks laid out every dollar of his $4,000 request, from purchasing the movie to paying an editor to printing the "fixed" version on film. Sacks wants his edited version to become the official version of the film, taking a cue from Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas.
"Unlike Lucas' and Spielberg's changes, this will make The Departed a much better movie," he said in his pitch video.
Sacks has already surpassed his $4,000 goal, raising $4,500 with 27 days left to go. The campaign has launched a debate about the movie's ending, with most people coming out on Team Rat or pointing out that the movie wasn't exactly subtle to begin with.
