Heat is the film that commanded me to make movies.  I saw it with Chris Kish in Louisville, Colorado in 1996.  It changed me forever.  I’ve watched this scene hundreds of times in my life, studying it to see what makes it work, to make sure that I’ll make something like it someday.  Of course, it’s power comes from the nearly three hours that have led up to this point.  Just before this final scene, the main “bad guy” Robert DeNiro’s Neil McCauley has escaped with his dream girl and has every opportunity to flee and ride off into the sunset, but when he catches wind of one last chance to settle a score with Kevin Gage’s Waingro, a double-crossing animal of a criminal, who severely tainted a score in the first act and who tried to have him killed in the beginning of the film, Neil cannot resist and he turns away from the escape path.  Bad move for him, great for Vincent Hanna, the Al Pacino character who has been tracking him, who can now catch up to Neil McCauley.  We care for Neil because he follows a code in his world.  It is a code that makes him a sociopath according to our code, but we still hope he gets away because he has worked hard and has been through so much to get to this point.  Fortunately, Mann snaps us out of it: ya can’t rob banks, even if you do it well and with precision.  And so this scene is the inevitable conclusion to this world.  Neil is a man stopped from doing what he has done and though he was a criminal, he deserves a witness to his death, even if that witness is the cop that brought him down.

Watch how Vincent, looks off into the distance at the airport wondering how in the world he got there, in the middle of this bizarre, blinking, future field.  And Moby’s God Moving Over the Face of the Waters, is just the perfect final touch.