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Alligators and Crocodiles in Movies   Adaptation (2002)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is an outstanding but crazy complicated movie about an orchid poacher, a writer writing a book about the poacher who falls in love with him, and a screenwriter who is hired to write a screenplay about the book the writer eventually writes but can't find a way to do it. Then the screenwriter's idiot twin brother comes to visit and takes a class in screenwriting for which he writes a cliche action movie script which somehow turns this movie into a violent swamp chase action movie - with alligators, of course. Nick Cage deserved his Oscar nomination for playing both the screenwriter and his twin brother. At the end Cage is chased through a swamp at the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida by the author, played by a pistol-packing Merle Streep, and the orchid poacher, played by Chris Cooper with a rifle. (Cooper won an Oscar for his performance in this movie.) Cage is trapped between them and some alligators. Just as he is about to aim his rifle to shoot Cage, Cooper is suddenly pulled under the water by an alligator that spins him around and rips a hole in his gut. But for some reason, the alligator just abandons him instead of eating him. Normally I would complain about such an unrealistic depiction of an alligator, saying that it's a movie cliche that alligators kill for no reason, but since this is supposed to be a cliche action movie within the movie, I really can't complain. It has to follow the conventions. Whatever, the gators are really just a Deus ex Machina - which is a screenwriting in joke here, since we saw a screenwriting instructor advise Cage not to use a Deus ex Machina (even though nearly every hit movie uses them.)