Though you would be hard pressed to find someone in Hollywood who could deface Apocalypse Now any worse than Francis Ford Coppola already did, surely George Lucas is up to the challenge.
Change #1: Replace Flight of the Valkyries with something by John Williams. Maybe a medley that includes a couple seconds from the original piece, just to remind the audience of the original movie.
Change #2: Remove all traces of Harrison Ford.
Change #3: The napalm drop isn’t flashy enough, replace it with couple 500 kiloton atomic bombs. The bigger CG-shockwaves we can make, the better.
Change #4: Give Willard a goofy sidekick whose main purpose is to get into zany hijinks. He’ll have a catch-phase like “we’re toast” and fall down a lot. A good introductory scene might be one in which he has a surfing contest with the surfing guy and keeps messing up. Can’t he do anything right??
Change #5: Replace the tiger with a Cambodian Garthraxomachus, an eight-legged, sabre-toothed, fire-breathing mega-tiger. Action figure available, of course. I can see the scene going one of two ways: either Willard gets into a ten-minute duel with it, or it chases the sidekick from change #4 around the jungle for a while and can’t catch him due to the sidekick’s uncanny yet zany string of good luck.
Change #6: The so-called “zen grenade launching” needs an explanation. Clearly, the soldier who can hit the enemy without seeing him has a recessive trait that fills his blood with Hyposensorites who swim around in his eyes and let him see in the dark and through walls. He was also using a specially modified Blastomatic Launcher (in stores now) that fires homing pulses of blue energy.
Change #7: No one bleeds at all.
Change #8: The little girl on the fishing boat shoots first.
Change #9: Replace the entire last thirty minutes with a battle between Kurtz’s tribal minions and a group of benevolent and adorable jungle dwellers. Willard is able to befriend them, though not without his sidekick getting into a little bit of wacky trouble first. Despite the fact that Kurtz has taught his soldiers to use their primordial instincts to kill, they’re no match for the little fuzzballs and their slings. At the movie’s climactic finish, Kurtz and Willard duke it out hand-to-hand, where of course Marlon Brando has been replaced by a computer generated image. Kurtz appears to be winning win, but at the last second the sidekick backs into an anvil, or something, which then falls on Kurtz and puts an end to evil and the war and everything.
