Contact- Little Ellie trying to contact her dead father by Ham Radio was, IMO, cheesy and unconvincing.
Hannibal- in the final scene with Hannibal and Clarice, why didn’t Hannibal just use the meat cleaver to cut the handcuffs? It may have taken several blows, but it would have worked. The scene should be rewritten.
Also in Hannibal (if I can add a second)- they should have included the Memory Palace from the book. (With digital animation it would have been memorable.)
Too many films (and games) to name: Remove the jivetalking/cute sidekick. Or tone it way, way down. I had to grit my teeth at the dragon in Mulan, for instance…in some cases, the sarcastic talk works, but in most scenes, it didn’t. Sarcasm, jivetalk, cute are all good in the right amounts, WHEN THEY WORK. When they don’t work, they stink so bad.
The Iron Giant; the movie ends after Hogarth says “I miss him”, fade to black, roll credits
Freddy Vs. Jason; choose an ending, none of this wussy “it was all a dream…or was it” ending, either Freddy’s Dead (yeah, like we heard that one before, i guess he’s only “mostly dead”) by a machete thru the gut, or Jason’s insectlike little brain is slashed to ribbons by the superior mental skills of Ol’ Razorfingers
minor spoiler warning.
The Matrix: humans are not “batteries.” They could have come up with a dozen better reasons than that stupid one.
Star Trek: Generations
[spoiler]The Enterprise lives. It can crash then get saved by the captains when they time-hop. But in any case, it makes it into the next movie.
(Sorry, Jim. It was one or the other.)[/spoiler]
Actually, I think he did die, but they softened the end. :smack:
thats how it was in the Book, however this movie would have ruled with the book ending instead, the movie ending never made sense since there is that cop whos not in the club who knows who Tyler is and everything about the club.
The Matrix Revolutions: After the end credits are over, have a shot of the Wachowski Brothers laughing and holding dollar bills. Camera zooms out, we see a huge money bank a la Scrooge McDuck, with gold coins and everything. Wachowski Brothers start swimming in their gold coins. The camera zooms out, as the tune of “What a Wonderful World” starts to play.
I completely agree with Vibrotronica’s suggestion for The Phantom Menace. Not only would it have improved that movie a lot the impact of that change would have traveled on to Ep2 and 3 making those better as well.
Although I agree that The Phantom looks like he just got a littlwe too much sun, that’s not the biggest problem here. What they really needed was to Get A Phantom Who Can SING!!!
And then give him his fair share of time and center stage in the movie. The Phantom was so peripheral in this movie that they might as well have called it “Christine” I haven’;t seen the female lead take over the movie from the nominal male character since Bo Derek’s “Tarzan”.
Godfather II: The very beginning of GF I is “I believe in America” (but I rely on the Mafia.) This friction is continued with Michael having enlisted in the *Marines, and his father’s ambiguous feeling about “fighting for strangers” vs his hopes for him to be a legitimate success.
With Sonny killed, those hopes are dashed and Michael has to turn into a mafia don, but GF II opens with him still planning on going legitimate. His initial confrontation with Senator Geary has him saying “we’re both two sides of the same hypocricy.” However, the senators besides Geary on the Kefauver-like hearings aren’t made to appear as as hypocrites.
Instead of persuing this theme, we get a story line with Hyman Roth and Havana, the only purpose of which is to have Michael kill Freido to show how thoroughly corrupted he’s become. I’d dump all this and, instead of Hyman Roth, I’d have young Vitto working with a Joe Kennedy Sr. character in the flashback; whose RFK-like son appears at the senate hearings, hypocritically making political hay against Michael.This would maintian the original theme, as well as perhaps improving Godfather III by making it about Michael trying to save JFK instead of the pope.
*The OP says I can only change one thing, but if allowed a second change, I’d make Michael something other than a decorated Marine. After Peleiu or Iwo Jima, shooting two guys in a restaurant wouldn’t have been such a big deal.
Cut the last 15 minutes of Ransom. Gary Sinise collects the reward at Mel Gibson’s office (not his home), immediately leaves the country, the end.
If I might be allowed to make another attempt at Phantom Menace:
Make Jar-Jar competent. Seriously. Remove all of the stupid comic-relief clumsiness, make him surprisingly competent in battle. Maybe he was on the outs with Boss Nass at the beginning because he didn’t really WANT to be a leader, but he really had the skills necessary, and Boss Nass was trying to pressure him into it.
You know, I’d never considered the option of a non-comic-relief Jar-Jar. As much as I still like the idea of having him get mowed down by blaster fire or not existing at all, I think it would in fact work much better to keep him in the movie and to write him as a competent fighter, but very vulnerable to suggestion. That way he’s not an embarrassment in the first movie, and his role in Episode II makes more sense.
Moving on, given the option to tweak one movie, I’d rewrite Faramir in Lord of the Rings. I much prefer his character in the book, and it would have the added bonus of probably eliminating the “Frodo goes to Osgiliath” nonsense, too.
Lord of the Rings: Get rid of every instance where a character says “Yes!”
Cold Mountain: Depart from the book and don’t kill Inman.
There is a reason that the Steadi-Cam was invented.
Every movie that recently has been shot with handheld needs to be reshot with a Steadi-Cam. I’m sick and tired of paying big bucks and then having to sit with my eyes closed through the vast majority of the movie so I won’t barf from motion sickness.
Silent Running: Let Huey stay with Dewey! Who cares if he’s not working that great! Stick him in a little wagon and let Dewey haul him around!
LOTR: Return of the King: Nuke the scene in which the witch king destroys Gandalf’s staff (which mysteriously reappears later in the movie anyway).
**Harry Potter II: **Nuke the entire ending. The “Harry will be there to save the day” thing and the applause scene for Hagrid make me ill.
Allegro non Troppo: 
Get rid of all the black and white parts, especially the ending.
I’d improve Mystic River by having it end about 10 minutes earlier than it did.
Windstruck: This was *so close * to being a really good film. The movie stars Ji-hyun Jun, who is a major cutie. But if the director would have tweaked the ending just a bit (fans of **My Sassy Girl ** will know what I am talking about), it would have been a bang-slam home run. (I would go into more detail, but if you haven’t seen the two films it really won’t make any sense.)
Anatomy of a Murder: Take out the courtroom laughter in response to the judge’s directives. Really breaks the mood.
Allegro non Troppo: Hey, I *like * the black and white scenes! But the gorilla can go. I’ll give you that one.