Reimagine a movie that disappointed you

Cafe Society
1

From your (personal - this is all just opinions here, folks!) fantasy world, describe what you loved about a great movie that just…didn’t exactly turn out that way in reality.

For instance, I just loved how The Phantom Menace portrayed the adolescent Anakin Skywalker as a skilled fighter pilot in the resistance against the growing Galactic Empire. And the way he encounters the mysterious, little-known monastic order known as the Jedi Knights and starts to discover powers he never knew he had but which anyone can control if they are in tune with the forces flowing through the universe. I really liked the aspect of forbidden love in his relationship with Padme; thought it was quite tasteful. She’s royalty on an Empire-sympathetic central world, and he’s a commoner from the middle of nowhere fighting with the Rebels.

Walk the Line was really heartbreaking. You could tell that Johnny and Vivian really loved each other, and his affair with June saved his life but not without costing both his and her marriages. And yet he’s a really sympathetic character throughout the whole thing. I thought it did a great job with the historical and social context too: the implications of Cash’s working-class background; the way that rock and roll was scorned by mainstream society for its African-American roots and simultaneously the way white musicians appropriated black music. It was interesting looking at the role religion played in Cash getting his life back together; I’m not particularly religious myself but I think it’s really central to understanding his music.

2

Deliverance with dialog that sounds more like real people talking and more/better whitewater paddling footage.

3

Changing Lanes would have been better if Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck’s character) had failed to fix everything in the end. The final shot should have been of the two main characters sitting on a curb staring into space while wondering how they could have screwed things up so badly.

4

Identity would have been better had the Big Reveal about John Cusack’s character been done AFTER the climactic firefight at the hotel. The way it was done in the movie, it removed all tension and involvement in the climax of the movie.

5

I was just discussing this with someone: Gone With The Wind needed to end after Rhett walks out the door. Scarlett’s line “Tomorrow will be another day!” waters down Rhett’s dramatic line.

Hubster and I have emphatically insisted that the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still was a total bust. The original movie had the speech by Klaatu at the end, where he informed Earth that the Universe had been watching Earthly foolishness. If the people of Earth didn’t get their ducks in a row, there would be Hell to pay. With all the hype of the Keanu remake, we figured Klaatu was returning to keep his word. The preview clips showing the wholesale destruction of Earth seemed to fulfill that anticipation. They blew it!
~VOW

6

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see a remake of this sometime in the next 5 years.

7

I thought Starship Troopers was a great adaptation. The powered suits were done really well, though it looks a bit dated now. They gave the impression of Mobile Infantry that could kick serious butt. Some of the veiled political stuff might not have been what Heinlein would have loved, but I think it’s fine — it was just subtle satire of a system that I think most would find over the top anyway. Putting it in there gave you the chance to at least think about it, and it’s not like that was the main focus. There was plenty of action, which is exactly what I expected from it. It served to show Aliens how it ought to be done (and it’s not like I think Aliens is bad, it’s just that Starship Troopers is better).

8

I’ve mentioned this before, but I was about to turn off Darjeeling Limited in disgust when the man-eating tiger showed up, and in a whiplash genre-change worthy of From Dusk Til Dawn, forced the movie into the Monster Of the Week zone, stalking and killing and eating each of those insufferably whiny rich bastards one by one.

9

The Matrix Part 3: In my version, Neo discovers that Zion is simply part of a meta-simulation and not ‘reality’ at all. That would explain why he can have superpowers even in the ‘real world’ and why the different Neo’s mentioned in Matrix Part 2 all looked the same.

The purpose of the Zion part of the simulation was for people (like Neo and Morpheus) who were too curious/restless and started to get curious about whether life on “Earth/Matrix” was real. So, they would be given the opportunity (by the simulation creators) to ‘escape’ the simulation and live in the ‘real world’. Once out in the ‘real world’, they would think they are free from the Matrix and stop further investigation into the nature of things. But, they were in fact still within a bigger simulation that included both Zion and the Matrix.

10

Ah, I see that I screwed up…didn’t read the OP carefully enough. Oh well.

11

In the original original Star Wars, I thought it was super cool how Han Solo was so badass by shooting Greedo before the latter had a chance to get off a shot, and then tossing some money to the barkeep, muttering “sorry about the mess.”

Wait, I’m confused now.

12

As a big fan of the book I found the movie adaption incredibly disappointing.

In the book the troopers actually used tactics, and the enemys had a believable civilisation.

In the movie the troopers just rushed around as an armed rabble, with no ryhme or reason to their actions, more like a panicing mob then a supposedly highly trained elite military unit.

And the enemy were more like monsters, behaving in typical monster fashion rather then as intelligent aliens with their own armed forces fighting a war with another intelligent species.

Also it would have been nice to have seen the soldiers delivery system from the book replicated rather then the tired old "landing in ships "cliche.

I found it a struggle to watch to the end, it SO let Heinlein down.

13

Sucker Punch: Drop the entire mental-asylum framing story and just make a movie about anime girls fighting steampunk zombies in World War I.

14

(EDIT: I didn’t notice that I was supposed to keep with the OP’s prose style, so just read this straight.)

I’m not crazy about The Dark Knight. Of course, I love Heath Ledger’s Joker, but apart from that, I think it was uneven. One of the things that I didn’t like was the way Harvey Dent / Two-Face was handled. I’m thinking of the effects in particular. The first time I saw his ridiculous CGI’ed burnt face in the hospital scene, I fell right out of the movie with an almost audible “clunk”.

I know how I would have done it. In The Dark Knight Returns, the Frank Miller comic, there is a sequence where Harvey gets plastic surgery on his face, is declared “cured” by a psychiatrist, and returned to society. This involves a scene where he has his head wrapped in bandages, which are then removed to reveal his repaired face. Later, it turns out that he was still bonkers all along, and he puts the bandages back on his face and goes on a crime spree.

Here’s a panel.

The image of his head all wrapped up like that has stuck with me ever since I first read the comic, and it would have been cool to have that in the movie. Not after plastic surgery, though, but just right after he ruins his face. Imagine that when we see Harvey in the hospital bed in the movie, instead of the stupid fake burnt face, which doesn’t make any sense anyway (why the heck would they just leave wounds like that undressed?), he is hooked up to a bunch of hospital monitors, and has his face all wrapped up in bandages. You can just see the burns in the areas around his mouth, nostrils and eyes, which are left open just a bit. Then he escapes from the hospital and goes on a crime binge, all the while wearing the bandages around his head. Then, at the end, there would be a showdown with him, Batman and Gordon, where, gripped by madness, he finally tears off the bandages, dramatically revealing a (much more realistically done) horrible, destroyed face!

This would have made a stupid sequence much more gripping and given it a much better climax, as well as keeping with the “gritty realism” of the rest of the movie.

I would also made have made that final part, where he goes nuts and becomes a killer, much longer and more complex, and kept him alive at the end. His story was terribly rushed.

15

Easy

GoodRotJ = (OldRotJ - Ewoks) + Wookies

16

No need, no worries! I didn’t like The Dark Knight either.

17

That’s your ideal version? (Hint: Read the OP again; We’re not talking about things that actually exist.)

18

Alien with the characters not acting like complete fucking idiots at every turn.

19

Sherlock Holmes, the Robert Downey Jr. vehicle. A fun light-hearted Steampunk romp of adventure and mayhem awkwardly tacked on to a literary character with a completely opposite nature. The BBC’s Sherlock is a great example of the correct way to reimagine Holmes. Downey Jr. can still be a detective but lets not pretend this isn’t an Indiana Jones ripoff and instead embrace it. The story is more likely to be fresh, the action will make more sense and there can be a plausible leading lady.

20

The ending of The Mist was awesome. After everything terrible that happened, it was really uplifting when that voice from somewhere else came on over the radio, letting them know that there was still hope.

Similarly, I was also blown away by the ending of SK’s Rose Red. You really expected that people would survive, especially the young man whose family owned the place and the autistic girl and her older sister, but the way the house continued to eat them one by one was terrifically scary - especially when the older sister saw the floor open up and swallow the girl whole, leaving her both free of her lifelong obligation and still trapped in the house at the same time. And the final scene, with the characters as new ghosts staring out the window at the next people who were willing to enter the mansion was utterly chilling.