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The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

I think "The Snyder Cut" of "Justice League" is the ultimate extension of directors' cuts: no movie will ever be considered "finished" -- especially a flop movie.

So why wouldn't Coppola go back and try to "fix" GF III?

Problem is it won't do too much good if they can't insert a CGI 55-year-old Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen to play out the storyline as it was originally supposed to be (and cut the kissin' cousins storyline of Andy Garcia and Sofia Coppola down to about 15 minutes).
 
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The very first sentence of the story is moronic.

The Godfather: Part III is considered by many, including a movie critic by the name of Roger Ebert at the time of release, to be the worst of the three Godfather movies.

Put pretty much any movie up against the first two, and it's going to be the worst of the bunch.
 
The very first sentence of the story is moronic.

The Godfather: Part III is considered by many, including a movie critic by the name of Roger Ebert at the time of release, to be the worst of the three Godfather movies.

Put pretty much any movie up against the first two, and it's going to be the worst of the bunch.
It's an awful movie.
 
It was nominated for Best Picture, and arguably was better than the film which won ("Dances With Wolves").

It was disappointing and disjointed, and its problems were almost completely due to off-screen financial wrangling, which angered fans because it all could have been avoided. But there's about 2:00 of a very good movie in there. The final operatic sequence is pretty awesome.

To fix it, Copolla needs to cut out most of the Vincent-Mary romance, cut it down to about 20 minutes screen time, and figure out somehow to make Michael's problems with Joey Zasa some kind of long-term chain-reaction event resulting from the final rupture of the relationship between Michael and Tom Hagen, the sequel they spent about the last half-hour of GF II trying to set up. Maybe they could get Pacino to do a voice-over of a sequence explaining that Tom had been drawing away from the Corleone family in the late Sixties, and was responsible for Joey Zasa rising in the ranks before his (Hagen's) "sudden death."

Michael would say, "It wasn't like Fredo; I didn't order Tom's death. But when it happened, I wasn't sorry; it saved me the decision a few years later." The subtext of course would be that it was probably Altobello, on orders from Lucchesi in Italy, who had Tom rubbed out, and elevated Zasa in the Mafia pecking order.
 
Godfather III isn't an awful movie. It is an uneven movie that is only awful within the context of 1 and 2 -- which are masterpieces. I don't think it can be fixed. No matter what you do with it, it still is going to suffer from being compared with 1 and 2. It should have never been released in the first place, not because it is awful. ... but because it doesn't belong in that franchise.
 
The story of the death of Michael Corleone's humanity was Godfather 2. There was nothing left to his story and no need for the third movie.
 

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