10 Small Changes That Would Fix Terrible Films

3. Cut The Love Triangle - Pearl Harbour

The Problem: In the wake of Titanic, any historical epic wasn't just satisfied to feature awesome explosions: it had to have a love story at all costs. Cue a painfully awkward love triangle between Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale and Josh Harnett which helps bloat the run-time out to an indecent 183 minutes, while only intermittently capturing the sense of spectacle that made Titanic such a hit.

Why It Would Fix The Film: For all of Michael Bay's faults as a director, the Pearl Harbour attack sequence is masterfully realised and one of the best set-pieces in his repertoire, a thrilling, and lengthy depiction of the day's horrid events. This is all gravy, but what prevents us from ever wanting to watch the film again is the needless love story, which slows the film down every time it's brought up, and considering how vapid these three characters all are, there's absolutely no audience investment whatsoever. Plus, the toe-curlingly awful dialogue doesn't help.

Cut it completely, just focus on these characters individually and you've got a film that's instantly lost about 40-50 minutes of its run-time. A barely 2-hour Pearl Harbour film? That works much better. Somebody needs to get on a fan-edit of this right away.