Continuing the saving-various-movies trend, here's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon." The second live-action Transformers was mediocre, but this one
sucked.
Some suggestions:
*If Megan Fox didn't publicly compare Michael Bay to Hitler, she might well not have been fired. Steven Spielberg, who has a secondary career in Holocaust activism, immediately ordered she be fired. Apparently she wasn't easy to deal with on the set, so it wasn't like Bay was willing to defend her.
(Considering how Bay and Spielberg are both Jewish, using the H-word was even dumber than publicly criticizing him.)
Failing that, have Spielberg/Bay's response be much less severe. Maybe they make her volunteer at the Holocaust museum or something as a condition of remaining employed, in order to get it through her head that just because your director has a temper, that doesn't equate him to the most evil man who ever lived.
Failing that, they should have simply recast Mikaela rather than bringing in Carly. The actress who played her had no chemistry with Shia LeBeouf (and wasn't even that great an actress to boot) and their explanation for why Mikaela was gone grossly contradicted the character established in the first two films.
(A woman willing to risk jail rather than testify against her father isn't just going to ditch her boyfriend, especially given what they went through in the second movie.)
*Tone down how obnoxious Sam is in the beginning of the movie.
*Eliminate the scene where Megatron demands the elephants bow to him. It's clear the elephant scene was filmed on different film at a different time than the rest--it looks like a bad patch job. It also makes Megatron look ridiculous.
*Make Starscream more scary and impressive instead of a spitting hysterical sychophantic nutbag.
*Eliminate the whole "appease the Decepticons by expelling the Autobots" plotline, or make it more obvious this is a trick in order to bring the hidden Decepticons into the open.
*Include the U.S. military engaging the Decepticons from beyond visual range or explain why they can't (some kind of stealth or jamming).
Hell, just read my review
here for suggestions for improvement.