Just watched The Godfather for the first time

What else is there to even say? I went in with high expectations and it still exceeded them. If I’m being honest, for the first half I wasn’t fully into it, but once I realized this is Mike’s story and the movie started to focus on him, it all just started to click for me. Even going back to the very first sequence in the film, when Mike said “that’s my family, it’s not me”, everything just came full circle in such an incredible way. Amazing performances across the board, great cinematography, soundtrack, editing, etc… and I honestly think Al Pacino gave one of the single greatest performances in history. The final scene was just perfect from an acting perspective. He plays the young college guy just as good as he plays the godfather mob boss. You can literally see it in his eyes, the change that he goes through in the film.

If I would critique a few small things, I wish we got more of the Sicily section of the film and the effects that seeing his wife get blown up in front of him had on Mike’s psyche. The movie fast forwards a few times without fully paying off the emotional weight of what happened. Dare I say it moved a little too quickly? I thought for sure it was building up to a revenge plot where he was gonna go full on Rambo and slaughter everybody, but then they just dropped the whole Sicily wife thread. I think you could make an entire season of tv just based on this one film.

Also, Marlon Brando was barely in this it felt like. I don’t want to say it was a bad performance, but to me he wasn’t the highlight of the film, yet he’s always on the posters and stuff. He’s not even who the title of the movie is meant for.

One thing I didn’t understand though was if the Corleone family was running out of power and had lost respect from everybody, how did Mike manage to get so much socio political pull in the mob world to engineer all these killings? Maybe I’m thinking too much into it.

But yeah, loved the movie. 5/5. Gonna watch part 2 tomorrow.