Being an armchair movie critic is a difficult profession. You have to come up with opinions on everything, you do it all pro bono, and you never meet the people you critique. How can all these actors, writers, and directors hear your brilliant thoughts if they never even know that you’re alive? It’s a cruel fate to be an opinionated cinephile.

On the other hand, if Hollywood would only listen to opinionated cinephiles, they might make more great movies. For instance, in the case of the following six films, the entire world – including this writer – agrees that they’d be great with just one tiny change. Maybe Hollywood will avoid similar mistakes in the future if we keep yelling about these movies.

*sigh, spoiler alert*

The Village

The one tiny change: No twist.

The armchair justification: Not every movie needs a twist, M. Night Shyamalan! Surely, the scene in which Bryce Dallas Howard’s visually impaired character crashes into a modern-day fence is not comedy; and yet, movie theater audiences laughed the moment they saw it. There was just no need to bring this distorted, disturbing period drama into the modern day. 

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The one tiny change: No aliens.

The armchair justification: This movie is a grand adventure! Harrison Ford gives it his all; killer ants devour everything in their path; and Cate Blanchett delivers the most crowd-pleasing evil Russian accent since Rocky & Bullwinkle. Then comes the big twist: It was aliens all along. Indiana Jones and sci-fi do not mix, and this movie’s climax wasn’t gonzo enough to recall the face-melting of Raiders.

La La Land

The one tiny change: No sad.

The armchair justification: This movie was all about following your dreams, haters be damned; however, its ending was as down-to-Earth as you can get. Mia and Sebastian may have been terrible dancers, but they did not deserve to be cruelly separated in the film’s final moments. They were inveterate idealists and they lived in a fantasy world where museum exhibits could come to life and humans could defy the powers of gravity. It didn’t make sense to snuff out their romance.

Signs

The one tiny change: The aliens did their research.

The armchair justification: This movie could have been a taut family thriller, but it devolved into unintentional camp after the movie deployed its reveal that the aliens were allergic to water. These were supposed to be smart aliens, right? Or were we watching a different movie from the one that director M. Night Shyamalan saw from his director’s chair? These aliens had never thought to study those giant blue wavy parts of the Earth that they saw from space? 

War of the Worlds

The one tiny change: The aliens did their research.

The armchair justification: Just as the aliens of Signs failed to disclose their fatal water allergy before invading the Water Planet, the aliens from War of the Worlds failed to understand how air worked before trying to breathe it. As we discovered in the movie’s final scenes, all of the invading aliens immediately died and collapsed into pools of orange KoolAid after becoming exposed to Earth’s microbes. Maybe they had been planning to walk around Earth in those giant armored water towers for the rest of their lives?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2

The one tiny change: Harry doesn’t suddenly develop supernatural abilities.

The armchair justification: HPDH2 was already a visually dazzling and emotionally satisfying epic for most of its runtime. That battle scene in the courtyard still haunts many viewers, despite being under two minutes long. Nevertheless, Warner Bros. Pictures apparently saw all of this and thought, “Needs that Michael Bay touch,” because they eventually gave Harry Potter the miraculous ability to transform into a flying beam of light. Sure, the “Death Eaters flying” thing was established in previous films, but when did Harry Potter learn to do it? And why did he wait until he was in Voldemort’s arms to dramatically break out this miraculous ability? He could have flown up to Voldemort and punched him in the face three movies ago.