Over the coming years much will change and not all his plans for his family will go how he wishes.
CW: some domestic violence
Reputedly one of the greatest pieces of cinema in history I thought I'd give this a rewatch. I last saw it maybe twenty-five years ago.
Its reputation mostly stands but I am as ever wary of the "appeal to tradition": this is fifty years old and much great cinema has been made since.
It shows its age in the dramatic norms on-screen that seem slightly odd now. For example being an "epic" sometimes large chunks of time pass without an overt immediate communication to the viewer. One scene Michael Corleone proposes to his slightly estranged girlfriend then suddenly they have a child and the dialogue talks about how his son looks like him. The passage of time has been communicated more subtley than the current norm for showing some establishing intermediate event or even just a date on-screen. It's not bad: it's different.
This boosted the status of a lot of the participants and some of them turn in early career slightly stagey 70s performances but it's a big cast and when thinking about what you tend to see in 70s cinema it's generally a cut above the rest.
Brando is both powerful and ridiculous. There's a reason people lampoon that wheezy voice and jowly face thing he does in this. Al Pacino and James Caan work well as his two sons with very different temperaments.
Overall it stands though, Francis Ford Coppola really did make an epic just slightly soured by a take from Brando that looks bad now 8/10.