it was actually.. see it this way: part 1 & 2 combined is the story of Michael Corleone, who starts out as a war hero-Ivy League student with great apathy against his father's (and elder brother's) way of living. At the end of GFII, he has changed so much (and so terribly) he orders the death of his own brother, whom he had himself forced to betray him one way or another.


There you have it, a two-part masterpiece of 'The Rise Of The Don Michael Corleone' set against 'The Fall Of The Person Michael Corleone'


Part III makes him a good guy again, in some way. It's romantisized, Hollywoodish, even though Mike get's the ultimate punishment at the Palermo Opera House-steps seeing his daughter get shot.

Part III does add, but it adds stuff it did not need. That's why a lot of people don't like GF3. The movie itself is great, no doubt. But it seems as the 'death' of Michael Corleone, or at least when he stopped being a sympathic person and became a real morbide monster, is only stretched with Part III; Mike was already finished as a human being when we see him in Lake Tahoe at the very end of Part 2!


(just think of Vito's birthday scene, only to contrast the brutal man Mike has become with the lovable man he once was)