Stop Making Remakes, Please (or just do it correctly)

by Joe

It seems like every summer all we get are sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes. Sure, occasionally we'll get an Inception thrown our way, but that's the rarity. The studios still choose to believe original movies are too much of a risk, while rehashes are the sure bets (and sadly they're right. Look at The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, the two highest grossing movies of 2012). I'm here to talk about the remake: Or, Hollywood's laziest option. Like any movie category or genre, there are good ones, bad ones, and mediocre ones. In my mind, if you do a remake it should be an improvement on the original (effects, character, and/or otherwise). So to make a bad remake you just have to simply copy the original. We're looking for people who chose to recreate and revise. So what's what? you ask. Well, let's dive way too far into this.

Bad Ones:

Making a bad remake is easy because all you have to do is be lazy. Gus Van Sant did a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The thing is, though, Psycho didn't need any improvement. That movie is near-perfect, hence the confusion. 

Adding more masturbation wasn't going to add anything to Norman Bates as a character that we didn't already know (and that's all the movie really did). Van Sant has said he made the movie he did to prevent someone from doing an even worse remake. But here's the kicker: this was as bad as it was going to get. If someone else tried to add to the Psycho tradition (and failed), at least we could say they tried.

The Thing (2011) was a missed opportunity. I'm going to get it out of the way and tell you that I did enjoy the movie, but nonetheless, missed chance at something bigger and better. They marketed the movie as a maybe-remake, maybe-prequel. 

Turns out they were going to prequel. The sad part is they made a straight remake, with a lazy attempt to connect it to the 1982 John Carpenter classic. They had an opportunity to explore this bigger story and show us more, but instead opted to go with the safe rehash.

The Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) tried, and failed so miserably it's not even funny. My friend Mark just kept screaming “Fuck you!” at the screen throughout the duration of the movie. It was bad enough that he was trying to hurt its feelings. 

They dropped the ball so hard that no one even knows where the ball is, probably buried beneath all the layers of Earth. They went with trying to give us more of a back story to Freddy Krueger to get him to be a more sympathetic character. Only, in doing this they made all the supporting characters way too flat, and Freddy less than realistic (especially with the embarrassingly bad make-up).

So essentially, the key to a bad remake is the failure to bring anything new or interesting to the story.

Re-Imagining:

This comes when filmmakers take a source material and adapt it again. We saw it with Let the Right One In, based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist of the same name, when they “American-ized” it with Let Me In. They cater to the culture with these remakes. These seem unnecessary at times, and it makes the English speaking population look lazy for their lack of enthusiasm for reading subtitles, but there have been successes, like the one mentioned above.

We can also look at Vanilla Sky (Abre Los Ojos), Solaris (Solyaris), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Departed (Infernal Affairs) and the upcoming Old Boy (Oldboy). I haven't seen any of the originals here—except the last on the list—and I probably wouldn't know they existed if it wasn't for the English-speaking versions. The movies above are all solid, strong, and enjoyable (in the aesthetic sense of the word). They key is to get ballsy directors who won't compromise, out of fear or a want of being accepted. Studios don't want to alienate the “more sensitive” American movie-goer, but Crowe, Soderbergh, Fincher, Scorsese, and Lee don't want to make a shitty movie. And they're big enough names with the talent to demand the freedom from being forced to water down their flicks. If you want a successful re-imaging, you need to get a strong, visionary director who isn't afraid to offend.

Note: I'm not even going to go into Burton's Alice in Wonderland or Raimi's Oz, the Great and Powerful because these are bullshit fake sequels/remakes. But they would fall into this category.

Getting Creative:

Akira Kurosawa was putting out great samurai flicks like Yojimbo, Seven Samurai and Sanjuro. Most of these movies involved badasses coming out of the woodwork and fucking shit up. Samurais would mess with the locals and use corruption to their advantage. Sound familiar? Like Westerns? Guy like Sergio Leone took the basic plot or concept and reworking it into a different genre. Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven. Yojimbo turned into A Fistful of Dollars (later to be remade again as Last Man Standing). This falls in line with doing remakes correctly because it's not a straight copy, but rather the directors and actors have changed the setting enough to successfully steal the original's basic idea with the end result of making it their own.

Then again, it also comes down to whether you're making a good movie. Vantage Point, for example, is terrible. They took a bare-bones idea that we've seen recreated again and again. It's the multiple first person perspective, so we see the same even over and over from different (DUN DUN DUUHHH!) vantage point. The first time I saw this was in Kuroawa's Rashomon (1950). 

Run Lola Run pulled it off as a fast-paced action movie. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia did it as a comedy in the “Who Pooped the Bed” episode. Before movies, you can get a good taste of it in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. At this point in time it's not so much a remake as it's a recycled “Ugh, this multiple perspective bullshit, again?” But Rashomon is a masterpiece. Watch it right now.

Lastly, we've got the more obscure remakes buried under piles of raunchy shit comedy. These are so far disconnected from the original source that the filmmakers are trying to gather a whole new audience (even thought they'd probably hate them anyway). I'm talking about Out Cold as a thinly veiled Casablanca. 

“Damn it, Sam! I told you never to play that song again! (So turn Weezer's “Island in the Sun” off!). And there is how Old School is a comedic remake of Fight Club. But that's already been discussed in depth, so we won't go into that.

Good Ones:

Guidelines to merely improve is difficult to follow because it's so broad. But at the same time, it's so broad that there is a lot of options to choose from. We see an updated setting in the Ocean's movies. Soderbergh assembled a cast of modern day Rat Pack with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and others. 

They took the idea of a heist team and plopped it into the current state of Las Vegas, making a whole new set of great movies. A lot of people these days don't realize these movies are remakes, which is a sign you're on the right track (especially since they made a great trilogy [and I'm thinking I made a mistake a couple weeks ago when I didn't include this on my list]). I (shamefully) have never seen the original Ocean's 11. But at the same time, I don't feel like I need to because I have these new and improved updated one. They've done something right in building their own expansive fan base on a borrowed premise. It shows that they have made movies they can truly call their own.

You can look to True Grit (2010) by the Coen brothers. A lot of John Wayne fans came out to see the updated flick, and a lot of them were more than disappointed in what the brothers put out. I, on the other hand, loved Jeff Bridges mumbling gibberish more than Wayne's western drawl. 

You could call this a re-imaging since it was based on a novel, but the 1969 movie has such a strong hold in the world of film that the new one comes off as a straight remake. The Coen brothers have such a strong voice they were able to put their personal stamp on it.

The Fly (1986) is a great example of updating for technology. The original was in black and white and suffered from the lack at really being able to gross the audience out. That's why it was so nice to see a man like David Cronenberg come along and really squeeze all the possible pus blisters out of this movie.

Then we get to the (possible) best remake ever done, Rob Zombie's Halloween. Here is an example where they took every aspect of the original and elevate the quality. The story of Michael Myers was developed more, making the movie as a whole more engaging and scarier. The gore was upped and made more realistic, again making the audience feel the terror even more. The actors did a better job, as there was more growth in all the players across the board. 

The key to making this the most successful remake, though, was getting Rob Zombie to write and direct the flick. They got a bright guy who loves and understands horror movies to redo a classic one. A true filmmaker, if you will. Zombie upped the story and used camera techniques to tell a better story. He used shaky-cam for the first act, steady-cam for the second, and dolly tracking for the third bloody act. This creates an embedded subconscious feeling in the viewer. Zombie was the perfect pick to make this original homage.

Now, my top/bottom five:

Top:

Honorable mention- Cape Fear

5. Ocean's 11

4. Let Me In

3. The Fly

2. The Departed

1. Halloween

Bottom:

5. Wicker Man

4. Total Recall

3. Planet of the Apes

2. The Nightmare on Elm Street

1. Psycho