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Topic: Remakes with major changes to the story - are they ever any good?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-24-2017 12:59 PM
By changes to the story, do you mean the time and place in which it's set, material changes to who the characters are and what they do, or both?
When updates to either are done purely and simply because the story is considered good but the original movie to be old and thus unsellable, I agree. When it adds a new perspective on an old story, the result can be positive. For example, I like the 1976 King Kong, because the oil crisis and the opening of the World Trade Center offered a new opportunity to recycle the original story into a setting in which it worked as well, if not better, than its original context of the Great Depression and the exploration/colonization documentaries of the 1920s. The Peter Jackson version, however, seemed to me to be pointless: all it did was to double the length of the movie and add twenty-first century visual effects.
And, done right, remakes can address deficiencies in the originals. For example, if Peter Jackson can ever stop fixating on the name of a certain black labrador and actually get his remake of The Dam Busters done, I hope that it will show honestly that the raid killed hundreds of innocent forced laborers who were trapped in a basement that flooded, that the damage to the Nazis' war production infrastructure was minimal at best, and that Guy Gibson was a bully, bordering on mentally ill, who was hated by almost everyone under his command (very few of whom volunteered to join his squadron, as the original movie portrays). I get why it wasn't possible to go there in the 1955 movie, but it should be now. Ironically, the name of the dog is one of the very few unarguable historical realities that film actually got right!
So, remakes with major changes to the story can be a good thing, especially if there are serious problems with the original story. But of course most remakes are simply an attempt to make a second lot of money out of the same piece of intellectual property, with no deeper thought given to it than that.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-24-2017 07:10 PM
Some remakes are pretty good, even ones that make big changes from the original. Here's a few I liked:
The Fly (1986)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
The Thing (1982) -not the 2011 re-re-make
True Lies (1992) -based on Frech Comedy La Totale!
True Grit (2010)
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Other remakes are so bad they either anger us for how they piss on the legacy of the original movie, or they're bad enough we don't even remember they were made when the classic movie title is mentioned.
There's a growing string of "horror" movie remakes that were completely unnecessary. They didn't live up to the originals in terms of thrills, edge or pop culture impact. We didn't need remakes of Nightmare on Elm Street, The Omen, The Hitcher, Prom Night, Halloween, The Fog, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Last House on the Left, The Blair Witch Project and Friday the 13th, especially if they were going to be that damned dull!
There's far more shitty remakes than good ones. Here's some on the shitty list:
Ben Hur (2016)
The Karate Kid (2010)
Clash of the Titans (2010) -shitty fake 3D
The Wolfman (2010)
Bad News Bears (2005)
Arthur (2011)
Conan the Barbarian (2011)
Footloose (2011)
Straw Dogs (2011)
Fame (2009)
Poseidon (2006)
The Pink Panther (2006)
Total Recall (2012)
Death Race (2008)
Rollerball (2002)
Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
Psycho (1998)
The Stepford Wives (2004)
Walking Tall (2004)
Swept Away (2002)
The Wicker Man (2006)
The Invasion (2007) -anyone remember that?
If Hollywood movie studios keep up this bullshit we'll get to the point where we can't name a classic movie from 20 or more years ago that doens't have a shitty modern day remake.
One big mistake the studios have been making with these remakes: these days they're always trying to remake movies that were big hits previously. Why not take a movie whose original didn't work so well and do a better job with it, like what John Carpenter did with The Thing? But we probably know the stock answer to that question: doing so involves taking chances. Movie studios would rather ride the coat tails of a hit movie that has an already established "brand."
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-25-2017 06:36 PM
quote: Mike Blakesley
I've always thought "Airport" would be a good candidate for a remake. They'd have to figure out a different way for the guy to get the bomb on the plane, but that'd be a good challenge for a screenwriter.
That kind of challenge is always fun to see risen to well, one of my favorite examples being A Perfect Murder (1998), which updated Dial M for Murder by introducing cellphones into the plot. Furthermore, this is, IMHO at least, a clear example of a remake being a vastly superior film to the original. The Hitchcock version is f-----g abysmal, totally unwatchable, and would have disappeared almost without trace if it weren't for the fact that it was in 3-D and the 3-D version survives. Even Milland and Kelly can't make the plummy, stagey dialogue come to life, it's about as suspenseful as listening to a Fidel Castro speech, and yet another example of Hitchcock doing his weakest work when working with a new technology for the first time.
Douglas and Paltrow, on the other hand, do a much better job of convincing the audience that they are having an illicit affair and plotting something seriously gnarly.
But I suppose the other question here is, when a film is based on a some other work of fiction (book or play), is a second version a remake, or a separate adaptation of the same source used by the first? William Friedkin has repeatedly asserted that Sorcerer should not be considered a remake of The Wages of Fear, but a separate adaptation of the Georges Arnaud novel, which was also the basis for Clouzot's film. IMHO, that claim has significant justification, because Sorcerer covers bits of the book that Clouzot's screenplay simply didn't touch, most importantly background scenes at the start of the film which explain how the four main characters ended up in a little town in the back of beyond.
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