Remakes

Some movies just shouldn’t be remade. I think most of us movie buffs can agree on that, no? I mean, why would anyone bother remaking Citizen Kane, or Casablanca, or Gone With the Wind? Look what happened to remakes of Hitchcock films: Dial M for Murder and Psycho, for example. Bland at best.

Science fiction is a bit different, though. Some movies are remade well, in my opinion, and I can cite as examples Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Thing (1982), The Blob (1988), and the recent I Am Legend (2007). This works well for science fiction because, well, as technology advances and improves, so does special effects. And special effects can make or break even the best written of films. Special effects can even substitute for writing, to greater or lesser degrees.

It’s the writing, however, that worries me.

Case in point: the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. When a Hollywood writer has an axe to grind, when he writes from an undisguised opinionated slant, he’s going to offend huge segments of his audience. Also, more often than not, the quality of writing will suffer. I mean, come on, making big business the bogeyman is so … done to death.

That’s why The Day The Earth Stood Still is scaring me. The original is like holy scripture to me. So was its companion that year, 1951, The Thing From Another World, but that was remade well. Perhaps even better than the original. But this Keanu Reeves film has the makings of a train wreck. Global Warming. Oh dear. I’m sensing rational critics will have a field day deconstructing this movie’s ideas. So will I, I think. If it’s as bad as I’m sensing, I won’t see it in the theaters, but I will rent it in about six months or so, and review it here.

But the few glimpses of the updated Gort we see in the trailer really, really look cool:


Also slated for release next year: Remakes of The Birds, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Escape From New York. Superiority, or sacrilege? We’ll see, but I’m not hopeful. Oh the humanity!