Hellooo, I'm the Nostalgia Critic. I remember it so you don't have to! I don't know if you've noticed,
but Hollywood has been out of ideas for a while.
(Sarcastically) Noooooooooo!
Okay. You've all noticed, but this can be a good thing and a bad thing.
I did a whole editorial about this before, but that's not exactly what I'm gonna focus on here today.
Today I'm going to focus on a subject matter that for the most part has still been making a fair amount of money. The remake.
Remakes are nothing new. Literally. Since the dawn of cinema, remakes have been very constant- particularly when movies went from silent to sound.
Hell, some of the same directors came back to redirect a timeless classic to create another
timeless classic. Good thing internet blogs weren't around back then. "Remake '10 Commandments'? HA!
Next you'll want to do an animated version with Jeff Goldblum!"
And somehow it'll actually work...
So I'm certainly not going to be a purist and say a remake should never happen.
Some of the best films ever made are remakes, improving on the original while still staying faithful, and yet also keeping a unique identity.
But needless to say, this is often difficult and very rare- hence a lot of the crap we've been getting.
Disney, once the imagineers of bringing classic stories to life, are trying to make classic stories out of their classic stories out of classic stories!
It's getting a little carried away.
So we naturally need to ask ourselves, "When should remakes stop?"
Well, I guess the best way to answer that is to figure out when remakes should happen.
(Cha-ching) Okay, we all know what Hollywood thinks, but for the sake of good storytelling, I think we can break it down to three factors.
Number one, the most obvious, is if it can be made better. A film can be good, even
groundbreaking, but still be either dated or not fully explored. Some remakes have become so classic that many people don't even realize they're remakes.
"Scarface", "Fistful of Dollars", "True Lies"; all based on movies that existed,
but the remakes did it so much better that they don't even realize there's an original.
I'm honestly surprised there aren't more remakes of bad films.
It's been rumored for a while that "Drop Dead Fred" was gonna get a remake.
Good! The original sucks!
The idea of an imaginary friend taking over your mind as an adult, though, is actually kind of a cool idea.
I'd love to see this concept explored and done a lot better than this.
People ask me if I'm against the idea of "Garbage Pail Kids" being remade.
Why the hell would I?
The original is the WORST film I have seen in my life. The cards deserve better! Remake the shit out of it!
Hell, it can't get any worse. Heck. Is there a "Batman and Robin" remake in the near future?
It'd be nice to see Mr. Freeze done right. Though if he's anything like what they're doing with the Joker...
Oh, don't make me choose which one is worse!
But okay, we get the idea. If something could be improved on, improve on it. If it's broke,
don't fix it. Make another one from scratch. It's safe to say as long as the original still exists (*cough* LUCAS) another version
is not an unwelcomed idea, which brings me to the second reason to do a remake;
expanding on a concept.
Now this is different than just making something better.
It's taking one element of the original idea and
exploring it more. In fact, a franchise that did this both a good way and a bad way is "Planet of the Apes".
Tim Burton is one of the most famous directors that coined the phrase,
"reimagining". He said he didn't want to improve on the original film, he just wanted to take in a different direction.
It just so happened that direction sucked.
Years later, another "Planet of the Apes" film would come along with a similar thought.
Apes ruling the planet. However, this focused more on how it
happened, similar to how some of the later Apes films went, and now it seems to be going in a new direction
that seems entirely its own. "King Kong" has been remade tons of times. In the Peter Jackson version,
it's still the same story,
but more time is dedicated to giving Kong and our heroine more time together, creating a stronger connection.
"12 Monkeys" was originally a half hour Sci-Fi film shown only in still pictures,
but that blossomed into a motion filled,
apocalyptic future that took elements from the film and expanded on it, and some of these tie-in to the number three reason to do a remake;
creating a whole new experience.
Whether it's a different point of view, a new culture, or even a new time period, as long as the identity of the film seems
unique despite it having origins from another source, it can work.
"Magnificent 7" is famously a remake of "Seven Samurai". Both have the same plot, but are set in different time periods and locations.
Films like"The Ring",
"Birdcage", and "The Departed" are all remakes of foreign classics, telling these great stories in different cultures shows both the differences and the similarities
between the two, making it interesting what they have to change and what they have to keep the same.
Okay, so we have three reasons when remakes should be done,
I guess when they shouldn't be done is the opposite reasons.
If a remake needs to stand out,
then logically the first sign not to do a remake is when people can't separate it from the original.
I get a feeling a lot of the Ghostbusters reboot
"controversy", yeah, I'm still putting "controversy" in quotes,
is because the original was so unique and one-of-a-kind that no one could separate it.
If it was a sequel, then they'd have had a better shot, or even a spin-off, but when people hear the word "reboot",
it's like saying, "Now
THIS is what you're going to think of when you hear
'Ghostbusters'."
Even though everyone will clearly think of this first. A lot of Universal monster movies are trying to get remade, and despite most of them
being based on classic works,
it's hard to not think of Karloff as
Frankenstein or Lugosi as Dracula or Chaney as the Wolfman, and according to the American box office neither can anyone else.
Oddly enough, the ones that seemed the most
ridiculous like "The Mummy" with Brendan Fraser,
at least went in such a different direction that we can kind of say, "That was uniquely their own thing".
But how is anyone gonna say, "Yeah. Johnny Depp. That's the first thing I think of when I hear, 'Willy Wonka'. Gene Who?"
Some movies leave such an impact that it makes it harder to do a version that can survive on its own without
constantly coming back to the original. If you don't have something super good or
incredibly unique in mind when remaking an icon, you're not going to be the definitive version,
but it can also backfire the other way. Like the number two reason not to do a remake; When you just do the exact same thing!
"Beauty and the Beast" had this bad. So many of the lines,
visuals and songs were all seen before and done better in the animated version.
It was so unique and awe inspiring when they first did it, so why would we want to see non-singers and
non-expressive actors do the same thing?!
Gus van Sant tried a very strange experiment with the movie Psycho.
Doing a shot-for-shot
reenactment. That's LITERALLY doing the exact same thing, except now all the freshness is sucked out of it
and we can notice the flaws even more!
What would this accomplish? Rob Zombie's remake of "Halloween" at first looked like it was going to be something different-
diving deeper into Mike Myers' childhood and devoting more time to him, but even that's done pretty generically, and when that's passed,
it's just the same story of Halloween again, except with no real surprises,
but what's even worse than doing the exact same thing is the number of three reason not to do a remake;
doing less.
"Ben-Hur" is one of the biggest films to exist in
every meaning of the word. The stunts, the story, the sets, it is the definition of epic.
So the idea of seeing a CGI remake where so much less is obviously not there seems
degrading. "Nightmare on Elm Street" is known for its creative depths and original ideas, but with the remake it's either repeated or scaled-down.
Even the makeup just looks like an unimaginative rehash. It's not different. It's not unique.
It's just the same thing except so much less. It's a guy who controls dreams that's burned alive!
You can do something cooler with this design! The original "Wicker Man" was a surreal and bizarre
experience, and while the remake is certainly bizarre and entertaining
in how bad the choices they made are, so much of the creative environment is lost,
resulting in what most people can agree is a God-awful movie.
Sometimes the opposite can be true too when you take too much out and replace it with
too much explanation.
"The Shining" and "Alice in Wonderland" remakes go WAY overboard in trying to make a super detailed and complicated story,
but that's not what we loved about the originals!
We didn't know what everything meant. We didn't need a reason for all the strange visuals.
That's what was part of making it such a unique experience. By trying to add more
explanation, it took away the imagination. They say the devil is in the detail- in this situation
they're definitely right. Whether for better or worse, all of these elements represent the most important thing in making a remake;
it's heart.
It's passion. It's reason for being.
Everything that almost can't be explained. The best remakes, even the most different ones
managed to capture the heart of the original source material.
Whether they improve on it or take it in a different direction, the connection is always there, and the worst remakes always don't
capture it. They either try too hard, not hard enough, or just focus on the wrong thing. In a time
where very little is original, it's hard to figure out what's gonna capture the heart of something and what isn't.
I never would have imagined an "Evil Dead" remake would be of any worth.
Who the hell would a thought a musical of a B-movie would surprisingly work?
What we do know is a lot more remakes are coming whether we want them to or not.
Some surprise us with how good they are, some surprise us with how bad they are, but the ones we'll remember the most
surprisingly don't give us something old, they always give us something uniquely new.
I'm the Nostalgia Critic! I remember it so you don't have to.
(The Review Must Go On)
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