The Best Films Always Shoot Twice
Written by Robin Pierce & J.R. Southall
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Each month two of Starburst's top writers go head-to-head in debate over a particular bone of contention. This month, Robin Pierce and J.R. Southall discuss the pros and cons of the Hollywood remake...
Robin Pierce writes:
To remake, or not to remake – that is the question. Actually, as Hollywood proves over and over that it’s completely devoid of original ideas or creativity – or at least is unwilling to invest significant production dollars in anything that isn’t a guaranteed hit – where does that leave us, the audience? We complain, but still we succumb to the irresistible lure of the darkened cinema and the glowing big screen. But then again, I guess we’re always complaining about something or other. And it’s usually something to do with repetition.
Think back - not so long ago, we who pay our hard earned cash to place our rear ends on cinema seats were complaining bitterly that Hollywood was completely devoid of original ideas or creativity and so on because it seemed that all that was being churned out of the celluloid meat grinder was sequel after sequel after sequel. Films that were good standalones were becoming long, involved franchises. Often, weekend box office releases would read like a series of sports scores: Friday the 13th 7, Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Hellraiser 4, Candyman 3; Star Trek 5, Terminator 2 and so on.
We felt cheated. Despite the cosy feeling of familiarity in seeing new films with established characters – except when the characters had already had their stories told and the endless continuations were getting weaker, eventually ending up as tepid dilutions of what had made the franchise a gripping success to begin with. The law of diminishing returns was never seen in fuller effect. Superman the Movie was a great world-wide record building success you say? Let’s spend less and less on each ensuing film, audiences will still come and we’ll make more money with less investment. I mean, did we really, really need a Superman IV: Quest for Peace? Was Hellraiser: Inferno vital to our entertainment needs, or Halloween 4, or 5?
Of course there are exceptions – there always are. But maybe in those days of never ending sequels, we never had it so good in retrospect. At least the material was new, even if the characters weren’t. James Bond, for example, has always been guaranteed box office gold despite varying quality (and personally, I’ve never forgiven them for Moonraker). But when the well ran dry and Jason Voorhees became too difficult to resurrect in Friday the 13th pt 17: Jason Dies And We Really Mean It This Time – the studios began to remake – or, in their parlance, reimagine – their properties. They wasted no time making cherished and beloved films new, fresh and shudderingly relevant for a whole new generation. Remakes became in vogue.
This is where the rot and creative rigor mortis really set in – and the question should be asked if all the good ideas are already taken and if every truly original film possible has already been made in the 100 years plus history, leaving only variations on a theme remaining, then when should a film be remade for a brand new target audience? Or maybe ... the question is: should a film be remade?
Remakes are not a new phenomenon. Not in our genre. They’ve been around since the advent of sound – and longer. Which version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde takes your fancy? The silent version from 1920? The Oscar winning 1931 production with Frederic March? Did you prefer the 1941 Spencer Tracy adaptation, or are you a Hammer fan holding out for 1960’s The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll? An admirer of Amicus’s 1971 version I, Monster perhaps? Phantom of the Opera – 1925, 1942 or 1962? How about the Robert Englund vehicle from 1989?
Many of us are Hammer fans, enjoying the nostalgia of that unique Hammer style. In fact, Hammer’s early forays into what would become revered as classic Hammer horror were often remakes of Universal classics of the 1930s. Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein, The Mummy ... Need I go on?
Alfred Hitchcock famously remade one of his own films in The Man Who Knew Too Much. He made the original in 1934, and remade it in 1956. Was it more acceptable that the famed director remade his own film with an improved technical brilliance? Yet – when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho in 1998 – there were howls of outrage (with mine among them) and rightfully so, because Van Sant had the temerity to use many of the same camera angles used by Hitchcock in the ground breaking original, begging the question – what’s the point?
Did Van Sant think he was a better film maker than the legendary Hitch? If so, why copy to that extent? Was a more overt masturbation sequence with Norman Bates really necessary to hammer home the point that he was a lonely and tortured individual? Hitch’s version followed the book very closely. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano has gone on record saying that the book by Robert Bloch is the film. Bearing that in mind, there wasn’t anything really for the remake to add because it was already all on the screen – so what was the point?
Another case in point was the recent True Grit. A great growling performance from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, no argument there – but what did the Coen brothers add to their western that was missing from the original, which made remaking the classic seem like a good idea? Well, again, I’ve read the source material – the book by Charles Portis and again – the original film director Henry Hathaway did an excellent job of bringing the book to life on the screen. The Coen brothers stuck closely as well. Actually, both films adapted the book accurately to the point that most of the dialogue in both films mirrors exactly. Was the Coen Brothers’ version a better film? Did the use of CGI and animatronics improve the telling of the story in a way that the physical effects and stunt work used in 1969 could not have? Not in my view.
So there we have two examples of almost slavish devotion to the original novels with the remakes proving both needless and, perhaps, exercises in ego for the directors at best. Sheer futility at worst.
Then there are the examples where a film is remade with the emphasis changed. One of the best films of John Carpenter’s career is The Fog. It’s a genuinely creepy story of the sea giving up its dead. Carpenter’s then wife Adrienne Barbeau gave a career high performance as the central character – a woman alone, fighting for survival against the vengeful spirits who’ve come to wreak havoc on the town that was responsible for running their plague ship aground and causing their deaths.
Come the remake 25 years – we, as an audience, are supposed to accept a too-young looking Selma Blair in that pivotal maternal role in what was largely a teen movie designed to be relevant to today’s youth demographic. It galls me to think there’s going to be a generation who won’t bother to watch John Carpenter’s superior version – “because it’s old”. The studios, and naturally therefore the movie industry, are effectively killing off their own glorious history. We’re pandering to the notion that youth and “new” is everything. How many people will watch Peter Jackson’s King Kong, but won’t give the 1933 feature the time of day “because it’s black and white”?
The Haunting (1963) is accepted as perhaps the best ghost story ever committed to film because of its subtlety in allowing the audience’s mind to suggest what the camera doesn’t show. In 1999, subtlety was the last thing on Jan de Bont’s mind as he unleashed the full range of special effects that the budget would allow. I dread the day that a remake of Rosemary’s Baby is made and we see a CGI demon baby with red eyes in the crib, rather than imagine what Mia Farrow’s character is seeing when she says “What have you done to his eyes?”
A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th were both hugely successful franchises which virtually dominated the genre in the 1980s – both remade and both remakes proving to be lesser than their originals. Wes Craven struck gold when he cast Robert Englund in the role of Freddy Krueger back in 1984. I’m sure the casting of Jackie Earle Healy in the role in 2010 might well have seemed a fine idea on paper – but did we really need Freddy to be as realistically nasty as he became? Does a suddenly unsympathetic Krueger make for a better villain than the wisecracking serial killer? We knew he was a child murderer – but did homing in on that point make for a more gripping plot, or does it merely break the fourth wall and bring an all too potent dose of reality into a film which is supposed to be a fantasy?
Friday the 13th added one thing when being remade that actually made sense. The inclusion of Voorhees’s Viet Kong inspired network of tunnels under forest, allowing him to pop up in various places with a seemingly supernatural speed explained a lot. Other than that, it was a needless retread that could’ve just as easily been a sequel. Take some permissive teenagers, add a crazed, retarded hillbilly wearing a hockey mask – chaos ensues. The formula didn’t change.
What’s more shocking – Charlton Heston on a beach seeing the remains of the Statue of Liberty or Mark Wahlberg seeing the Lincoln Memorial with the face of a chimp? Despite better looking monkeys, Tim Burton must surely have known that he’d never in a million years trump the twist ending of the original Planet of the Apes.
But, let’s not blind ourselves to the fact that there are of course the exceptions.
The Crazies was a 1979 film by George Romero about a small town becoming infected with a secret virus that, despite a good premise, is horribly let down by poor execution and an almost complete lack of budget. Filmed in a small town, the extras are actually townspeople with no acting experience – and it shows in every camera conscious shot they’re in. Breck Eisner had a budget which allowed him to bring the story to our screens in a more cohesive and credible fashion in 2010.
Halloween also fared better than most. A much loved film and a risky undertaking for any director considering stepping into John Carpenter’s shoes. Despite howls of protest that Michael Myers’s abused childhood was going to be part of the story, Rob Zombie took a defiant stand and told the same story as Carpenter did, but from a different angle. This effectively gave us two different versions of the same story with a change of perspective. The same, but different. This must be more acceptable than needlessly churning out exactly the same story surely?
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s Hills Have Eyes were both raw, low budget horror films in their 70s debuts. They were remade with extravagant budgets and effects which furthered the graphic nature of the gruesome plots. Both worked well, and both can co-exist comfortably. You pay your money and you make your choice, but it’s not all about effects, clever editing and modern stylized visual panache. For example, with all its budgetary limitations and limited effects, Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) is a far more entertaining evening’s viewing than Piranha 3D, even with photorealistic CGI fish and its seemingly endless, not to mention needless, nude underwater ballet by hardcore porn star Riley Steele. When mentioning adding extra dimension, I mean there’s got to be more than added 3D nudity just for the hell of it, a crime My Bloody Valentine 3D was also guilty of. Similarly, most genre fans will accept the primitive charm of Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion figures over the hectic CGI wizardry of Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans any day, but that message just isn’t getting through to the bean counters at the studios.
So, given the examples cited above, when is a remake a great idea?
I would venture to say when it can add an extra dimension or bring something to a story that wasn’t evident the first time around.
Does that happen? Yes – but not very often – or at least, not often enough. Cape Fear worked well in both its versions and enjoyment of either doesn’t negate from the other which makes it an ideal, picture perfect remake. Likewise, 1956’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers didn’t suffer when the 1978 version was released. (Sadly, I can’t say the same for The Invasion in 2007.) I actually much prefer the Pierce Brosnan version of The Thomas Crown Affair to the Steve McQueen. Mention The Thing, and I’m sure that images of Kurt Russell, dogs being turned inside out, and severed heads deploying spider legs and skittering away come to mind before James Arness as “an intellectual carrot” in a boiler suit being electrocuted by Kenneth Tobey. On the other hand, I’d sincerely hope that mentioning The Day the Earth Stood Still evokes Michael Rennie on the ramp of his ship with Gort beside him before you think of Keanu Reeves.
I’m actually open minded enough to accept that it’s my choice whether to see a remake of a beloved classic or not. Nobody holds a gun to my head and forces me to watch. After all, as a wise man once said – “it’s only a movie”. But more often than not, I find myself let down and disappointed by an inferior product that should never have seen the light of day, much less the green light of approval.
J.R. Southall replies:
Remakes, reboots, sequels, adaptations – it all comes to the same thing: putting a new spin on an old idea.
While I can’t argue with your demonstration of how so very often it’s the case that the new spin is unworthy of the old idea, what I will say in defence of remakes is that you shouldn’t disregard the entire concept because you don’t like one or two of its offspring (or perhaps even the majority of them...). The failure of specific filmmakers to truly engage with decent original material isn’t the fault of the material they’re failing to engage with (and it would probably be the case that if they were creating original films rather than remakes, those movies would almost certainly be just as bad – if not worse).
Here’s the rub: there are only so many original ideas in the world. Filmmaking, like composing music, is an exercise in rearranging a standard set of notes into a sequence that feels fresh and has resonance and meaning. To extend the metaphor, there are two ways in which a filmmaker can play the song: either as an original composition, complete with all the director’s own themes and concerns; or as a cover version, in which scenario the director can overlay his own themes and concerns on top of a set that’s already been established. By choosing the former route, the director potentially hits two problems which the latter route avoids: a lack of interest from the wider public in a work the validity of which has yet to be established, and a potential lack of capability in the full range of skills which might be required to fully realise the work.
In short: it’s hard enough to get a film made from start to finish (in fact, it’s hard enough just to find the financing to get it off the ground in the first place), but by starting from a position of having material that already has a proven track record, you can often manage to circumvent the first few rungs on a potentially slippery ladder. It’s hard to imagine, for example, David Fincher being given the kind of budget he was allowed to play around with on his first movie, had it not been an entry into the Alien franchise.
Remounting already-successful productions is something that’s been done since almost as far back as there have been productions to mount. I’m talking about the stage, of course. In the days before cinema, it was impossible to catch up with the latest theatrical developments unless you were in the right theatre at the right time every time – just as in the days before record-players, it was similarly impossible to hear all the latest music. And so stage plays, and operas, and orchestral performances, would tour – and those most popular in their field would be restaged, often in new towns and cities, new countries even, and often with an entirely new cast (or orchestra) to boot. Essentially, these were the first ‘remakes’.
Something of this approach survives today.
It’s a sad truth that the majority of each ‘coming generation’ finds it hard to connect with the art of their predecessors. In the same way as it’s a pound to a penny that the teenager walking down the street with his headphones in isn’t listening to The Beatles, Bowie or Blur, so it stands to similar reason that these teens aren’t looking towards ‘ancient’ movies for their entertainment. Apart from the fact that – particularly these days, in which films find themselves crossing the format divide with increasing speed, thus circumventing any such need in the first place – it’s very rare for movies to be re-issued in the cinema (and say what you will about on-line streaming, DVD and television hurting the box office dollar, there’s still a sizeable chunk of the population that will seek out movies in their traditional home – as part of an evening’s all-round entertainment, if for no other reason). You’re just not going to get the same level of interest (particularly concentrated into such a small space of time as a movie’s theatrical release) in a 1933 King Kong as Peter Jackson has done with the remake.
Which is not to say that the original doesn’t still have its place in the scheme of films; it hasn’t even necessarily been superseded. But for a brief period the remake was the centre of attention. And now they rub shoulders together as part of cinematic history, and it is for the individual (the individual who has interest enough to sample both) to decide which is the better.
By the same token, the language of cinema evolves, just as the language of popular music does. What was popular once upon a time can often be seen as out-moded or obsolete. Pop music is, in fact, the perfect simile, for while it used to be something that was lovingly crafted by well-trained musicians with an ear for the nuances of their instruments, these days a significant (and extremely popular) portion is created inside machines, very often sampling the key phrases and melodies of long-forgotten – or never (by the audience) experienced – originals. It’s the same with films: not only has the craft of cinema changed in such a way that certain genres of film are almost unrecognisable (compare the swords-and-sandals epics of the 1950s with recent entries in the same canon, such as 300; compare the disaster movies of the 1970s with such recent fare as The Day After Tomorrow; compare the original Star Wars films with their prequels), but it has also changed in such a way that modern cinema audiences would simply not get the same level of enjoyment out of something that by virtue of its method of production classifies itself as antique.
That’s not to say that this is a situation I’m happy about, nor is it anything more than a generalisation: intelligent people will always seek out the classics, and enquiring minds will always seek out the originals. But these only make up a tiny portion of the modern audience, and that modern audience would actually prefer to sit through Poseidon rather than The Poseidon Adventure.
Whether or not these remakes have anything new to say, anything to add to the original, any other reason for existing other than to make money, is a moot point. They exist to put cash in the coffers of studios that might otherwise struggle to make ends meet (and never forget, a cash-cow franchise is also helping to subsidise movies that might otherwise find themselves unfundable), and to entertain a popcorn-munching Friday night audience who often want nothing more than thrills and spills – brain-bending is something they have to cope with in daily life, every time they open a bill. Remakes (and sequels) are becoming more proficient because the times are harder for everyone – even the major studios – but also because Cinema has now amassed such a large and diverse back catalogue, it is becoming more and more difficult to find new ways to say the same old things. If you can sell a new interpretation of the same idea to an audience who aren’t aware of (or are simply apathetic towards) the original telling, it saves having to think of something else instead. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a good thing; it’s simply economic, both in the fiscal and the creative sense. (Actually, I’d be curious to find out just how many of these remakes started life as ‘original ideas’, only for someone on the periphery of the process to point out the similarities with an already existing work and suggest that turning the film into a remake might not mean greater exposure once it’s released...)
Remember, when we complain that a sequel or a remake isn’t as good as the first instalment, we’re coming to an opinion that’s based upon knowledge of the first instalment that most of the audience – particularly in the case of remakes – simply won’t have, or possibly – in the case of sequels – have only come by from television showings. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get on the same ride again, experiencing the same emotions and thrills as you did the first time you took it – and that’s something that is often only possible in the cinema with a second instalment. If we complain that the sequel is nothing more than a retread, then we’re surely missing the point.
In the end, though, I think it all comes down to adaptation.
Many, many of cinema’s ‘originals’ have actually been adaptations from different sources in the first place. You yourself have mentioned James Bond, Planet of the Apes, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde ... Sherlock Holmes is as good an example as any. If an audience wishes to experience The Hound of the Baskervilles with all of its original nuances, then it’s down to them to read the Arthur Conan Doyle. If they wish to experience it in a different format, then it goes without saying that they’re going to experience it differently. It is pretty much incumbent upon the film-maker to bring something of himself to the plate, just as it stands to reason that something else will get lost in the mix. It’s an adaptation; it’s not the original. And a remake is no different. It’s an adaptation of the original material, and it is going to be different – not necessarily worse (and rarely, but occasionally, better), but different. And if you like the original, if you’re a fan, then it’s unlikely you’ll be quite satisfied with the new version. But that doesn’t mean the adaptation is entirely without merit. Somebody will prefer it!
Ultimately, I simply can’t argue that the vast majority of remakes and sequels are inferior to the films they are trying to replicate. But by the same token, I don’t think we should dismiss the process of adaptation, simply because the lion’s share of those who are doing the adapting aren’t really up to the task. You wouldn’t write off pop music as a genre simply because most pop songs are crap, would you?
And it’s ironic that you chose to begin your argument by paraquoting Hamlet, surely the most commonly remounted text in existence, and proof if any were needed that as long as the people doing the adapting bring something of value to the adaptation, then there’s no reason that we should ever stop seeing the same works re-presented to us time after time. The ‘art’ of the remake isn’t going to go away, so it’s better just to live with it. And just not bother parting with your cash if you don’t think a particular remake is going to float your boat...
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