Remaking movies: a train ride past the past

As any movie buff I have a love-hate relationship with the term ‘remake’. I, for one, loathed The day the earth stood still (2008) with a vengeance but then I adored The departed (2006).

I also adore the original; point in fact I even consider it the better film.

When I was watching 2018’s The Commuter a thought struck me: am I watching a remake? Because, to me, it looked like it was based on the classic Hitchcock: the lady vanishes.

If you’ve seen this classic a lot of The commuter is very recognizable.

I turned out that I was wrong; No remake; Just shameless stealing.

But, then, I liked The commuter. I like it enough that I actually wanted it to be a remake! To share the spotlight with the ‘original’ as it were. So now my mind was boggling. Here we have a remake that isn’t a remake that I wanted to be a remake.

So taking The commuter’s train track as my basis I want to take you, reader, by the hand and explain some of the concepts surrounding remakes.

The main gist is the question: why are movies remade? And with it comes the fallout from fans who love the original artwork. So let’s start at the first station: what kind of movies people don’t mind about being remade?

In short the scale goes from “Sure remake it” to “why would you want to mess with the original”. But, like any train ride in the movie The Commuter –which I will refer to in the last paragraph- it has various stops along the way.

The “Sure remake it!”-zone

This is the easiest category. If a movie has a certain reason that would permissibly allow for it to be remade. Let’s name a few:

Outdated and forgotten

The original movie is quite old, outdated and utterly forgotten not only by the mass audience but by film scholars as well. These are the movies that creep up on us in ‘clickbait lists’ like “ten movies you didn’t know were remakes”.

If nobody remembers the movie then nobody minds if a studio tries it again.

Outdated but loved

The original is terribly outdated, only true cinephiles would protest against it being remade. The best example is, of course, King Kong (1933).

Yes, the original is loved (by me). But even we lovers of the original know that a remake would allow for some wonderful cinematic trickery to bring the big ape to life.

A bit too much trickery in Peter Jackson’s version for my taste – but it’s still a very good movie in my humble opinion.

So the big ape goes on the screen once more with a bigger budget and more CGI.

Outdated for today

1995’s Hackers is a hilarious movie when you recognize what kind of (drug-fuelled) visions, early nineties, filmmakers had about computer culture.

But going even further back to the science fiction movies of the 1950s you’ll notice –with today’s eyes- that moviemakers often got their fantasies way off.

In this sense it is understandable that moviemakers want to try Lost in Space and Star Trek again. The original is still loved and respected but the cardboard decors and puppies masquerading as aliens have to go. Update is the magic word here.

Even though a lot of contemporary science fiction movies are making the same mistake their predecessors did:
by assuming the likes of Facebook and Twitter will still exist in the future.

The crossing/The crossroad

Here we are at the fork in the road. Now we get fans involved. Like it or not, nowadays fans have the power of the internet at their fingertips and they are using it.

It is at this point –I argue- that the word ‘remake’ becomes a thing.

Because there is one thing to consider when you remake a movie (even if the choice objectively might make a lot of sense): The subjectivity of the audience.
People might not want a remake and rally against it. From this point on the question ‘Why’ becomes tangible.

Why remake The day the earth stood still and actually remove all elements of –human created- global destruction?

Why remake Ghostbusters if you exclude any (ongoing) ghostsbusting and fill in the paranormal elements with soup-jokes?

The “Why remake it!”-zone

Re-adaptation

This first ‘station’ is an arguable one. If an original movie was based on a book a second movie would (technically) not be a remake. So, we’ve got various different versions of The Phantom of the Opera and nobody bats an eye.

However, the unmasking scene is very much a plot-device created by the movies.
Thus every single unmasking scene would be a remake within a re-adaptation…

However, when an almost flawless adaptation is made (or even two) in the case of Murder on the Orient Express (1974 and 2010) the latest adaptation not only has the book to answer to but also two previous movies. And, as such, does suffer the ‘remake curse’ a bit.

One of the current (online) discussions is the idea of adapting The Lord of the flies with girls instead of boys. I’m wondering whether this will work as well (considering how the book is so macho driven). But trust me, when the movie comes out, people are going to compare it to the two original movies.

If it worked before…

If a studio owns the rights to a story and characters who can blame it for, in a few years, time churning out another version of the original tale? This is where the term: ‘cash-grab’ is most often used.

Who needs another version of The Thing or The Nightmare on Elm street? These remakes are often quickly forgotten in favour of the original. But, by that time, a lot of tickets have been sold.

So here we have a clear case of studios succeeding while fans protest.

But that doesn’t mean that the studios don’t listen to the wishes of the audience.

Nostalgia

If an original tale is loved by an audience why not make a new movie out of it. Not only does this create interest. But when the movie is released the nostalgic audience will be so preoccupied with recognizing all the little details they loved in the original that they’ll fail to see whether it is actually a good movie or not.

Time, however, is a cruel mistress. In time any nostalgic remake has to stand on its own of be forgotten in obscurity.

Detour – or pampering the ‘wanting audience’

The original cast is in! Or: the original cast approves!

This is apparently the magic potion to ease the fans’ suffering. Just rehire the original actor or actress to play a part in the new movie. Or, let the original director, actor, actress fully support the movie (The Evil Dead). Sometimes this works (Star Wars), sometimes it doesn’t (Ghostbusters).

This is one of the ways of legitimizing a remake. So, in my schema, it creates a track between the two rails.

Changing things

Originality versus cash-grab this is the big debate surrounding remakes. So, whilst movies studios prefer to play it safe and simply and remake the original they do tent to listen to filmmakers wanting to take the original story into a different direction. The question is, however: how different?

So the villain becomes the good guy in Malificient. Or the men become women in Ghostbusters.

The success of such a movie depends on how different it is in regards to the original and, more importantly, if it is any good.

Rereleasing yet updating

Movies get rereleased all the time. Old classics get cleaned up and released into cinemas usually for some kind of anniversary. The rerelease of the Exorcist featured an additional scene or two that didn’t make it in the original cut. But still every single frame shown on screen was shot in 1973.

Not so with the rereleases of E.T. (guns become walkie-talkies). Let alone the rerelease of the original Star Wars-trilogy.

Now this unique situation occurs in which the artist is constantly refining the original to the extent that the original becomes none-existent.

‘When is the artist done?’ And, more importantly: ‘How much does his current vision differ from the one he/she had back then?’

Sufficient to say that fans aren’t pleased about that.

Not changing anything

A rare remake is the ‘not changing anything’ remake. The famous example is Gus van Sant’s Psycho which took a lot of Hitchcock’s original notes and only changed the shots the great master of suspense wasn’t able to achieve in the original version. The rest is pretty much the same (often a copy).

Michael Haneke did the same with his second version of Funny People. You could also call it a ‘country swap’ but since so little things change in his second version both movies stand as some kind of mirror image of each other.

These remakes are for the interested niche moviegoers only.

The “Franchise county!”-zone

The Reboot

When a movie franchise appears to be finished it is sometimes time to get back to the beginning and start again. Sam Rami’s Spider-man-trilogy or Christopher Nolan’s Batman-trilogy both ended themselves after their respective three-movie run.

To take Spiderman as an example, a new starter was developed.

Again poor old uncle Ben died.

However, after two (bad) movies, it turned out that this direction wasn’t working for the studio. Especially as a franchise starter (=wanting to make numerous more movies than a ‘mere’ trilogy). So after those two movies were scrapped the studio decided to try again.

That’s what the reboot also is: a cut-clear case of ‘let’s try this again’.

The soft reboot

A subtle approach to the reboot is the soft reboot. Instead of openly going back to the beginning of the overhanging storyarch a ‘soft reboot’-movie is a new movie in the franchise but with some small references  leading back to the beginning.

Casino Royale is the perfect example of the soft reboot.

This man is Bond in all his mannerism whilst fighting megalomaniac criminals, yet he is at the start of his career.

So –in a sense- it is the ‘old’ Bond thrown back in time.

Considering the fan-theory that both the number ‘007’ and the name ‘James Bond’ are code the soft reboot works.
You, the viewer, simply sees a new alcoholic hero at work.

Alas, Skyfall destroyed that theory the minute it showed the Aston-Martin.

Exiting the “Franchise county!”-zone

The country swap

Americans and subtitles.

It could be worse – they could have opted for the German dubbed versions.

"Nein, Mr. Bond - ich erwarte von Ihnen, dass Sie sterben!"

Or the Russian versions which are even more hilarious because it is often a monotone voiceover.

Basically it is the exact same movie but with different actors playing the parts in English this time round.

If it works, it works beautifully. The American remake of Let the right one in (Let me in) compliments the original by taking an ever so slightly different approach. This way the two movies can stand together on their own both individual works of art; one in Swedish and one in English.

In this sense the two Haneke Funny Games movies can’t stand side by side because they are –basically- the same movie. Nothing has changed.

But when it doesn’t (Oldboy) it is quickly forgotten in favour of the original.

The not-really-an-obvious-remake

A perfect murder was a remake of Dial M for murder. However, by changing the title and lots of other elements this movie distanced itself from the original.

Going into A perfect murder blank you might not even recognize, at first, that you are in fact watching a remake. You might recognize certain elements but you might not be able to put your finger on it. Only during the credits do you realize the truth.

Or not; if you take the commuter.

Conclusion –coming full circle: the commuter

The commuter isn’t the first movie to play with the idea of finding somebody on a train. Source Code comes to mind, so does Silver Streak, as does Hitchcock’s The lady vanishes.

But, The commuter does use a heck of a lot of things from The lady vanishes. So many, in fact, that one could wonder whether or not this movie is an indirect remake?

The commuter uses Hitchcock’s famous MacGuffin, double agents, a missing person and even a standout in a train cart.

Yet the movie isn’t a remake. So we’d have to settle with ‘something borrowed’.

By ‘borrowing’ the writers and director have crafted a delicious movie. And, most of all, they didn’t feel the need to proclaim themselves as a remake which they could’ve done easily.

‘Remake’, therefore, is a ‘wonder word’. It hinges on whether or not the new movie uses the original title. If it doesn’t one could actually photocopy a movie and get away with it.

So this struggle between fans and movie-producers resides mainly in the title of a movie; and as such the intention.

Movie-producers want to cash in on an old favourite. Fans, however, see no need for this rehash if the original was/is perfect in their eyes.

I argue that often the intention of remaking blows up in movie producers faces while it could easily have been prevented by not leaning too much on the term: remake.