Movie remakes

I think it was when I came out of the cinema after watching the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate. I’d actually seen the original for the first time the year before, and had absolutely fallen in love with it. John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film was a brilliantly-executed mindfuck, which was itself the genius of the movie. I loved every bit of it, from the crazed juxtaposition of the communist briefing of the progagonists’ brainwashing and a congenial ladies’ club meeting to the use of the deck of cards as a subconscious trigger.

While I thought there were a couple nifty “nods” to the original sprinkled throughout the remake, I was otherwise underwhelmed by it. Here was this masterpiece of film that was remade into an uninspiring, toothless and lobotomised action thriller that just appeared edgy without ever really cutting you.

“How dare they?” I thought. I guess growing up I’d been spoiled on rather good remakes like Scarface, 1984 and The Fly, but I’d always been of the opinion that it’s not inherently bad to remake a movie. Sure, I winced when they re-did classics like Psycho and Planet of the Apes, but they weren’t completely awful. Besides, I still had the originals to enjoy. I got a bit more grumbly when Sky One announced that they were going to do a remake of The Prisoner and disregard much of the original, but it didn’t make the original any less brilliant.

Since that time, however, every time I hear of some movie being remade my first reaction is inevitably a grumbling of “they’re just going to screw it all up” and “why bother?” And yet, at the same time, I have plans for my career in film to do my own remake. For years I struggled with how to reconcile such opposing views on film remakes. Isn’t the growing wave of remakes just a symptom of Hollywood running out of ideas? Who am I to say that it’s okay to remake some movies but not others?

I think the key is to have a genuine affection for the original. Whether your desire is to try to make it better, do your own take on it or even just have a chance to see how you do on it, the main reason that anybody should make anything in film is because they love what they do. Why should anything be relegated to a status of sacred and untouchable?

Alfred Hitchcock remade one of his own movies, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and the remake was far better. “But it was his own movie”, I can hear you say. True, but the point was that he loved the movie enough to do another version of it. So what’s the difference, then, between the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much and the remake of Psycho? Gus Van Sant clearly had a real fondness for the original film, otherwise he wouldn’t have made the effort to copy the movie shot-for-shot. Psycho wasn’t even Hitchcock’s story, anyway — it was based off of a book by Robert Bloch. He must have loved doing that remake, and who are we to tell him to not do something he loves? Even if you didn’t like the remake (I wasn’t fond of it, myself) it’s patently ridiculous to tell someone that they had no right to make it. The truth is, nothing in art is sacred. I could re-paint The Scream if I wanted to, and it would not take a single thing away from the genius of Munch’s original. So why, then, should film be considered any more special? Sure, I got mad at the horrible remake of The Manchurian Candidate, but nobody is telling me that I have to go out and buy it on DVD. Besides, I still have the original to enjoy.

I look at movie remakes the same way I look at plays. Nobody, for example, gets mad when some theatre company does a performance of Macbeth or Phantom of the Opera, so why should I get mad when somebody decides they’re going to do yet another movie version of I Am Legend or Invasion of the Body Snatchers? People ultimately do remakes because they love the story and want to put on their own performance, as it were, and I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with it when that really is the motivation.

The next time someone decides to remake something you hold near and dear, calm down: nobody is telling you that you have to watch it. And who knows? It might even be good.