Volitions Advocate on 10/5/2011 at 04:33

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I hate remakes.

On the Alien 3 idea. I'd support a remake if David Fincher was the one to do it. It was his first movie and had nothing but roadblocks from Fox. Give him a blockbuster budget and GTFO the soundstage. (it's actually my favorite of the franchise)

If I had to pick a remake, I'd say Disney's The Black Hole. Where I'd say get Edward James Olmos to play Ernest Borgnine's character It would probably be done very "safe" by Disney and stick with the typecast formula. Getting Guy Pierce to Ernest's character, either Anthony Hoptkins or Gary Oldman to play Reinhardt, and end up with Maximillian looking just like a Cylon, and Vincent will be speaking Ebonics. That and the zombified crew will probably end up all marathon runners. ugh... screw hollywood.

EDIT: This Fan-made trailer is actually pretty awesome: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zyCIltmf0k)

EDIT EDIT: OH (http://blog.moviefone.com/2009/12/01/disney-remaking-the-black-hole-with-tron-team/) FFS

PeeperStorm on 10/5/2011 at 06:12

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I hate remakes of good movies. Bad and mediocre ones are fair game.

Not counting remakes of foreign films, I can think of one or two:

The Old Dark House comes to mind immediately, even though the original had Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton.
El Dorado, a remake of Rio Bravo, both starring John Wayne.
The Thing.

Thirith on 10/5/2011 at 06:50

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Thing is, ideally I don't see remakes as a second chance to turn something that was originally bad into something worthwhile, although I guess that can work. Usually those things are bad in part because the material isn't particularly brilliant, though.

If the original material is rich and has a certain depth, or at least potential, I think a remake should very explicitly be a different take on the material - just like different performances of the same play can yield very different outcomes. You can watch several productions of Macbeth that all manage to emphasise different things and, in spite of sharing the same plot and much of the dialogue, are different plays.

That's why I like both versions of Solaris. They share their overall plot and themes, but each feels like its own thing, like individual approaches to the same subject matter.

IMO this is especially the case with books that are turned into films by directors and actors who bring something different to the table, as (apparently) happened with the two versions of True Grit. I wouldn't even call the Coen version a remake in that sense, just like modern-day productions of Hamlet aren't remakes of the original productions in 16th century London.

henke on 10/5/2011 at 09:44

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Because they didn't get it right the first time. Did you even read my post or did you just skim over the titles?


Yeah I know. The titles that usually get throw around in these "what should be remade?" threads are remakes of movies that were great the first time around. So I wanted to start things off by listing some movies that weren't great the first time around but could be great, if done right.


That one already sorta got remade as the South Korean "The Good, The Bad & The Weird". And it did manage to forge it's own identity. Make you completely forget about the original while you were watching it.


I knew someone would suggest a "sweded" remake. :) That's not what I had in mind but it certainly would be fun to see.

demagogue on 10/5/2011 at 14:37

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Yes I read the reason you gave. I was mostly just not jiving with that reasoning for a full remake. Sorry I didn't mean to word it so strongly. I'm not saying it's irrational, it's even normal, but just doesn't jive with me personally. I always read your posts attentively, henke. :)

To me, you're not saying you want a remake per se to reinvent the story in another telling (like music interpretation) so much as you wish the original had never been made, but another version more like this and we forget the original was ever there, actually we pretend this new telling *is* the original. That just feels like a different bag of cats to me. You don't care that it's REmaking anything, you want someone to *make* a movie.

But in that case, to me they're just going through the same development process they just went through like 2 years ago. So even if we imagine the original had never been made, we should still expect they'll come to pretty much the same movie; if they have a reason to do it differently now, why wouldn't they have just done it then? I mean, I always connect the movie (or any artistic creation) with its development process & setting. It's a product of a time & place -- the investors, producer & director, contracts, equipment, development woes, working conditions, market pandering ... You can never strip those out of movies because that defines what they are and how they can get made. "Remaking" a movie to me means reawakening that whole behemoth and putting it into motion from scratch.

And you're cutting the connection between the two to just have a fun discussion of movies that could have been cool if they'd just done it this way, never mind how. That's fair, too. I can think of lots of movies, even individual scenes, I wish development had taken it this way rather than that way, especially if we didn't have to care about the contracts & market pandering & deadlines but could just imagine an extra shooting day. I just don't think about that in terms of "remake" in the sense of seriously getting new investors and writers and let's reshoot this thing and expect a different movie; I don't think that's a serious suggestion. Your post is just having fun with the idea. So that explains why I took the topic in a lot different way than you meant it, and couldn't grok with the idea of seriously rounding up investors to remake a 2008 movie, but we might for some 1960s movies. We're just thinking about the sense of "remake" differently.

The bag of cats that I actually put your OP, or the closest place where we can actually find something like it (not exactly), isn't remakes but (http://fanedit.org/) Fan Edits or Recuts, where fans take existing movies and recut them to be the way they should have been, even adding scenes from other movies or stuff from outtakes. It isn't exactly the same since you can't get original material, but there's not much chance you can get that anyway. But some of them are quite good, remaking the movie into a much different experience. Yeah these kinds of projects can be very fun and are more in line with something you can actually get done and released. If you had worded it to be movies that should totally be Fan Edited to be the same movie done right, then I'm right with you.

Edit: In that category, I think about movies like Explorers (well that's a kid's movie), but that movie had such a cool concept and the first half where they're figuring out this alien technology is great; then they finally get in their spaceship and wisked away, and the writers just fall asleep and the second half on the alien planet was dumb IMO. So I wish all that could be redone, so the place they go deserves all the cool set up it took to get there. Movies like that. Excising Jar Jar Binks of course. Yeah there's lots of movies I can think of in this sense of remake.