Remake movies

“Everything comes in circles,” Sherlock Holmes, maybe the most famous frictional detective, once observed. “The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It has all been done’ before and will be done again.”  Ironically, the detective himself appears in more than twenty versions of movies.  In Hollywood, up to today, almost every classic movie of all genres has been remade, even more than once for some of them.  A film producer Wilbur Stark explains this ongoing death rattle for creativity in mainstream Hollywood, “doing a remake is easier and cheaper than writing an original.  You have the story.  You have the characters.  All you have to do is contemporize them.”  For a remake film, it has name recognition even before it’s released, and some audiences are willing to watch it regardless of the quality of the film itself.  Furthermore, the discussion about how the remake version compares to its origin, either criticism or praise, will push the newly released movie into people’s attention.  Are remakes a way to give audience a fresh taste of classics or are they simply a perfect way for Hollywood to make money using minimal creativity in exchange for maximum profit?

In 2012, the 100th anniversary of ship’s sinking, the 3D conversion of James Cameron’s Titanic was released and earned the movie an additional $343.6 million worldwide.  The new version follows exactly the same storyline, but after all, it’s just a 3D conversion.  Audiences should not expect anything new besides special effect.  The film itself indeed deserves to be rediscovered and presented to younger generation on the big screen.  However, for many audiences who have already seen the movie, the 3D technology failed to add anything to it.  Does any film really need to be converted like this?  We buy ticket to watch a movie for its original plot, actors’ performance, and director’s way to tell a story, not merely for its 3D effect.  It’s not worth to replicate a movie just to prove what we have achieved in technology.

Different from the new Titanic’s simply improvement in special effect, many remakes did shift their focus and change their point of view.  However, many filmmakers seem to suddenly lose confidence in audiences’ intellect and sensibility.   They have become too careful about public’s response and decided that it’s better to concentrate on something that everyone of any educational level can understand, love, for example.  Pulse, a Japanese horror film which imagined a world in which the social isolation and loneliness created by technology such as cell phones and emails literally transform people into ghosts and leads to breakdown of society.  In recent American remake, the problem is not technology itself, but merely that humans tapped into a frequency they were never meant to find.  While the original version criticizes the current state of society using imaginary means, the remake has no problem with the way the world is.  As long as people don’t find that freaky frequency, which no audience knows if it exists anyway, they are safe.  This tendency toward shrinking a movie’s purview to concentrate only on non-controversial topic can also be seen in Solaris. In the original, the main character dealt with his feelings about his feelings about his dead wife, but also his commitment to his parents and his place in the larger society.  The remake is all about love, cutting his parents out of the equation entirely.  More and more remake movies tend to run away from overarching ideas, and certainly from ideas that bring social criticism, toward events that happen for mysterious reason, even no reason.

Some filmmakers’ attitude that they try to earn money by simply reproducing a classic movie while in the same time avoid social criticism toward the movie’s thesis has irritated audiences.  Therefore, now many of them attempt to come up with something new and squeeze their “innovations” into remakes.  Van Sant, the director of Psycho remake, emphasized that his version will be very different from Hitchcock’s because now it has colors.  But one effect he uses too much is exactly color.  Many audiences find it’s hard to immerse into the scary movie when they see the bright yellow envelope containing the money, or the way Marion’s bathroom at the Bates motel is now a brilliant, overexposed white.

However, despite so many criticism against movie remakes, there are still some successful examples.  Hitchcock himself remade his The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956 using his original 1934’s version as a blueprint.  He dropped scenes that didn’t work, added more subtle humor and improved on the main set piece: the assassination attempt at London’s Albert Hall. As Hitchcock himself put it in 1967, “Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”  Unfortunately, in contemporary society, many filmmakers lose their patience to use creativity; even if they do not, the audiences may lose their patience to admire it.