When are the remakes better?

[Writer]

By the looks of things, somebody in the movie industry finally noticed what a heap of money the Lord of the Rings movies and Mel Gibson's Passion were making and decided to cover both economic bases with a series of high-budget films based on the Narnia Chronicles.

Hopefully, they'll be better than that BBC series that came out when I was in elementary school.  (They'd better be! As one accurate if rather cantankerous commentor at www.rottentomatoes.com put it, "Don't **** it up!") The recent Lord of the Rings movies, for all of their flaws, were certainly better than the earlier animated adaptations.

Yet I hear a lot from other movie fans that this rise in quality rarely happens with remakes; that indeed, the high budget on newer versions of a given movie just makes it fail more spectacularly.

So my question is: what makes some remakes great, and others just terrible? I'd appreciate some examples.

[BeyondTheGrave]

It really depends on alot of things. The best example I can give is Dawn of the Dead. I enjoyed both but they were complete different. The remake took a chance and didn't attempt to be like the original. The only thing they really have in common is name and it took place in a mall. To be honest, If they called it something else it would be dam hard to compare the two. I feel thats the best remake, were I can't compare the two. If I sit there and say "the original did this better or that better" ruins the entire movie.

I honestly wish I could give a bad remake but can't think of any right now. Godzillia might count. The remake thing has gone to remakeing ton of Asian horror movies (Ring, Grudge)which are always sub par. These remakes usually just try to "Americainze" It makeing it with a bigger budget and such. The usually pattern I see with this is If you don't like the Asian version won't like the the American you like the Asian won't like the American." I guess thats taste perhaps.


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You can’t give it, you can't buy it, and you just don't get it!-Aeon Flux



Post Edited (02-19-05 23:13)

[BeyondTheGrave]

Just thought of what looks like a bad remake. "House of  Wax". Classic Vincent Price film turned into what looks like a run of the mill teen slasher starring Paris Hilton. Also (can't believe I forgot this one) "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Both of  trying to"hip" to the new generation, they end up just being mediocre.



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You can’t give it, you can't buy it, and you just don't get it!-Aeon Flux

[Ed]

The French Film "La Femme Nikita"  is one of my favorite action flicks.  They did an american version, and it was pale.  Even though it was word-for-word the same (up to the ending).  I don't know many remakes that are up to par.
-Ed

[blkrider]

The Haunting remake was awful....that's about the worst remake I can think of right now.

I tend to like the American remakes of Asian films better, because I tend to not like the Asian pace of storytelling.  It depends, though....I really liked THE EYE.

The best remakes work in different ways than the original.  I like the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake because they decided to just go for a straight horror film instead of focusing on the social commentary and humor of the original.  The original is a great action-adventure satire, and the remake is a good horror film.  Nothing wrong with that.  

I think you're right, it's the ones that go into different directions that usually are better--THE THING being a good example.  

There are also some like the NOTLD remake that are just not necessary--they don't really harm or help the legacy of the original.   That's genearlly how I felt about the TCM remake, although a lot of people hated it.  It pretty much came and went---I think it made money and I imagine they'll make more movies but I don't think it's going to replace the original in people's memories.

[FluffyCatFood]

Well a lot of people would disagree with me but I thought the remake of night of the living dead was better than the original, Mainly because of the character Barbara. In the first she was pretty much useless, in the remake she was a stronger character who pulled herself together. I really cant stand hysterical characters.

[blkrider]

I just thought it wasn't necessary...it was obvious the only reason it was made was for copyright reasons.  The effects were a little better but it wasn't nearly as gory.
They wimped out for the R rating.  At least it wasn't as bad as that "30th Anniversary Version" but it was really just kinda there.

[BoyScoutKevin]

I guess this is a two-part response.

First part.
I don't know how everybody feels about this, but the upcoming "Chronicles of Narnia" will be a Walt Disney Production. Having seen it as an animated film, a live action film, and even as a stage play, by and for children, it'd be hard to totally ruin it. (IMHO) the story by C. S. Lewis is that strong.

Second part
While I have not seen the original, the greatest remake is . . . John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon." And surprisingly, this was not the first remake of the film, but the second.

[Sam]

Besides Dawn of the Dead and the Ring, I would have to say that Red Dragon was much better than Manhunter. I read the book first and then I found out that they made  movie, man was I ever disappointed. The best thing about it was that I bought it for $2.00 at a Savon and then sold it to a local shop and they gave me $5.00.

I wouldn't say that it was better by any means but, Last Man Standing is just a couple of notches below Yojimbo.

[blkrider]

Haven't seen the recent Red Dragon but I didn't think much of Manhunter--way, way too dated and didn't have the ending of the book.

[Sam]

It didn't really have much of the book in it.

[Yaddo 42]

It has been many years since I read the book or saw the first film, but working from what I remember. It would have been hard to film the climax (blind girl in the burning house) to "Red Dragon" the book. As written that part depended on her blindness to set up the villain's seeming demise and the surprise of his final confrontation with Will Graham. Didn't it totally depended on the other senses besides sight? A black screen with lots of noise would have been difficult to pull off in a long scene. If the audience could see what the character couldn't (we see her trying to get out of the burning house) the scene would have lacked the intensity it had in the book. I cab see why they changed that part at least. Just my hazy memories and two cents.

Back to the OP, the 1953 film "Mogambo" is a remake of the 1932 film "Red Dust", both starring Clark Gable in the same role, different names. Both are considered good films, "Red Dust" is considered a great example of mature pre-Hays Code filmmaking. "Mogambo" is more widely known these days, probably because it is not as old and is in color. Which one is better probably depends on who you ask.

The 1939 version of "The Four Feathers" is the fourth of seven film versions and is considered the best of the lot.

I guess the best remakes either don't betray, cheapen, or dumb down what made the original work (I'd offer "A Fistful of Dollars" and the better remakes of Kurosawa films), find a new facet of the original to bring out and explore (I can think of plenty failed examples of this but can't think of one that works right off), or recognize something universal in the original that can be applied convincingly to a different framework (I'd offer all the various interpretations of Shakespeare on stage, film, and TV for this one).

[trekgeezer]

TCM has shown Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven  back to back and I found it very interesting how they switched around personality traits between the characters.

[Writer]

Well, Disney is doing the funding and distributing, but it looks like Walden Media is doing most of the actual making of the Narnia Chronicles films.  According to one report I read, just the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is budgeted for over $100,000,000! They aren't going for half measures, by the looks of things.

One of the best things about these books is that they're just about the right length for making movies out of them. With monstrously large tomes like the Harry Potter books and the Lord of the Rings, there's just no way to get all of what's in them up on the screen. With Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, the producers managed to cram the first three stories into a single movie. Each of the books in the Narnia Chronicles, by contrast, is just about the right length to be made into a feature length film, if the director makes some of the things C.S. Lewis merely implies in his novels a little more explicit.

I've seen both "Manhunter" and the "Red Dragon" film, and what I can say for them is that the budget definitely did make a difference in quality, although the guy who played Graham in "Manhunter" looked more like the idea I'd gotten of Graham's looks from the book than the actor in "Red Dragon." "Red Dragon" did have a lot of more stuff that was true to the book, and a lot of the scenes were done better. (I especially liked the "National Tattler" sequence from the opening credits.)

For a remake that was more or less of equal quality to the original, I would point to You've Got Mail, which was a contemporary remake of the black-and-white Shop Around the Corner. (I don't know what year the Shop Around the Corner came out, but the picture quality was very good and the sound quality was excellent, so I'm thinking it was from late in the black-and-white era.) Watching both films, they're essentially the same story with just a few plot differences and a number of devices updated for You've Got Mail (e-mail instead of a pen pal relationship, obviously, and a contemporary American setting instead of pre-World War II Hungarian setting).

Judging by the explanations of remakes that weren't as good as the original, it seems that any remake that tries too hard to be "hip" and shows off the special effects too much (instead of telling the &%$*@ story) will usually be worse than the original; also, some attempts to re-interpret foreign films for a domestic audience tend not to work too well. (Certainly, any Hollywood live-action interpretation of otherwise respectable Japanese anime tends to be a disaster, as in the example of the Guyver movies.)

Maybe I should do another thread on whether "B" movies should ever be remade, and if so, which ones.

[DaveMunger]

I think an important subset of the inferior remakes is the unneccesary remakes, often one must ask why they didn't just rerelease the original. It bugs me when they do an American version of a foriegn movie practically one year after the original comes out, the entire purpose of remaking these seems to be an over-estimation of how averse American audiences are to subtitles. I always thought that instead of making "Joes Apartment", MTV should have just bought the rights to "Twilight Of The Cockroaches".