If there’s anything mainstream Hollywood cinema has taught us it’s that “Every good deed leads to a hundred knockoffs”. There is absolutely nothing Hollywood loves more than repackaging the same story & charging you $10-15 to see it…. Again. Well, that & giving awards to anything that is about British royalty. Today, our movie screens are overloaded with sequels, prequels, remakes, 80s nostalgia, & spin-offs. But, the worst thing to come out of all this repackaging is the REBOOT. It’s the pinnacle of what Hollywood has been searching for since a bunch of Viacom executives took over Hollywood in the early 80s. It’s better than a sequel! Offers more freedom than a prequel! Best of all, it doesn’t have that dirty connotation that comes with being a remake. Or does it?
First off, let’s specify what each of these terms mean. A SEQUEL is relatively self-explanatory. They’ve been around since forever. All the way back to when a bunch of men with beards decided God needed a rewrite in the Bible & thus we got “The New Testament”. A Sequel is the continuation of a previously existing narrative. It carries the story on from where the previous work ended. Homer’s The Odyssey continues the story of Odysseus’ after he left the battle of Troy, as told in The Iliad. James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein continues on from the original 1931 classic, telling the story of how the Monster did not die in the windmill but lived & eventually killed himself after being rejected by the Bride built to be his mate. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is… well; the Part 2 makes it pretty clear. A sequel is the oldest & still most common form of continuing a popular work of fiction. One of the great things about a sequel is with the proper determination & balls to take risks, the story & characters can be taken into vastly different territories, I.E. James Cameron’s Aliens or George Miller’s The Road Warrior. Of course, a real problem is when you get never ending sequels, continually separating the following work from what made the original so great. In the worst case scenario, this can lead to the Batman Credit Card or Indiana Jones & CG Prairie Dogs.
Not Pictured- An Indiana Jones movie
In recent years, Hollywood has become enamored with the PREQUEL. It’s like a sequel, but even better because instead of having to tell a whole new original story, you just have to tell the audience how they got to the start of the film they ALREADY LOVE! Best of all, you can cast younger, hotter, cheaper, less talented actors to play roles already established by the older, more experienced thespians that the audience already is willing to pay to see! To quote sociologist Eric Cartman: “It’s like having your cake & eating it too.” Now prequels existed in popular fiction in one form or another since at least the tales of Horatio Hornblower but in cinematic terms, blame for this new trend can largely be placed on George Lucas who found a way to milk Star Wars for a whole new Trilogy of films with just a few loosely defined ideas. He really didn’t need to tell any interesting stories in the Prequels because fans were already going to go regardless on the hopes that Anakin Skywalker would be just as awesome a character as Darth Vader was. (Spoiler: He wasn’t.) The prequels made bank & Hollywood jumped aboard the concept. Hannibal Lecter got not one, but TWO prequels (in a possible first, one of the prequels- Red Dragon– was also a remake of Michael Mann’s Manhunter). Father Merrin got to excise demons in both a Renny Harlin & Paul Schrader flick. Star Trek got to have Scott Bakula as a captain for a whole series & the X-Men franchise got to keep going after having The Last Stand back in 2006. Truthfully, it’s a smart move on Hollywood’s behalf. Hell, I want to see Michael Fassbender fall to the side of evil & James McAvoy hopefully lose his hair in X-Men: First Class! I also want to see Ian McKellan be Gandalf the Grey again in The Hobbit. I love those characters! Thus, Hollywood’s villainous scheme has succeeded. (Note: The Hobbit should work because the original book was written before The Lord of the Rings & is not “officially” a prequel. I just hope they don’t weigh the new films down with too many “Look, there’s Legolas” moments.)
THERE'S LEGOLAS!
A REMAKE ups the ante on a prequel by not even bothering to tell a new story at all. It just has to repeat what already existed without pissing too many people off. Once again, remakes aren’t anything new but in recent years have really taken a hold in popular entertainment. I’d argue the match that lit the remake fire was Gore Verbinski’s well made The Ring (2002). A remake of a 1998 Japanese horror film, Verbinski’s The Ring took the often used horror tropes of another culture, threw an ethnic makeover on everything & was able to come across as a fresh & original work. Even if you had seen the original film, the remake had the charm of being the first of its kind. Verbinski’s The Ring introduced the Western world to the then-unique evil, pasty-faced little ghost girls with long black hair. It also introduced Hollywood execs to the magic of millions in profit to come out of taking a pre-established successful film & turning a Japanese Reiko Asakawa into a Caucasian Rachel Keller. One man was even able to take this simple concept & become an A level producer by repeating this process over & over & over again! Seriously, look up Roy Lee (I) on IMDB. I’ll wait. You back? Ok, so within six years pretty much every recent successful East Asian horror film (whether it was Japanese, Korean, Thai, etc) had been remade with pretty blonde actresses to varying critical & commercial results. Soon enough the trend of pasty-faced-little-girls-with-too-much-hair-scaring-people grew tired but Hollywood had already turned their attention to remaking American horror films. Hence, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003, Dawn of the Dead 2004, Amityville Horror…some year, Nightmare on Elm Street 2010, & far more than I even want to think. If someone online has said it was a good film, it’s been remade it seems. Hell, Rob Zombie got to rape Halloween twice…and it’s not as if the 1978 original hadn’t already been screwed over by some terrible (or TURR-IBLE) sequels. In fact, Hollywood seems determined to remake every film in John Carpenter’s entire body of work by the year 2020. I pity the fool who decides to remake Ghosts of Mars.
Truth that Jason Statham once had hair.
Now sure, some good has come out of this remake madness- they can’t always shoot blanks you know, filmmaking IS hundreds of talented individuals coming together & sometimes the art of filmmaking itself can shine through the bullshit. Some of the previously mentioned remakes don’t suck (namely Texas Chainsaw & Dawn…though neither is as good as the original) & one of the best films of recent years is a flat out, unabashed remake! Roy Lee even helped produce it! Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is a remake of the Chinese gangster flick Infernal Affairs & while I do enjoy the original a fair amount, Scorsese’s flick wipes the floor with it. So it’s not all bad, the great films do shine through the pointless repackaging but it wouldn’t hurt to have more original works. A few more Inception’s in place of a few The Wolfman 2010.
Which brings me to the worst & most shameless of these repackaging techniques. The REBOOT. I mean what the fuck? Can anyone explain to me the difference between a Reboot & a Remake? Even Hollywood doesn’t seem to know at this point anymore. When A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 was coming out the director kept calling it a reboot but forget that, it was Wes Craven’s original just remade with more “gritty realism” (i.e. pedophilia)! To date, I can only think of two flicks that can actually qualify as genuine reboots. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins & Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale. Both film’s reshaped their respect universes so drastically & had storylines so unconnected to the previous films that it made watching the others irrelevant. Aside from Bruce Wayne being a bit of a bore, Nolan’s flick has no connection to Tim Burton’s 1989 flick & Daniel Craig’s first venture as Bond was as far from Die Another Day as you get…. short of Bond being a Chinese asexual midget. Maybe. Those two films took RISKS with their respective franchises. Nolan dropped the comic elements for an adult character story. Campbell dropped the gadgets; world domination plans, & even had Bond NOT FINISH BANGING A CHICK! When did Connery not bone a girl?
Boning is about to commence. Dirty 60s boning
In the end, the risks paid off for both films with Casino Royale being the best Bond film in over 20 years & Batman went on to become The Dark Knight. And Hollywood knows that the audience is aware of that. Hence, when they flat out remake The Pink Panther or Friday the 13th (or The Punisher for the 8th time) they can call it a reboot & you immediately think back to Batman & Bond instead of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho 1998. The term reboot allows them to remake films super fast & most people won’t even complain. You didn’t like Ang Lee’s The Hulk? In 5 years you can see some guy’s The Incredible Hulk! Not a fan of Spiderman 3? Fuck it, we’ve got The Amazing Spider-man (an unofficial remake set to come out one decade after the original)! Didn’t like Yogi Bear? Too bad, it made money. Lots & lots of money.
... Profit?
There’s a lot of reboots in discussion right now. Pretty much any movie that was a success & had one sequel to it’s name, there’s a guy out there saying a bland reboot would be a smart move. Mostly my concern is that most of our tastes in cinema are defined at a young age. The movies that moved & inspired me as a kid were those from the 80s & 90s when mainstream filmmakers were doing original (though still highly commercialized, I mean the product placement in Back to the Future is insane) works. Today, Hollywood seems focused on recapturing that 80s fame through whatever means possible (namely reboots) whether it’s a Wall Street 2, or a Tron 2, a “prequel” to The Thing (hint: it’s an unofficial remake) or a remake of Fright Night! I mean the best looking (& seemingly only) original blockbuster film of the summer, Super 8, still has a distinct 80s vibe to it. We’re in a reboot-enforced remake of the 80s. It just makes me wonder, 20 years from now in the far off year of 2031 will all popular movies be 5-D remakes of blockbusters from our time…. that in turn where sequels/prequels/remakes of blockbusters from the 80s… that in turn were inspired by the media of the 50s, 60s, & 70s…. which means cinema will be…that it has… that … AAAAHHH!
& thus it was over.
(… Wow. First official post on blog was a rambler. I enjoyed the write up & it helped me avoid doing soul-crushing work. I’ll be certain to make them shorter from now.)
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