It’s apparently an infinitesimally fine line between what material is appropriately classical and worthy of being done over and over again the way theatre plays get repeated, and what is “too soon” or is considered impossible to improve upon. But improvement isn’t exactly the point. It can be enough for a remake to be simply interesting in its differences rather than specifically better. In the case of a movie like Total Recall, the hope is likely to update some of the aesthetic and technological material of the story, and the original Schwarzenegger version was far from a masterpiece, so what’s the harm?
It seems that the fear is that laziness in conceiving a new story will necessitate laziness in the storytelling, and thus a boring, uninspired movie as the result. There are too many exceptions to this idea for it to be a hard and fast rule. Even Man of Steel, for all the flak it has taken, cannot be fairly criticized as dispassionate or uninterested. It has a bit of a new take on what Superman is about, but the idea that this detracts from the Supermen that have already been formed and exist in cultural history is akin to thinking same sex marriage somehow sullies current heterosexual marriages. Likewise, Andrew Garfield’s channeling of Peter Parker is vastly different than Tobey Maguire’s, but the choices he makes, making him a confident but shy teenager still finding his identity, is interesting and entertaining. Even remakes and sequels designed solely to make money do things that are different in terms of spectacle or scale, and this holds merit worth judging on its effectiveness rather than based on prejudice.
Continue reading on the next page…
