Anghus Houvouras on the problem with remaking good movies….
Lamenting about the woeful lack of originality in Hollywood is hardly novel. Much like the politics or religion, it’s a topic that gets discussed often but rarely comes to any real resolution. I’ve said it a dozen times in a dozen columns:
Hollywood studios are averse to risk. They will always finance the familiar rather than risk resources on something original.
For the most part, I’m mildly irritated by the deluge of remakes and re-imaginings that clutter the cinematic landscape, but for the most part it’s harmless. When Hollywood trots out Brad Pitt and George Clooney in a remake of Oceans 11 many cinephiles roll their eyes, but there isn’t a huge swell of indignation simply because the movie isn’t a cultural staple or a well loved classic. It is simply a thing that existed and has some level of recognition and is repackaged for a new era of film fans. Soderbergh himself said that while he loved the idea of a star studded caper film, he was not a big fan of the Rat Pack original. So while the core concept might be lazy, there’s still a goal of improving upon the source material. To deliver audiences a better (or unique) version of the same story. I suppose if you’re going to be a re-make apologist, that is your best case scenario.
Film fans will use a handful of examples to defend re-making good movies. John Carpenter’s The Thing is always a popular example among hardcore movie geeks. Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead gets mentioned a lot in these discussions. Personally, I enjoyed last year’s Evil Dead reboot. No one’s saying these remakes and re-imaginings don’t have any entertainment value. Certainly there is. But for the sake of digging deeper we have to break the argument down into some more basic components.
I’m not going to waste any time discussing the merits of the end product. I have no interest in engaging in a tired debate where someone lists off successful remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings and instead focus on the core of the problem:
Creating a remix culture.
We’re currently living in a remix culture. A society where our art, music, film, and television is often a remixed version of a pre-existing property. Music is the most obvious example of this, where hip-hop and pop artists sample a record, change the timing, add some flair, and call it their own. At one point it was kind of subtle, with the artist taking a beat or a small sample and reworking it. Nowadays you have people taking entire hooks and singing over them. Before digital production techniques became all the rage, musicians just kind of ‘borrowed’ things from others and if they borrowed too heavily they ended up in court. You had all the blues and rock-n-roll musicians of the 1950’s claiming Elvis had stolen their entire shtick outright. Back then it was a guitar riff or a beat that might not have been widely known. Today, Kanye West can take Curtis Mayfield’s “Move on Up”, change the tempo, throw down 16 bars on top of it, and call it his own song. The remix culture isn’t just about simply borrowing elements anymore. Like the Kanye West example, it’s about wholesale thievery of a pre-existing idea and putting your own stamp on it. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so they say. And trust me when I say I have no interest in getting into the entire history of homage. However, there is a pattern forming across all artistic mediums showing that we’re becoming all too comfortable with remixed versions of the familiar.
This week sees the release of the new RoboCop remake, a film that at best is passable and at worst completely pointless. The original RoboCop is considered to be a classic. A film that perfectly captures the violent R-rated action films of an era, and a movie that works in a lot of satire thanks to the ghoulish mind of Paul Verhoven. It was a movie that worked as entertainment first and social satire second. When I was young and snuck in to see RoboCop, it was because I loved the idea of a cybernetic cop action movie. I loved the premise, the action, and the hilarious over the top antics of the villains. As I got older, I started to appreciate the movie on other levels. The things that 12 year old me didn’t quite have the maturity to understand. RoboCop was a great movie because it worked on more than one level.
The RoboCop remake is the most salient example, to me, of what is inherently wrong with our remix culture. So many of these remakes are spawned from the creators inner child. Allow me to explain. The new RoboCop is chock full of the stuff that 12 year old me would have loved, but that the adult version finds kind of boring. The inception phase of these remakes is coming from the ‘cool’ factor of a filmmakers’ inner child, channeling what they loved about the property when they first saw it. We’re only getting one level. The filmmakers is changing the tempo and putting some polish on it, but aesthetically it never achieves the same connection as the original.
The remix culture is a permanent fixture of our creative culture and looks like it’s not going anywhere. We already got Marc Webb’s remixed version of Spider-Man and Bryan Singer is back in remix mode taking his original X-Men and adding in some samples of Matthew Vaughn’s retooled X-Men: First Class. Every major franchise will at some point require a remix, stripping down parts and pieces of the original and reconstructing it into something different.
The problem with remaking (or remixing) good movies is the reality that the finished product will never exceed the quality of the original and will more likely pale in comparison to the original.
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Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published February 13, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
