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I know some of these movies will have their fans, and I am not knocking what they like. However, its pretty obvious when something flops or is rejected by the masses. I am all for stand-alone stories, but when I really like the characters, I want to see more of them: like Jack Sparrow. I'll watch Jack Sparrow antics through 100 movies if they will make them. Just depends on the story and where the characters are left at the end. I would be more than happy to see a sequel to No Country for Old Men to see more Anton, but its okay if I don't too.

However, what I don't understand is how badly movie studios are doing at doing remakes and reboots. The Predator, which I haven't seen yet but concluded would be disappointing and reviews are confirming it, is a prime example, but its not alone. Robocop, Ghostbusters, Red Dawn, Amazing Spiderman, Terminator Genysis, do I dare say The Force Awakens, and there are many others. I don't want to just write these off as simple cash grabs by studios capitalizing on sentimental attachment to classic movies, I think they really want to make a good movie, and in some cases have some pretty big hitters staring in them. Is it just simply rejecting the new actors? Is it current politics seeping into the story? Is it bland story telling? Do they not go farther enough changing the story, or maybe not making it closer to the original? Maybe the times have changed and some stories just don't fit in today's world like they did before? Like Red Dawn (which had a whole host of issues but that's another topic)

Doing remakes isn't easy. The more recent one I can think of where they pulled if off was True Grit. There isn't a crappy acting job in the entire movie, but then, its also a Cohen Brothers film so we can expect that. But I am also surprised they took the project on. What if the Cohen Brothers did the Robocop remake? Can we imagine how that might have turned out? Maybe its the directors? Has the basic recipe for action films just gotten stale? I mean, Fast and Furious seems to defy that. Maybe its just having the right chemistry of actors in a film? Some have it and some don't? You would think that in the case of Ghostbusters, that the talent of staring in that would have knocked it out of the park, but is it because people are still really attached to the original? What if next year they make a remake for Back to the Future? The original is a near perfect film, an absolute classic. I can't for the life of me wonder why anyone would try and remake it. But then, I am surprised they remade Ghostbusters too. Was changing the sex of all the Ghostbuster team seen as too PC? Story too predictable? Maybe not enough time between films? Maybe some are too soon. There was quite a lot of time between the original True Grit and the remake, to the point many may not have even known about the original starting The Duke.

I guess there could be many different reasons why each would fail yet they all have something in common: they are all taking from the original. And in many cases, the remake is not superior to the original even with better effects and more likely a diverse cast, so you might think in this PC world they are doing everything right. Maybe not dotting all those Is and crossing all those Ts matters.

I also find that most of the time, I just flat out reject the remake/reboot out right. Like with Robocop. I took one look at the new Robocop costume with the exposed human hand as was like, nope, moving on.

What do you think? Are there any similarities?

Number one reason is that people always remeber the orginal as better than it was. There's this polished sheen of nostalgia over things (and sometimes a ton of extended universe content as well).

Worse, people feel that their 'fandom' is disrespected if the reboot/remake doesn't contain every minor detail of the previous version, even if they themselves wouldn't sit though the resulting film/series without being bored out of their minds.

Star Wars fans always forget the huge plot holes in the first three episodes, Star Trek fans fight endless forum wars over which version from their childhood is better than the version from someone else childhood. The Death Note fans wanted to see a 40+hour seasonal show turned into a 2 hour movie with no loss of content. The Last Airbender fans - well they wanted the original season's content plus a bunch of fantheory stuff put into a 3 hour film that no one would have bothered to watch.

Older fans don't want change. They want people to enjoy things exactly as they did. Just look at all the WHFB fans that hate on AOS fans or spend five minutes in a LOTR forum thread in which someone mentions the hobbit movies.

Robocop is a pretty good example. I re-watched the original movie and it's a terrible movie full of flimsy political statements and plot holes you could drop a small starship through. It never aimed at being anything other than a quick, explosive ridden romp. The problem is that people remeber the slightly better TV show and then get surprised when the movie can't replicate the plot developments of the multi-hour show. It was never a reboot of the TV Show, it was a reboot of the movie - and a decent one at that.

Before I sound too high-horse I experience the same thing with the Crow and Highlander movies. I remember tham being such great epics, but occasionally I rewatch them and get reminded of the terrible campiness of the movies. Even the TV show is worse than I remember.

I agree that there tends to be a lot of "rose colored glasses" view with many films. . .

Star Trek is a prime example. . . people LOVE TOS, TNG, and DS9, and for decent reason. Many people hate Discovery, while many others (myself included) love it. People want to argue that its not "real" Trek because of how they are portraying the Klingon War. . . I mean, while I'm not the biggest uber-fan of Trek, even I know that the Klingon War was pretty approximate in scale to WW2, a sort of all hands existential type of conflict. And, personally, I think a war should be portrayed differently than a Picard negotiation and villain/monster of the week type episode, especially when its as large scale as the Klingon War. Those of us who have been in combat know that war isn't clean.


Many films that are ultimately rebooted are very much rooted in the time they were first made. . . the Stallone Judge Dredd film worked because its commentary was rooted squarely in the 90s. Robocop worked because it resonated in its time in the 80s, etc. In the post-2000s, we don't have the levels of gang violence or cold war paranoia of those films, and so for their reboots to work, they need to attempt to fix on some aspect of today that will resonate with movie-viewers. And I am specifically using terms like commentary, because film has always provided a lense into the state or direction of our society. For a prime example of what I'm talking about, check out the documentary Reel Injun, many film makers didn't even realize that they were making statements on society in the day they were making their films, although some (like those who made Dredd/Robocop) most certainly do know they are making some kind of statement. So, in short. . . I think many remakes "suck" because the resonance isn't there. The problems of the 80s and 90s arent the problems of the 2010s and 00s.

2019 is going to be bad. It's almost all sequels or remakes.

Remakes are pretty low effort, high reward prospects for studios. They're rarely made with the kind of passion you see from someone that did whatever they could to make their movie happen.

Member movies are almost never great.

Everything the OP stated is spot on, another reason is that often the original movies being good at the time was just dumb luck. The right actors, with the right directors and producers at just the right time. It's not so much the story/plot/universe that was good as a combination of so many different things that the chances of replicating it again are near 0.

ChargerIIC wrote:people feel that their 'fandom' is disrespected if the reboot/remake doesn't contain every minor detail of the previous version

I agree. One of the biggest issues I hear about remakes, and a lot of book adaptations, is that they weren't true enough to the original.

While I understand people being passionate about the things they love, a remake doesn't wipe the original out of existence so I don't get why some fans get so angry at remakes. If you don't like a remake, just stick with the original.

I'm a huge fan of Robocop, Total Recall and Clash of the Titans and watch all of them at least a couple of times a year, but I still enjoyed the remakes. They weren't as good as the originals in my opinion but they were still fun to watch.

vonjankmon wrote:another reason is that often the original movies being good at the time was just dumb luck

Again I agree. To use Robocop as an example again, if the new Neill Blomkamp Robocop remake goes ahead and has the crazy violence of the original (something that a lot of people wanted in the first remake), I imagine a lot of fans will still hate it because Blomkamp has a completely different directing style to Paul Verhoeven and different writers will have different ideas about what made the first film work. It doesn't mean it will be bad though.

 LunarSol wrote:
Remakes are pretty low effort, high reward prospects for studios.

And, of course.... they totally, totally work. Everyone hated Ghostbusters (2016), right? Well, it made $230 million on a $130 million budget. The Robocop remake cost $100 million and brought in $242 million.

Why take chances on an unknown movie when a reboot or remake comes with a baked in audience? Even better, let's remake that movie, and since we're risk-averse, let's cheap out on it, too!

Every time they get burned, they're less willing to take risks. Why would a risk-averse studio bank on making Children of Men and losing $6 million when you can throw out another Underworld and make $60 million?

Personally, I much prefer it when reboots borrow as little as possible from the originals as they can. When Disney announced that they were making a new Star Wars, I desperately hoped that they were going to leave the original cast alone, go a few decades into the future with only a few, if any, references to the Galactic Civil War. New faces, no Skywalkers, a totally fresh start. The expanded universe was full of trash but it had quite a few gems that showed the potential for other stories in that setting, and instead of exploring that we got a remake of A New Hope.

I feel that very few people actually think like that though. I must be the only person in the universe who actually liked Prometheus, because it was set in the Aliens universe but did something entirely different with it. That question of 'why are we here? where do we come from?' is, to my mind, a powerful theme and isn't present at all in the earlier Alien films. I liked the boldness to go there, to not just do another film about xenomorphs. It was a lot more creative than just throwing the monster into yet another environment, and I wish more reboots/remakes had the balls to do that kinda thing.

Just my 2 cents.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

I feel that very few people actually think like that though. I must be the only person in the universe who actually liked Prometheus, because it was set in the Aliens universe but did something entirely different with it. That question of 'why are we here? where do we come from?' is, to my mind, a powerful theme and isn't present at all in the earlier Alien films. I liked the boldness to go there, to not just do another film about xenomorphs. It was a lot more creative than just throwing the monster into yet another environment, and I wish more reboots/remakes had the balls to do that kinda thing.

I also really like Prometheus, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Covenant. Are there issues with them, plot holes a mile wide? Of course there are. I mean, an issue thats fairly common in many monster movies today is the lack of suspense. . . It used to be, you didn't get a full view of the big bad until the final climactic scene, if at all, whereas many modern films give away the goods fairly early on. That said, I am not sold on the idea that either Prometheus or Covenant were designed to be sold on the monster jump factor, they were more designed on the cerebral level, as mentioned the "why are we here" questions (the debate on whether they succeed on that level of thought is an entirely different discussion tho)

I liked Prometheus a little more after Covenant came out. It actually made it a bit more of a cohesive narrative arc.

That being said, Prometheus still had some pretty significant problems that we can't simply wave away as a dedicated fanbase being upset that they're doing something new. Seeing ostensibly smart people doing inexplicably stupid stuff over and over again has a way of breaking immersion, and that was merely one of the many problems that movie had.

If nothing else Prometheus was beautifully shot and looks wonderful in 3D. Still not sure how to feel about Covenant. The mad scientist idea was interesting but in the end I think I prefer the xenomorphs to be a bit more mysterious.

 Ouze wrote:
Seeing ostensibly smart people doing inexplicably stupid stuff over and over again has a way of breaking immersion, and that was merely one of the many problems that movie had.

I've never understood this criticism. People doing stupid gak is a long established trope in the horror and monster genres, and while Prometheus doesn't really fit into either of those it skirts pretty damn close. I'm not saying people are wrong to point out that the characters do stupid things, I just don't understand why it's such an issue when films like this have relied on their characters doing dumb gak for years. It's just par for the course.

Well, for sure there’s a snobbishness about movies that other mediums don’t seem to have.

Quite why, I’m not sure. But consider theatre. Nobody complains about a new adaptation of say, The Taming of the Shrew, yet there are adaptations held in highest esteem.

Compare to Robocop. The first is a stone cold classic for good reason. The remake? It takes the central premise in an interesting new way, rather than attempt to simply excise the camp and the 80’s from the original.

Now the remake doesn’t quite work. But it was subjected to a certain criticism as soon as it was announced. And that’s what I’m meaning by the snobbishness.

There are remakes which people tend to forget are remakes, such as The Thing and The Fly, because they’re just damned good films.

Yet if we applied my alleged snobbishness to them? They’re somewhat different to the originals, with levels of gore and effects the originals completely lacked. They’re darker and grittier, because standards and what’s actually allowed on screen has shifted over the years.

Take Ghostbusters: Answer the call. Now I dunno what others were watching, but what I saw was a good laugh, and certainly without ‘I just wasted money’. It’s not as classic as the original, but it still stands on its own two feet well enough. Now the criticism of that was completely Radio Rental in some quarters. Bizarre little man babies claiming that an all female cast somehow betrayed and destroyed their childhood, leading equally bizarre attempts to slate the movie for the same reasons.

As to ‘why so many remakes’, that’s not necessarily studio greed, but them retaining the rights to the series going forwards. Consider Hellraiser. I’ve got the first nine, and am yet to see the tenth. They do of course get progressively crappy - but then they’re not there to reinvent the genre, just to retain the rights. Make them cheaply enough (and didn’t they just), and it can be relatively easy to turn a profit, or end up with a deliberate tax write-off. And don’t forget, keeping hold of the rights doesn’t mean you’re actually planning a big budget remount or remake. It can means you just don’t want any other studio getting a slice of that particular pie.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Seeing ostensibly smart people doing inexplicably stupid stuff over and over again has a way of breaking immersion, and that was merely one of the many problems that movie had.

I've never understood this criticism. People doing stupid gak is a long established trope in the horror and monster genres, and while Prometheus doesn't really fit into either of those it skirts pretty damn close. I'm not saying people are wrong to point out that the characters do stupid things, I just don't understand why it's such an issue when films like this have relied on their characters doing dumb gak for years. It's just par for the course.

Because the original films largely avoided the trap of needing people to do stupid gak to make the plot happen.

Let's look at the original Alien, for example.

Nostromo picks up beacon signal and goes to investigate, as required by their contract.
Evac team investigates signal source and one is exposed to alien organism after falling into egg storage chamber.
Science officer ignores warrant officer and breaks quarantine procedure (as per his secret instructions to bring the alien back).
Attempt is made to remove alien organism, however implantation of alien embryo has already occurred. Removal is unsuccessful.
Alien is born and escapes.
Attempt is made to capture alien, however it has grown to full size and kills member of crew. Crew realises it is using the ducts to move through the ship.
Plan to flush the alien into airlock and blow it into space, using fire to flush it out of the ducts. Unsuccessful and captain dies in attempt. Going to reattempt after warrant officer discusses with MOTHER.
Discussion with MOTHER reveals secret orders to return alien. Science officer revealed as android and is killed.
Plan to self destruct ship and leave in escape pod.
Two other crew members killed whilst preparing equipment for escape pod.
Self destruct initiated and warrant officer boards escape pod.
Alien is revealed to be in pod but is blown into space.

The only "person does stupid gak" in there is Ash letting the alien into the ship and breaking quarantine, which is later revealed to not be him doing stupid gak but him actually following his orders to bring the alien back.

In contrast, Covenant has people walking off into a completely unknown alien planet with no precautions to prevent contamination. Whereas the contamination being brought onto the ship in Alien was the result of someone knowingly doing so, in Covenant it was the result of multiple instances of alien contamination not even being considered by a group of people landing on a completely alien planet.

Ok, One: soft reboots are not reboots. These terminator, star wars, and predator type movies are still narratively connected. That said, outside of that narrative thread they have alot of the same connective tissue reboots have and...

Two: reboots, sequels, prequels, reimaginings, lost chapters, and everything else that latches onto a beloved property is trash. They are trash by their very nature and are only ever not trash when forces beyond anyone's control or notice conspire to make them not trash.

It's not because people are too PC, any more than its because people are racist or sexist or millennial, it's because they're a product of a cynical notion the studios have; that they can guarantee a degree of success by riding the coattails of something that's already been successful.

Making a movie incurs risks. Some of these risks are mitigated by the effort people put in, but others aren't. In theory, a sequel or remake to a successful property mitigates some of the latter risks: the setting or characters or something about the story have captured the imaginations of a fickle public consciousness. Studios like to believe that it can mitigate some of those other, effort related risks too: that we don't have to hire back an expensive actor and can just kill them off-screen in a spaceship crash, that we can fire a politically opinionated director and replace him with someone who'll do what the studio wants without question, that we can replace the soundtrack with foley muzak and it's still good because X, Y, or Z superficial resemblance still exists and that will sell movie tickets.

Robocop (which I love!) is a B-movie story about an American Jesus rising from the dead, walking on water and gunning down his enemies, but it somehow (quite accidentally according to the director's commentary) also had this heartfelt sympathy for good cops, corporate middle-men and other folk often hated in 80s media. If the studios cared about it as much as they cared about the Robocop remake all of that really good stuff would have been cut, scraped, excised, revised to make it safe. And in so doing would neuter it completely.

The Robocop remake has kernels of its own miraculously good story sprinkled throughout. There's this notion of loss, being reduced as a person, first by the injury and then by the corporate masters pulling his strings. But it all gets pulled back because it needs to be safe: we can't make the corporation be too bad, we have products to place! We should throw in an 'I'd by that for a dollar' reference! We shouldn't let the audience walk away from the movie feeling too sad about amputees.

Movies that capture the imagination, that can be bankable franchises come about because of a courage born from low stakes. When the stakes go up that courage evaporates, and you're left with garbage.

Some are good some are bad- its all subjective anyway

Looking at recent remakes: (IMO)

Jurasic World - fantastic film, as good as the best in the original series vs

Star Wars: Fun opening film then a truely awful film in the Last Jedi which fails in every respect - terrible characters, poor story telling, shockingly bad pace, dull. It does nothing well.

Star Trek - have really enjoyed every one of them so far.

ST Discovery - dito - really enjoyed it all - except for the pointless reforging of the kingon appreance but thats not something that detracts from how well is done

Lost in Space - loved the last fim, love the new series.

King Kond: Skull Island, the 1930's filsm is great, the Jack Black one is a loving homage to it - the most recent one is a brilliant fun film vs
Godzilla - badly written film with terrible characters and a Godzilla who is too shy to appear on scean.

Aliens: Prometheus - oh dear its bad, from the laughable stupid crew to the poor plot - its just bad
Convenet salvages quiet a bit - its not as good as Alien or Aliens but its well worht a watch.

Predators - loved it - great stock characters that get on with a predictable but most enjoyable story.

New Bladerunner - beautifully made but too long.

Some remakes work, some don't - doing so is neihter good or bad and its down to the audience to decide if its good or not.

Design by committee

Many of the classics are the vision of one or a handful of people, and have a solid and consistent tone

A lot of the shakier redo's appear to gak at a wall and hope enough sticks to cover the cracks

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Because the original films largely avoided the trap of needing people to do stupid gak to make the plot happen.

Let's look at the original Alien, for example.

Nostromo picks up beacon signal and goes to investigate, as required by their contract.
Evac team investigates signal source and one is exposed to alien organism after falling into egg storage chamber.
Science officer ignores warrant officer and breaks quarantine procedure (as per his secret instructions to bring the alien back).
Attempt is made to remove alien organism, however implantation of alien embryo has already occurred. Removal is unsuccessful.
Alien is born and escapes.
Attempt is made to capture alien, however it has grown to full size and kills member of crew. Crew realises it is using the ducts to move through the ship.
Plan to flush the alien into airlock and blow it into space, using fire to flush it out of the ducts. Unsuccessful and captain dies in attempt. Going to reattempt after warrant officer discusses with MOTHER.
Discussion with MOTHER reveals secret orders to return alien. Science officer revealed as android and is killed.
Plan to self destruct ship and leave in escape pod.
Two other crew members killed whilst preparing equipment for escape pod.
Self destruct initiated and warrant officer boards escape pod.
Alien is revealed to be in pod but is blown into space.

The only "person does stupid gak" in there is Ash letting the alien into the ship and breaking quarantine, which is later revealed to not be him doing stupid gak but him actually following his orders to bring the alien back.

In contrast, Covenant has people walking off into a completely unknown alien planet with no precautions to prevent contamination. Whereas the contamination being brought onto the ship in Alien was the result of someone knowingly doing so, in Covenant it was the result of multiple instances of alien contamination not even being considered by a group of people landing on a completely alien planet.

I wonder if then, the reboots lose some legitimacy then, when the audience doesn't buy into it like they had in the earlier version. While I admit parts of Robocop (1 mind you, the sequels were trash too), maybe be hard to watch by today's standards, but everything from the voice, armor, etc, isn't just awesome, but like others mentioned in some other movies above, might reflect what we thought was cool at the time. The newer Robocop to me was sleaker, and looked silly on a motorcycle, but to a younger fan maybe they thought that was cool. I just looked at the design and saw an armored body but exposed hand and just thought, 'at least put a glove on or something'. Whats the point of the armor on his arm? The design lost its legitimacy and I just couldn't buy into the rest.

The same applies to Red Dawn. I LOVE THE ORIGINAL. When I was a kid, I thought I would do the exact same thing those guys did. I was totally ready for a Russian invasion as a kid lol. That movie influenced play time with GI Joe, Star Wars, etc. The movie for me went far beyond than just the 2 hours I spent watching it. Was the plot improbable? Probably. But I thought it was still mostly done with a sense of realism and I appreciated that. I felt just about everything in it was somewhat believable except for the gun battle at the end.

Now the remake, right out of the gate, lost me the minute they decided to change the invasion from being a Chinese one, to a North Korean one, just so they wouldn't offend the chinese (true fact). A threat of millions of Chinese invading is far more probable (even if unlikely) than a North Korean one, who can barely feed their own people. Now, knowing it was in the peak of the Cold War and the Russians were the bad guys and all that, I could buy into the original. But North Korea now? Give me a break. It wouldn't matter what others said about it I feel like I already have seen the perfect Red Dawn. And when I did get around to seeing bits of it on tv, I was glad I didn't pay any money to see it. Even if they left the Chinese in it. But, we live in a different world today too. I am not sure we could have one of the Wolverine shoot a North Korean prisoner. Did they? I don't even know. But back then? Things were grittier. Maybe I am a product of my time.

I think the reason is much more simple.

Reboots are often huge-budget attempts by a studio to cash in on nostalgia. The more money and the larger the effort the more intrusion the studio has (down to selecting a director who may have zero interest in the property but is contractually obliged to do X number of films for the studio, etc.). There is no passion, no genuine interest other than the occasional lip-service paid to fans. Rarely you'll have a director or actors who are passionate about being in the remake but not often.

New films with new stories (which some of these classic films were) are not based on a nostalgia-driven-cash-grab. They were good based on their own merit. Often featuring actors/actresses who became famous but perhaps weren't at the time, or were passion projects by directors or writers, etc. A lot of our favourite old films were commercially "meh" with regards to sales and success but became more heavily appreciated after the fact. ALIEN for instance was a pretty small budget film with a cast who disliked eachother immensely in some instances, etc. But it was slightly more "true" film making than a modern CGI-laden remake or expansion of the original story.

You see the same thing with cars. A lot of the most famous cars or models became famous based on merit, and then the name/concept is dragged through the mud for 30-40 years after its original inception, just cashing in on the name (rarely does a successor measure up to the original). It's a very successful business strategy.

 vonjankmon wrote:
Everything the OP stated is spot on, another reason is that often the original movies being good at the time was just dumb luck. The right actors, with the right directors and producers at just the right time. It's not so much the story/plot/universe that was good as a combination of so many different things that the chances of replicating it again are near 0.

Mostly this.
Ghostbusters is always the best example. Aykroyd's...uh... overwhelming passion for the subject played really well off of Bill Murray's indifference (which also fit Venkman's character), and Reitman and Ramis seemed focused and dedicated to getting things right.

The new one was just a muddled mess of improv and props with no coherent thought behind it beyond 'cash in,' and the end took far too many cues from superhero movies and digital FX and nothing about a character focused story supported by a knowledge of the subject.

KTG17 wrote:
The same applies to Red Dawn. I LOVE THE ORIGINAL. When I was a kid, I thought I would do the exact same thing those guys did. I was totally ready for a Russian invasion as a kid lol. That movie influenced play time with GI Joe, Star Wars, etc. The movie for me went far beyond than just the 2 hours I spent watching it. Was the plot improbable? Probably. But I thought it was still mostly done with a sense of realism and I appreciated that. I felt just about everything in it was somewhat believable except for the gun battle at the end.

Now the remake, right out of the gate, lost me the minute they decided to change the invasion from being a Chinese one, to a North Korean one, just so they wouldn't offend the chinese (true fact). A threat of millions of Chinese invading is far more probable (even if unlikely) than a North Korean one, who can barely feed their own people. Now, knowing it was in the peak of the Cold War and the Russians were the bad guys and all that, I could buy into the original. But North Korea now? Give me a break. It wouldn't matter what others said about it I feel like I already have seen the perfect Red Dawn. And when I did get around to seeing bits of it on tv, I was glad I didn't pay any money to see it. Even if they left the Chinese in it. But, we live in a different world today too. I am not sure we could have one of the Wolverine shoot a North Korean prisoner. Did they? I don't even know. But back then? Things were grittier. Maybe I am a product of my time.

Right there with you. It helps that my family was stationed in Germany during the 1980s, and I remember eavesdropping as a kid on a conversation between the battalion's company commanders during a party. They were matter-of-fact talking about the idea that the NATO forces in Germany would definitely lose if the Soviets invaded, and be pushed back to France, if not further. The real question was whether they'd buy enough time for the families to be evacuated. That sort of thing rather reinforced the idea of the Soviets being a real threat, even close to the end.
That fed well into the overall tone of the times that the Cold War could flare up at any moment, and the 'red menace' was very real and present in media. It certainly made Red Dawn slightly silly but with enough verisimilitude to buy into.

North Korea? An invasion just isn't possible. Sporadic assassinations, chemical and possibly nuclear attacks (assuming they don't blow up their own launch sites trying)? Yeah, they could cause problems. But invasion is just utterly ridiculous.

In my experience remakes are generally no better or worse than anything else. They just come with impossible baggage. If you change the content it’s a shameless cash grab that ruined someone’s childhood and they now want to eat your babies. If you change nothing it’s a shameless cash grab that ruined someone’s childhood and they now want to launch your babies from a catapult.

The honest truth is that fans as a group are inherently unappeasable and will complain about anything.

And remakes are just shameless cash grabs most of the time

Edit oh and I loved the Red Dawn remake. Best comedy of the year. A thrilling and soul biting satire of American foreign policy summed up in one clusterfeth of cliches bad acting and a complete lack of self-aware hypocrisy. The irony of the ending scene in particular was just wonderful

Remakes suck because we only remember them as remakes if they suck (generally anyway, as has been mentioned above with The Thing and The Fly)

again nostalgia helps smooth the rough edged of stuff we saw ages ago so a film we quite enjoyed edges closer to great, the remake doesn't have this benefit, and suffers a bit from 'why did they have to spoil this' at the same time

Studios tend to pick on successful and therefore popular films to remake (eg 70/100) so to an extent there is more chance for them to be worse (1-69) than there is to be better(71-100)

A lot of films depend on catching the zeitgeist of the moment, so a close remake will miss since it's aiming at yesterdays moment (and unless they're lucky if they deviate too far from the original the older element of the audience will hate it because it's not the film they rememeber)

 creeping-deth87 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Seeing ostensibly smart people doing inexplicably stupid stuff over and over again has a way of breaking immersion, and that was merely one of the many problems that movie had.

I've never understood this criticism. People doing stupid gak is a long established trope in the horror and monster genres, and while Prometheus doesn't really fit into either of those it skirts pretty damn close. I'm not saying people are wrong to point out that the characters do stupid things, I just don't understand why it's such an issue when films like this have relied on their characters doing dumb gak for years. It's just par for the course.

People doing stupid things is a long established trope of human history. The real problem is the audience thinking themselves to be super capable and better than the characters in the movie. If put in the same circumstance, with the same information as the characters they might just behave the same way.

 Crimson Devil wrote:
People doing stupid things is a long established trope of human history. The real problem is the audience thinking themselves to be super capable and better than the characters in the movie. If put in the same circumstance, with the same information as the characters they might just behave the same way.

I gotta be honest, I don't think there are many lay people who would, on an alien planet, encounter a weird alien snake that is hissing and swaying menacingly, and would decide to just get right up into kissing distance and give it a few pokes with their hand.

Eh, reboots can be good or bad. Sometimes it works like John Carpenter's The Thing, or Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Batman: The Animated Series. Recently, the Netflix Voltron series has been great.

It just takes the artist finding a spark of something in the material and a wish to make something new.

 Ouze wrote:

 Crimson Devil wrote:
People doing stupid things is a long established trope of human history. The real problem is the audience thinking themselves to be super capable and better than the characters in the movie. If put in the same circumstance, with the same information as the characters they might just behave the same way.

I gotta be honest, I don't think there are many lay people who would, on an alien planet, encounter a weird alien snake that is hissing and swaying menacingly, and would decide to just get right up into kissing distance and give it a few pokes with their hand.

The people who saw a snake and walked away are not the kind of people stories get told about.

 Crimson Devil wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Crimson Devil wrote:
People doing stupid things is a long established trope of human history. The real problem is the audience thinking themselves to be super capable and better than the characters in the movie. If put in the same circumstance, with the same information as the characters they might just behave the same way.

I gotta be honest, I don't think there are many lay people who would, on an alien planet, encounter a weird alien snake that is hissing and swaying menacingly, and would decide to just get right up into kissing distance and give it a few pokes with their hand.

The people who saw a snake and walked away are not the kind of people stories get told about.

True. We do tend to tell more stories about the idiots either being killed by their stupidity, or the idiots somehow surviving their stupidity, than we tell stories about smart people doing the smart thing.

I think that any remake that fails suffers from the mistake of losing the SPIRIT of the original. Take Enemy Mine, for instance. If rumor is to be believed, at least one proposal was shot down viciously to remake that movie. There is so much in that movie that you'd have to nail to get the spirit of it right. Even a movie like Krull isn't easy to nail down.

Granted, some would be easier than others. It'd be simplicity to remake Escape From New York, because getting the spirit right takes very little effort.

All in all, I will give remakes opportunity to prove me wrong on this, and AbramsTrek did exactly that. Not many remakes do, but that one did.



Also, is it wrong that I think Amazing Spider-Man was better than any other film in the franchise?