As many of you know, I am a pop culture and sci-fi fanboy. Like most people that describe themselves as such, I have a list of movies that I feel were I in charge would have been so much better than the tripe hollywood normally shoves down our throat. If I ever wind up with a few million to spend, I may just go and re-make them.
My big pet peeve though, is "adaptations" or the slightly trendier term "re-imaginings".
It's not that I think that the filmmakers somehow set out to make a bad movie, it's just that in most cases it's pretty obvious that the screenwriters and directors of these films have no (if any) filmiliarity with the source material or a firm concept of what made the source material brilliant.
Cases in point (From my list):
Superman Returns (I've thought a lot about this... Bryan Singer let the film fan in him supercede the comic fan. God willing, Sam Rami will never make the same mistake.)
Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes (Which I actually loved... but it totally lacked the hard hitting 'should humanity even be allowed to survive' angst which was at the heart of the original)
The Hulk (Bruce Banner is a tourtured enough soul without having been abused as a child by papa.)
The original "Punisher" Movie (do I need a comment here?)
Batman Forever (warning sign: when the director does an interview saying with a streight face that "Batman shouldn't be dark... who decided that he needs to be all gritty? Whatever happened to the Batusi, anyway?")
The Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick (Which would have been a great monster movie if someone had told the cast that it wasn't a comedy.)
So, now that MTV has reported that the guys writing the new Star Trek movie see it as a 're-imagining of the franchise' I'm more than a little nervous.
4 comments:
Reimagining, indeed.
There are only so many different saddles they can put on the same horse. And it is mostly the same horse, from TOS to Voyager [let us not even aknowledge Enterprise, which was put to sleep it was so bad].
It might work if they reimagine it right; but Hollywood rarely does that. Batman might have gotten more fans if the less-grit-less-antihero-more-sensitive-hero angle was done correctly. But no, we have George Clooney standing there like a wooden stick as if staring at his sexiest man of that year would bring empathy.
It's not going in the direction of the original comic, but it might have worked anyway with better execution.
Dude... there are so many things wrong with that last comment that my head is ready to implode like a neutron star!
1) Enterprise ruled... it was given a sucky time slot, which lead to its downfall.
2)Comic book characters should go in the direction of the comic book by definition. Otherwise, you're purposely denying everything that made the original work brilliant enough that someone thought to make it into a movie. If you don't want a movie about a dark, slightly psychotic anti-hero, then DON'T make it about Batman! Create a new character called "Totally-gayman" that fights rejects from the ice capades in a neon-lit car and wears combat armor with nipples.(None of which was Clooney's fault)
The Dark Knight is so straddling of the line betwixt good and evil that nobody -- least of all Batman -- knows what he might do; only the determination to avenge his parents keeps him fighting the otherwise powerfully enviable criminals [who lord the power of life and death over innocents in a way Bruce Wayne wishes he could do so as to save his parents].
But his methods aren't what good old american Superman would always do, and a movie about that would want to take the comic to a new fan base. Which sounds idiotic (the new fan base wasn't into the comic, then why be into a movie about it). But Fanboys think they can convert people into seeing the comic in a new light. And they make movies to convert the heathens -- heathens who do not know the Way and would embrace it if only they were shown and led before the Altar of Comic Genius that the comicwriter erected.
And why make it about batman anyway? No Alfred, no Batman. The man couldn't even fix his own dinner. The real story is how great Alfred is and inspires the insipid pathetic sod Bruce Wayne out of his patrician lethargy. Make a movie about that, Bryan Singer!
That is why Singer et. al. made the movies they did, and why they made them how they did.
Don’t get me started on my perpetual rant about the proliferation of awful J-horror remakes that have polluted our theaters in recent years. Man, they’re not even remaking anything good anymore. Originally it was The Ring and The Grudge. Ok, fine, they were nothing like the originals but I accept that most of American Society is too dumb to figure out how to watch a movie and read subtitles at the same time. However, when they remake stuff like 2006’s “Pulse” which is a remake of “Kairo” – this movie was done well by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but he has a very slow, deliberate pacing to his movies and they tend to be very atmospheric. Whatever happened here, that atmosphere was lost and the movie turned out…flat. To say the least.
Just because Hollywood can’t manufacture its own creative genius anymore is no reason to go remaking anything and everything that superseded its meager budget. There are so many good independent filmmakers out there with wonderful ideas, but yet they make terrible remakes of movies that weren’t that good to begin with!
Regarding the adaptation nonsense of the comic book variety – I notice that these are so laden with CG that I feel like they might as well just hand over all these projects to Pixar and quit trying to visually manipulate actual people. It just looks so FAKE!
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