At the Movies, to Err is Human -- and to Remake is All Too Common

Movies can serve as a cultural barometer in all sorts of ways. They can tell us things about who we are, where we've been and the lessons we've learned. The selections someone makes in picking out titles for his personal collection can offer insights into his personality and tastes. Of course, a number of people say America no longer has any real culture and point to the fact that movies are a prime form of entertainment -- especially the big, dumb summer movies that now are upon us.

To each his own, of course. Yet if you want to talk about cultural bankruptcy, how about the fact that so many movies nowadays are remakes? Not even good remakes, even when the movie was good the first time around. Or sometimes, not even remakes of movies, but big-screen versions of television shows from years ago. It begs the question of why, in an age when technology has advanced enough to make telling any kind of story possible, when anything one can imagine can be conjured up by the wonders of CGI -- why are there not more original ideas? It's like being blessed with limitless magical powers and then deciding all you want to do is simply pull a rabbit out of a hat over and over again.

I think a big part of it is that studios think people are most comfortable with what is familiar to them -- of course, this amounts to underestimating audiences by assuming that all they want is the same old pap served up with whatever visual or cultural idiom applies to the current generation. Another problem is that it is easy to confuse nostalgia with quality -- or worse, to confuse marketing opportunities with nostalgia.

Were horror film buffs sitting around for years thinking, "I really wish someone would remake The Omen?" Unlikely -- it was a perfectly disturbing little gem back in 1976, and it is hard to recapture the qualities that make horror films work especially since their effectiveness can be tied to what scares people in real life at that particular time. The things that frightened Americans in 1976 are not the same things that give us nightmares today. However, some marketing genius a couple years ago clearly realized that the date of 6/6/06 was too good an opportunity to let pass, and so we got a remake which by most accounts was inferior to the Richard Donner original.

The horror genre is especially vulnerable to remakes, since horror films are usually made cheaper than other movies and, I think, some filmmakers cannot resist the chance to touch a cinematic legend in the hope, however unlikely, that they can actually add to or improve upon it. How else to explain the decision to remake Psycho, an idea almost as crazy as Mother herself? They waited until Alfred Hitchcock died just to broach the idea of sequels, which were bad enough. It's one thing to continue a story; it's another to take the original material and think you can present it better than Hitchcock. (Full disclosure: I have never seen the Psycho remake and don't intend to. Why bother? Artistically, there's nothing to be gained from it and it would just be two hours of my life I'll never get back.)

Some remakes have turned out well. I enjoyed the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead -- simply because it gripped me from the opening 10 minutes, was very suspenseful and well directed and took me on a hell of a ride. Zach Snyder must have realized that he had no hope of competing with George Romero in the arena of social commentary and satire, the things that made the original so great. Instead, he gave us a great popcorn movie, which is perfectly fine. Plus, having the zombies able to run like hell actually made them scarier and more dangerous.

The 1993 movie The Fugitive in some ways improved on the legendary 1960s TV series that inspired it. Audiences in the 1960s had to follow David Janssen for four years before seeing how it all turned out. In 1993, Harrison Ford's adventures on the run were jam-packed into a tense, explosive two hours. The movie works so well that it is easy to forget that it originated from a television series three decades earlier.

How about Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The original came out in 1956, then was remade in 1978, in 1993 and now I believe a new version is on the way with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. The secret here has to be the fact that the pod people can stand in for whatever social fear was afflicting society at the time, and so the tale can take on new resonance for each generation. In the 1950s it was communism, in the 1970s mistrust of government in the wake of Watergate, in the 1990s probably AIDS, and today? Terrorism, most likely.

Then there's "the remake as vanity project" -- witness Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 version of Dracula and Kenneth Branagh's 1994 version of Frankenstein (which stunned me -- people got so upset about Michael Keaton as Batman yet no one saw anything ludicrous about casting Robert De Niro as Frankenstein's monster; I was waiting for him to ask the little girl, "You lookin at me?"). These movies had astronomical budgets with lavish sets, fancy costumes and all kinds of visual effects and slick camerawork, and yet, I'd still take the Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff versions any day of the week. I guess the lesson is that money and big names can't buy quality.

And have you noticed that they never seem to take a bad movie and remake it into a good one? It's usually the opposite. Probably because no studio bigwig would dream of spending money on something that was not a proven hit before. But imagine how much better something like Disney's "The Black Hole" (anybody remember that one?) could be in the hands of someone who actually understands science fiction and the laws of physics. (This was a film in which characters were exposed to the void of outer space without spacesuits yet survived as if nothing had happened.)

In the end, I guess remakes will be with us unless people decide to start voting with their wallets, since that's the only thing that gets the attention of movie producers. But in a nation where the movie industry has been able to thrive like nowhere else in the world, it's a shame.