The Remake Era in Hollywood Doesn't Have to Be Bad

We live in an age of Hollywood remakes, when every new movie is also old. Consider these recent-release examples of Hollywood reaching to the past for remakes and old names: the remake of a 1980s television show (A-Team), the remake of a 1990s children's Saturday morning puppet show (Land of the Lost), the remake of a 1982 sci-fi classic (Tron).

It is only natural to wonder what other films can be remade and what other films can be followed up with sequels. What back-stock can be re-hashed into a remake?

To get the conversation going, here a few remake and sequel ideas:

Remake: Moby Dick

Herman Melville's tale of Ahab's revenge against a heavily symbolic white whale contains numerous moments suited to film. The made-for-television filmed versions of the famous novel fall short either of budget or of moxie, and don't get the job done.

In today's world, should we really be forced to go another year without a screen depiction of the great white whale being chased across the high-seas by the original monomaniac Captain Ahab?

(As it happens, this dream remake is coming true with a William Hurt/Ethan Hawke version in the works.)

Sequel: Star Wars Episodes 7, 8, 9

The nerd haven we call the Internet has long been abuzz with storylines following the adventures of the Skywalker family in the wake of Return of the Jedi. George Lucas encouraged these stories by granting rights to the novelization of the Skywalker saga to a series of writers in the 1990s.

In those novels, Han Solo and Princess Leia get married. I hope I'm not ruining the big surprise. They have three children, two of them twin Jedi. The youngest and most powerful child is given the name Anakin and he is practically a Jedi while still in vitro.

Lucas set parameters and gave the Star Wars novel writers some firm idea as to where the story of Leia's children should go. And, according to nerd haven legend, the final three episodes of the saga will feature the final balancing of the force as performed by Anakin.

How will this happen? I don't know. I just hope it happens in my lifetime.

"Teaser Trailers" for Star Wars Episode 7.

Remake: The Neverending Story

A movie about the power of reading made during the Reagan years, this film both celebrated the life of the imagination and heralded its doom. Perhaps The Neverending Story is a cheesy movie, but it is a rarely film for its bizarre consistency.

Of the many strengths of The Neverending Story the two that make this worth remaking for today's world are these: 1.) The message is secular. There is no religious undercurrent. The "bad guys" are literally monsters, not thinly veiled ethnic figures. 2.) There are multiple layers of mystery. The Neverending Story does not spell out everything or finish things off neatly. Sebastian's mother's name is still a mystery to me and I've seen this movie thirty times.

Yes, I know, this whole article is a nerd-fest. Thank you for noticing.

Remake: Spartacus

Wait, they have already remade Spartacus. Stanley Kubric's film with Kirk Douglas as actor and producer was a huge hit. Not only that, but Douglas went out on a limb and hired a black-listed writer, Dalton Trumbo, whose harrowing career was far from sure. This was not just a movie. This was a piece of Hollywood history.

Gladiator, with Russell Crowe, stands as a thinly veiled remake of the Kubrick/Douglas classic, and it seems that the television version of Spartacus is more a serialization of Gladiator than it is one of Kubrick's classic.

This is funny to me. I laugh, ha ha.

Remake: Transformers (The Movie)

We are currently mired in a Transformers trilogy, a series of popular films that push the technological envelope while sacrificing narrative cohesion. It's not that Transformers I and II don't make sense. They just don't make enough sense to be good movies.

I am not the only viewer out here who is tired of all the fast-flashing fight scenes that go on for ten minutes at a time without moving the story along. As Bruce Lee showed us with his films, when a fight scene means something to the story, the action can be highly compelling. When the fight is done for the sake of choreography, then the action is just so much dancing. In the case of Transformers, the dance isn't even real. It's computer generated dancing, aka, boring.

Transformers (The Movie), the original 1985 film featuring the voice of Orson Wells, was a movie with a story. The narrative was actually quite good; a traditional epic or hero's quest.

A live-action remake of this intergalactic, story-driven film would bring the effects back down to earth, so to speak.

As a final word, I would like to refer to common knowledge: remakes and sequels almost never capture the wonder, inventiveness, quality and verve as the original. As an art form, it makes sense to continue to seek out new stories and new ways to tell stories.

There is a role and a place for the remake in this creative endeavor. Filmmakers who take on the remakes and the sequels have an opportunity to find a new way to tell an old story. At the risk of being cliché, this effort seems to be at the root of narrative art. It always has been.

Artists and writers continue to tell the same story. We are born. We suffer. We exult in life. We die. Sometimes we fight and have adventures, always with one eye to god.

So, every movie is a remake. Every story is a sequel to the original tale of humanity. We tell what life is, over and over, hoping one day that we will discover a way of telling the story that will give a final insight into what it all means, this living, this life, this exultation and adventure.