Home Entertainment The Ben-Hur reboot will be something new

The Ben-Hur reboot will be something new

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Last week I posted about the new Ben-Hur movie and that taking up the lead role of Judah Ben-Hur would be Jack Huston of Boardwalk Empire fame. Some more information has come out of an interview from ComingSoon.net who spoke to Academy award winning screenwriter John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) about his treatment of the 1959 movie. Of course remakes are quite a common thing these days and each treatment is open to a new potentially more contemporary feel so what can we expect from the update? Well the new MGM and Paramount production is said to follow some of the elements of the original but with a very new take on the main character, one that brings the original emotions to a new audience. The screen writer himself says:

“It’s going to be different in the sense that the original writer Keith Clarke wrote an amazing script and then went back to the Lew Wallace novel and really excavated the relationship between the two main characters, Ben-Hur and Messala,” Ridley told us. “It’s interesting to a degree. It’s kind of like going after Jimi Hendrix, because there are things about the 1959 movie that we think we remember, there are things that really happened, including obviously the chariot race, so it’s going to be different in the sense that we’re not really trying to completely chase the movie people remember but there are elements of that movie: the heart of the film, the emotional drive of the film that we want to try to bring to a whole new audience. I think it’s an interesting project. It’s certainly challenging. It’s certainly one that people are going to come into with expectations, but like anything you do, you gotta exceed those expectations to a degree and also not worry about them because at its core, we hope and believe that we’ve got something that’s unique.”

Director Timur Bekmambetov’s last movie was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and was pretty fun so could he be remaking Ben Hur into something similar? Not sure how I would feel about that. The classis is, well, a classic. Making it into a new Fast and the Furious may be a rather risky move! What do you think? A Ben Hur chariot scene with nitro?

Jack Huston will star alongside Morgan Freeman (who plays Ildarin – the man who trains Beh-Hur to chariot race) and the studios are in talks with Toby Kebbell (Dawn of Planet of the Apes) to play Ben-Hur’s friend turned foe Messala.

Last Updated: September 23, 2014

One Comment

  1. Oh dear. It’s a historical epic, please don’t stupid it up in your quest to be unique. Honestly, who really remembers the original movie anyway? I don’t, and I watched it every time SABC had it on.

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