Home Entertainment Midweek Movie Mouth-Off: Hollywood remakes aren't all bad

Midweek Movie Mouth-Off: Hollywood remakes aren't all bad

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The potential remake of The Crow has been suffering. With production delays, no starting date and now, the loss of its main star, its basically dead in the water again. Which of course has led most people to say “well why don’t they just leave it alone? We don’t need another remake!”

Well, that’s the thing. Don’t we? You might say that modern Hollywood has no original ideas left, and all remakes are inexcusably terrible (here’s looking at you, Michael Bay and your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). But, knee-jerk reactions aside, Hollywood has actually been doing remakes for just about as long as there have been movies, and they haven’t necessarily been a bad thing. There have been excellent remakes on older movies, like The Departed, Ocean’s Eleven, John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Fly and Casino Royale, among others. Done right, a movie brought into modern times, with updates in the technology used both on screen and in production, can bring a story to a whole new audience that may never have bothered with the original.

For example, wouldn’t you love to see an updated version of Blade Runner? We’ve had so many advances in technology that a sci-fi movie about off-world colonies and androids seems really silly when they’re using payphones and the internet doesn’t exist.

Like it or not, Hollywood and remakes are inextricably linked. So seeing as we’re going to have to live with them, what classic movie would you like to see done again?

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Critical Hit as an organisation.

Last Updated: January 28, 2015

6 Comments

  1. Kervyn Cloete

    January 28, 2015 at 11:27

    I liked the Robocop reboot*. There, I said it!

    *it definitely is not on the level of Verhoeven’s original classic, but it brought it’s own very interesting ideas to the table. I appreciated that they actually put quite a bit of thought into how a modern-day Robocop would actually work, and what the implications – moral and physical – would be.

    Reply

    • James Francis

      January 28, 2015 at 12:20

      I’m halfway to agree with you. I think it could have been a very interesting and different movie, then someone screwed it up. Some movies have almost nothing and become wonderful, others have everything and then run onto a wall.

      Reply

      • Kervyn Cloete

        January 28, 2015 at 12:26

        I thought the ending was undercooked and some of the action sequences were incredibly generic – especially given how great Jose Padilha’s action directing was in Elite Squad – but it was the new ideas that grabbed me. This wasn’t just a cash-grab but a movie that actually had something to say.

        Also, that scene of Murphy being revealed to be nothing more than a head and some organs is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in ages. True nightmare fuel.

        Overall, it’s not a great film, but way better than I thought it would be or it had any right to be.

        Reply

        • James Francis

          January 28, 2015 at 12:33

          I think the director made something significant, but other fingers turned it into a cash grab. The movie really annoyed me, but yeah it did have a lot of good ideas. Maybe one day we’ll view it in the same light as Predator 2.

          Reply

  2. RinceThis

    January 28, 2015 at 11:31

    I don’t know. I really like it when NEW movies come along that blow us away, like Gravity. Give me more of that!

    Reply

  3. James Francis

    January 28, 2015 at 12:23

    I’d be a hypocrite if I said I dislike the idea, especially in light of The Thing. Remakes also allow for interesting takes on a familiar concept, like the new Oldboy. But then there was the Spider-man reboot right on the heels of the Raimi films…

    Reply

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