By KEVIN KAUMANS
Remakes are nothing new. We may see them more often from big streaming services like “Disney” or “HBO”, but they have been around for a while. Fun fact: Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” films were a reboot of a television show from the
1960s. However, I bet if you walked up to a person born in the 2000s, odds are they never knew that.
“Mission: Impossible” is one of the only remakes I find to be actually acceptable. Instead of just copying the show, most of the original cast dies in the first movie after a mission gone wrong, actually making a new premise from scratch.
But see, here’s my problem with most other remakes: They tend to take away from the original movies. I cannot for the life of me name a single remake that had the same charm and quality as the original film.
Sure, the special effects have improved due to the advancement of technology over the years, and maybe the writers will tweak some things to make the plot slightly different from the original. But at the end of the day, watching a remake is like drinking non-alcoholic beer: It may taste and look the same, but the magical effects just are not there.
Some of you might think I am being a little mean here, but hear me out for a minute, yeah? Film, art, literature, it is all history. By looking back on older works, even if said works have not “aged well” by our modern standards, we can get a good look at both the pop culture and values of the people of that time.
By making a remake of that media, it feels less special because you are taking away from the historical context of that time period. Even if the film in question is only ten or twenty years old and thus would not really be considered an era of a different time period, by remaking it, you are taking away from the original artistic design of the original creators and slapping it over with your own.
I get the idea of what these movie producers are trying to do. They are trying to capture what made the originals so well-liked (or at the very least make as much money as those movies did, depends on the person). In their minds, making something new and original is risky because there is no guarantee that they will make back on the money they put into the film. At least if they redo a cult classic people grew up with, you can bet at least some people will buy tickets due to nostalgia bias.
To me, nonetheless, it just come across as disrespectful to the original material. There never seems to be any love or passion in most remakes, not to me at least. Instead, it just feels like the movie studios are trying to do the bare minimum in order to take money from the naïve who hope to feel the same joy they got from when they saw the original in theaters.
Imagine if a publishing company did that. Imagine someone taking a book written by Faulkner or Twain and having someone else rewrite the entire thing with their own spin on the plot. It would be seen as desecrating the dead. Why are movies any different? Why change what is not broken?
Maybe I am being too emotional about this. I have always had an obsession with preserving the history of something, whether that thing is a thousand-year-old document or a film I saw growing up as child. There are creative people still out there in the world, people with their own original stories that could potentially become the next blockbuster if given the chance, you just have to look for them.