Remakes and Reboots

Every once in a while I will use this blog to post my views on trends in movies and such. And one such topic involves remakes of movies: When is a re-make actually an adaptation, a re-make or a reboot? In short, a re-make typically involves using the same kind of story with the same setup, but with different, albeit similar characters. It usually unravels in typically the same fashion. An adaptation typically involves an original source, say a comic book, novel or short story. There can be multiple movies that based on the same source, in which case they are adaptations, not re-makes. A reboot usually involves taking an established franchise or story, takes the characters of said franchise or story and keeps them fairly intact while throwing everything else out, and starting over. I'll give a few examples:

Take the recent Star Trek film, starring Chris Pine as James Kirk. That film is considered a reboot, because after Nemesis, the franchise became stale, and Paramount decided that the best way to reinvigorate the franchise was to take established characters like Kirk, Spock and McCoy and put them into an alternate time-line. While respecting the existence of the original time-line, the new Star Trek film reintroduced classic characters to new audiences and remained faithful to the original crew of the Enterprise as portrayed in the original Star Trek series and the films 1-6. The new film just takes them and puts them in a different reality that seems a little....different. But it worked. Star Trek was a fantastic film that could have failed miserably. Paramount take a real risk and captured lightening in a bottle. This is how a successful reboot works, much like Christopher Nolan's take on the Batman mythology. Then there are ones that aren't nearly as successful like Friday The 13th. It didn't really get anywhere and didn't push the envelope the way the original film did. As a result, a sequel hasn't been made.

For some people, the term adaptation doesn't seem to apply to movies, but in truth, it does. John Carpenter's The Thing is the best example of this. John Carpenter's film is considered by many to be a re-make of The Thing From Another Planet, released back in the 50s. Wrong. Like The Thing From Another Planet, John Carpenter's film was also adapted from the same short story, "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, published in 1938. The story involved a creature that could look and sound like anyone that it came into contact with. John Carpenter's film gruesomely depicted a monster that absorbed and imitated the people that it attacked, and while it didn't achieve box-office success back in 1982, it found it's audience on home video and is considered to be one of the greatest adaptations, with some of the best visual effects in science fiction and horror. Stephen King's The Mist is also another great example as is The Green Mile.

Now, we get to re-makes. It's easier to identify re-makes these days because Hollywood is too scared to take chances on original subject matter. Typically, a re-make will take an idea presented in earlier film and try to "modernize" it with new actors and plot-lines while maintaining the overall story. The best example of a successful re-make is Scarface. Everybody knows the film that really put Al Pacino on the map, with his successful portrayal of a Cuban refugee that becomes the drug kingpin of Miami. While it is an awesome movie, most people aren't aware that the film is based on Howard Hawke's film of the same name, release back in 1932. That film, instead of dealing with drugs, dealt with the bootlegging of alcohol which was banned under the Prohibition, during the Great Depression. Having seen BOTH films, the Al Pacino film doesn't make fun of the original, but maintains its bleak and violent outlook of the first film, while updating the subject material to something that was relevant during the 80s, which was trafficking of illegal substances like cocaine and heroin, and the consequences of that activity, which usually came to a violent end. There are many re-makes that are blatantly that. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Flight of the Phoenix, 3:10 To Yuma just to name a few. A handful of them are actually any good. The aforementioned 3:10 to Yuma is one. Nightmare on Elm Street? Not so much.

There are few movies that can actually be considered an adaptation, re-boot AND a re-make. X-Men First Class would be considered a re-boot and an adaptation of comic book characters, but is not a re-make in any way. The most recent film I can say that IS a combination of all three is LionsGate's Conan: The Barbarian. It's based on Robert E. Howard's character of the same name, updates some of the story that you saw in John Milius' film with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but is also a complete reboot of a franchise that went completely flat in the mid-80s, after the dismal failure of Conan The Destroyer. But some would argue the new film is not an adaptation of any of Howard's stories, and they're right, but the character and some of his characteristics HAVE been adapted from some of his stories, even if those stories haven't been told on screen yet. Unfortunately for LionsGate, the new Conan movie was a box-office failure, both critically and financially. Which is a shame, because I don't think it's a bad film at all, and in fact I've reviewed the film here on a previous post, and I gave it a fairly good score.

In the end, does it really matter if a film is a re-make, reboot or an adaptation? For me, not necessarily as long as it's done right, and done with passion and respect for the source material, and a lot of times these days, they're not done with respect to the source as they should be. Some of the comic-book movies released in the past few years, haven't been, like Ghost Rider. That was a dismal film that somehow managed to spawn another movie to be released in the next year or so. But another question could be: Can a movie be TOO faithful to the source material? That's another question for another time, but it's certainly worth exploring.