Total Recall and The Remake Rule
“When a good movie happens, which it might, on a roll of the dice, once in five years, it’s like this total aberration, a freak of nature like the Grand Canyon, they’re ashamed of it. They can’t wait to remake it in another ten years and f*** it up the way it’s supposed to be.”
That joke, from Lanford Wilson’s play Burn This, sometimes seems like a literal truth, as when 2002′s excellent Spider-Man was remade in mediocre fashion in 2012. But most filmmakers I know acknowledge an unwritten Remake Rule, though perhaps it’s breached as often as observed.
If the unwritten rule could be written, it would go something like this: A film may be remade when it represents a great idea that wasn’t fully realized the first time OR when its realization has become so dated as to have lost its appeal to a modern audience. Classics, no matter what the temptation, should not be remade. If you’re so shallow you can’t project yourself back in time to enjoy Casablanca or Gone With the Wind or All About Eve as is, just stay home and watch Jersey Shore because it turns out you’re an idiot. The classic rule can occasionally be negated by dated special effects, but it usually doesn’t work out. The 1933 King Kong does look a little stagy and dinky now, but it’s still a better movie than any version that followed.
All this comes to mind because I saw Total Recall the other day — I wanted to see Bourne but Recall fit perfectly between two meetings. In my opinion, despite what some critics say, this picture was a perfect candidate for remake. The 1990 version has an excellent script but is weighed down by Arnold Schwarzenegger — whom I like but who is asked here to play an ordinary guy, which is absurd. The muscles, enormous head and funny accent make the whole picture seem sort of outsized and cheesy. What could have been a brilliant Blade Runner style classic if it had starred Harrison Ford becomes instead a good-but-dated actioner. A perfect candidate for remake.
I think the new Total Recall violates the primary rule for doing a remake. You must have a dedicated producer/director/creative force behind the remake. A person who really want’s to tell the story. Either to do it right this time or to add something to a story they’re passionate about. Something.
Total Recall reeks of a property the studio owned that had brand recognition and the suits figured they could ring some money outta it.
If they could have re-made this movie with Dana Carvey playing the lead with his Hans and Franz impersonation (including the shirt padding) I would definitely have gone to see it.
One complaint I had about the new version was that it was almost immediately apparent whether it was Live or Memorex (like the first, it was live). It was NOT apparent until the very end of the the first movie, so the central idea, that this may really be a manufactured illusion “real” enough that the hero can’t tell the difference, held up through the whole movie. The way to tell was if there were events that the audience sees, which have effects on how the plot runs, that the hero can not have been shown if it was an illusion, as it would spoil the illusion to be shown things that he could not have experienced. I still liked it, though neither version was Great Art, and it required a substantial amount of Willing Suspension of Disbelief. It was munching, not dining, but pleasant munching nonetheless.
SF/fantasy lends itself to remakes because of advances in special effects and screenplay writing, although there have been some head-scratching failures on the screenplay level recently. Among those for me are:
The Dark Knight Trilogy
The new Day the Earth Stood Still
The remake of The Thing
The 2 Iron Man
Captain America
The Avengers
To me an example of bright screenplays would be:
Children of Dune
The Mummy
Serenity
Gattaca
I’d like to see a remake of:
The Land That Time Forgot
At the Earth’s Core
The Land Unknown
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
King Kong Escapes
Science Fiction has so many good stories yet to be made as films, why do remakes?
Well, because the unimaginative studio execs don’t know how to market anything that doesn’t come with a pre-packaged audience, but other than that…
I agree: I can’t figure out why The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man by Bester haven’t been made.
And can you imagine a trailer for The Mote In God’s Eye, one that never quite shows the Moties? That movie would be gold.
Good grief, The Mote in God’s Eye could be a blockbuster. It could even be a LOTR style trilogy if they included The Gripping Hand. Yes, I can picture the trailer, probably ending with the scene where they are evacuating the doomed ship and (I forget who, it’s been a while since I read it) one character looks at the spacesuit behind him and screams because it’s full of moties (just showing the suit and his scream of course, not the actual moties). Making CGI moties would be a whole lot better use of a render farm than those idiotic nine-foot tall blue iriquois from Avatar.
And Mote even has a vaguely anit-nuke message. Seems like it would be a natural for Hollywood.
But considering the butchery inflicted on Starship Troopers, maybe it’s a bad idea…
I would argue that the two boys you overheard were on to something. It’s true, Arnold was oversized and not exactly an actor worthy of Shakespeare…..but he was AAAAhnold: a larger than life action hero. That quirkiness is a part of what makes the original a classic.
I saw the original at a dollar theater next to a college campus. As rowdy as you’d imagine. One of the best movie-going experiences of my life. It was big, bloody, insane…I just can’t picture that Farrell boy holding the screen in a movie that big.
“The Mote in God’s Eye” would be a tough one to get on screen. I’d go for CGI on the Moties myself. While image can substitute for a lot of words the book was pretty dense. If done right it would be an action, horror, tragedy, stunner of a movie. I just wonder if a general audience could accept an Empire as force of necessity.
Probably the toughest part about Mote on screen would be a screenplay – special effects have been there for years. It would almost certainly have to be 2 movies. The problem with that is there isn’t much drama in the first half. They’d have to flesh out the revolt at the beginning for some action and rely on a sense of wonder and exploration, tension and build up, something lacking in SF films nowadays. It would also heavily benefit from NO STARS bringing baggage into a ground-breaking film. You need empty bodies to fill with this project in order to fully understand who they are.
The second half would have to start when the Watchmakers get loose perhaps and people might feel cheated the movie ends just when the action gets heavy. On the other hand, if the first film was treated with just that sense of wonder at every little thing SF has to offer, plus some good characterization, it’d be a pretty compelling story and the 2nd film a smash-up counter point.
I still think the project would be gold. People have never seen such a story on the screen before. And it’s as good an SF novel as any ever written, certainly light years ahead of my pet object of hate because of its bewildering status, “Ender’s Game.”
Ender’s Game. Sigh.
EG was a brilliant short story… the alienated but brilliant hero–doing his best, the vicious, implacable enemy–out to destroy all humankind, the surprise twist at the end–that the game was real. If you had the misfortune to read the novel first, you missed something.
When EG was expanded and then turned into a whole “universe” it lost almost all of what made it great. Ender turned out to be a boring, wimpy dork. The implacable enemy was just misunderstood. Blah.
In my mind, the greatest hubris ever displayed by a filmmaker was from the person who remade Psycho.
Hollywood is really running out ideas, it was a running joke 2 years ago but now it’s not even funny. Say what you like about Skyline, but at least it’s original.