Monday, August 26, 2013

Enough with the remakes, already!

Hollywood has always loved doing remakes because it's so much easier than coming up with an original idea; however, all the remaking of movies and rebooting of franchises seems to have really gotten out of hand in recent years.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all remakes are bad.  It's just that there have been so many, and the good ones have been so few and far between.

Tim Burton's Batman was great, but Batman Returns was a pretty weak followup.  I like Tim Burton, but he's not someone you want heading up a franchise; his obsession with originality renders him utterly incapable of making two movies that can both exist within the same logical universe.  Tim Burton was then replaced by Joel Shumacher, who decided to turn Gotham City into a gay disco for some reason.  (I'm not just complaining about the nipples on the Batsuit, either.  He turned the Batmobile into a giant glowing dildo on wheels, for crying out loud.)  If there was ever a franchise that needed to make a fresh start, this was it.  With Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan showed us how to do it right.

One bad thing about a remake that gets it so right is that other people who put no thought into how great movies are actually made tend to fool themselves into thinking they could have easily done the same, and then they run out to make half-assed remakes of a hundred other things.

Another part of the problem is that more and more movies are being made based on comic books, and at some point studio execs got the stupid idea into their heads that the movies themselves should be treated more like comic books.  But they aren't the same, not to me.  If DC and Marvel want to keep reinventing their entire universes at the drop of a hat, that's fine, but please leave my movies alone, at least for a reasonable amount of time.  Please let them breathe a while and at least try to figure out what went wrong (and right) with them before you start remaking them.

Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were both great films, but I have no idea what the hell Sam Raimi was thinking when he made Spider-Man 3.  I also don't understand what Columbia Pictures was thinking when they green-lit The Amazing Spider-Man.  I can understand wanting to start over, but why so soon, and why use a director whose prior experience comes mainly from directing music videos?

A lot of people like to dump on Ang Lee's Hulk; it did have its problems, but it's still a much better movie in my opinion than Louis Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk.  The final confrontation at the end of Ang Lee's film made very little sense, but the rest of it was well done, and the casting was spot on.  Louis Leterrier on the other hand got almost nothing right in his film.  The backstory and exposition were badly bungled, just about every single joke fell flat, and there was no chemistry at all between Edward Norton and Liv Tyler.  (In fairness to Leterrier, some of these problems probably stemmed from Edward Norton's insistence on rewriting the script, but then why not just cast someone less meddlesome, like Eric Bana?  Really, they should have just made a sequel to Hulk that glossed over that film's problems while setting up whatever they needed to set up for The Avengers.)

And now everyone is freaking out about the news that Ben Affleck was chosen to play Batman in the next Superman movie, Batman vs. Superman.  Some of this probably comes from bitterness over Daredevil, but I think a lot of people are just apprehensive about the possibility of seeing Batman get Schumachered again, especially so soon after finally seeing the franchise reach its pinnacle.  People might also be a little leery about the idea of putting Batman in a sequel to a movie that probably shouldn't have been made in the first place.  (I haven't seen Man of Steel for myself yet, but I heard it wasn't very good.)

It'd be nice to see Christopher Nolan take off his executive producer hat for a bit and go back to directing.  I'd love to see him make a Nightwing movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a followup to his Batman trilogy; unfortunately, Nolan has said more than once that he wants his trilogy to remain a trilogy, so a Nightwing movie probably isn't in the cards.  But then why is Nolan attached as executive producer for Batman vs. Superman?  Does it mean they are planning to depart from Nolan's trilogy as much as possible in order to draw some arbitrary distinction?  I hope not, I don't think anything good can come from that.  I'd really hate to see Nolan end up being the worst thing to happen to Batman since Schumacher after having already been the best thing to happen to Batman since Burton.

Update: I'm really not a fan of The Atlantic, but I thought Nicholas Slayton had an interesting take on the potential problems surrounding Batman vs. Superman.

14 comments:

  1. Sam Raimi was ordered to do a lot of things for "Spiderman 3": It's why he left the franchise and made "Drag Me To Hell" next. He had creative control over DMTH.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah, I didn't realize... that's so odd to take control away from him like that after the first two movies were so successful.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'd blame Marvel, since they cocked up Iron Man 2 for the sake of their grand plan, but Spider-Man is Sony...and I don't know what they were thinking. "Have three villains! It's two better than having one villain!"

      Delete
    2. Sony had to make the movie, or the movie rights would revert back to Marvel/Disney. When Raimi and the entire cast left, Sony had no choice but to reboot, or they'd've lost the rights back to Disney.

      Delete
    3. Iron Man 2 wasn't as good as the first movie, but I still liked it, mostly... Sam Rockwell makes for a great douchey secondary villain.

      And yeah, Spider-Man 3 had way way too many villains, and not a single one was handled properly. (Plus that whole thing about changing the way Ben died seemed especially dumb to me... not sure if that came from the comics or they just pulled that out of the air, but I didn't like it at all.)

      Didn't know about the Disney thing... still, even if they were under the gun to do a reboot I wish they would have at least tried to do something close to the same level as the first two Raimi films.

      Delete
    4. On the bright side, we got an epic "How It Should Have Ended" for Spider-Man 3 as a result.

      Delete
  3. I generally hate reboots and remakes, but if someone comes up with a clever way to redo "Back To The Future" in 2015, where Marty goes back to 1985 and finds Walkmans instead of iPods and cell phones the size of toasters, then they will get my money without argument.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hahaha! With October 21, 2015 being the present instead of the future? Sure, why not? They remake everything else. If they haven't already been working on a script for that though I doubt they have time left to do it right, assuming they could even get a decent director willing to try.

      Delete
  4. Dunno, I thought Man of Steel was pretty good. Or about as good as you can do with Superman anyway. He is just a bad character to work with in a lot of ways. He is nigh invincible, almost totally incorruptable and has few character flaws to work with other than his pathological need to maintain the Clark Kent secret identity.. So you end up with lots of Kryptonite and/or Zod. They went with Zod.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm one of those who actually liked Superman Returns... some of the casting decisions were a bit iffy but I thought Kevin Spacey was great as Lex Luthor, and I loved the whole land scheme he had involving the kryptonite. Was curious to see how they might handle Zod in a sequel, but then this reboot happened instead.

      Delete
    2. I would say "Man of Steel" is watchable, particularly if you have no attachment to the character. It drags on a bit, to the point where the CGI is numbing.

      But it's a cop-out to complain about the difficulty of writing for Superman, and they "got around it" here by making a different character. Also by making Pa Kent a moron. And simultaneously clinging to the idea that he had to have a secret identity while making it globally obvious what that identity was.

      It's a mess.

      Delete
    3. I might give Man of Steel a try someday... maybe I'll wait and see if Batman vs Superman ends up killing the franchise or not.

      Delete
  5. I think they keep rebooting the comic book characters because it has something to do with the trademark and copyright laws. They have to release a new movie every few years so that have some creative license that allows them to retain the rights to the story and characters. Otherwise the original creators of the character can sue to reclaim the rights. And it strengthens their standing if they try to sue someone else that creates some type of original content based on the characters and claims fair use. So movies like the "The Amazing Spider-Man" were only created because it was recommended by the legal department. Not because some focus group was saying they REALLLLY wanted another Spider-Man movie.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So I should expect this to happen more and more then? That's kind of depressing. If they're gonna put out things just to put out things without caring about the quality, why not put out a crappy animated movie on the cheap instead? Wouldn't that be enough to make the legal department happy while still leaving the option open to handle the live-action movies however they want?

      Delete