How Not to do a Remake

Remakes tend to get a bad rap from the film community (as well as the syntactically inclined). It’s not as if we haven’t been gifted with some brilliant re-workings (Casino Royale, True Grit, Dawn of the Dead), but the current good:crap remake ratio stands at about 1:4.

But how exactly do you make a bad remake? We can count the faults on one hand…

#1 Try to be smarter-er than the original

There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking an aged movie and applying modernised film conventions to it (as long as the film caters to those conventions). It can be neat to re-open an old world with a sweet licking of CGI. However, don’t try to outsmart an intelligent movie. It’s like trying to out-drink an farm-bred engineering student: you will lose, you will embarrass yourself and you may quit drinking altogether.

The best you can do is to try keep up with the intellect of the original whilst doing your own thing. Tim Burton was put in a tricky position when he signed on to remake The Planet of the Apes. That ending was always going to be the most difficult part to pull off, being how much of a pants-stainer the original’s climax was. Suffice to say, Burton reached for the moon, but fell amongst the pavement.

The exception to this rule is dependent on the movie you’re remaking. Perhaps the original film isn’t all that smart to begin with. But then that poses another question: why remake it at all?

#2 Choose a classic film to remake

http://youtu.be/ISnQmnER0hU

“You see that completely unbroken film there? I’m gonna fix it.”

That’s the perceived attitude of the filmmaker that dares this challenge. For what it’s worth, your little remake might not be that bad. Hell, it could even be pretty good. But unless you actually make a masterpiece, which you probably won’t, then everyone will be saying “Well what was the point of that?”

You would need balls of granite to remake Citizen Kane. That very notion draws mental images of your colossal failure as the collective mass of internet film freaks prepare the virtual noose for your inevitable critical lynching for even thinking you could achieve this.

#3 Completely ignore the message of the original

http://youtu.be/wMrE8e_LakA

As previously stated, a remake benefits from altering the direction of the original. However, essential core elements need to stay on the same course. That’s how you put the “re” into remake. One of these elements is the message, the moral, the overarching idea the film is trying to express. Unless you’re doing something extremely experimental (display a longitudinal shift in social issues), you should stay faithful to the message of the original.

That’s exactly what Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher’s Guess Who didn’t do. Supposedly, this was meant to be a remake of the Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier classic 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a romantic drama about a white woman who invites her black boyfriend over to dinner to meet her white parents. Needless to say, the original film dwells in racial social issues (a black man dating a white woman is still a touchy issue today), which is where most of the conflict resides. The remake flipped the contract in an attempt to be clever, only to shun the moral of its source material.

Guess Who would’ve been much better off had it not try to associate itself with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

#4 Do absolutely nothing interesting with the original’s material

http://youtu.be/-VhXo4Nye5Q

It’s possible to get some enjoyment out of an amazingly bad remake (not the bees!). However, there is no enjoyment to be had from a boring rehash. Whether it’s shot-for-shot (Psycho) or simply lacking in imagination (Prom Night), there is little to enjoy from a dull remake.

As was the unfortunate case with Rob Zombie’s take on Friday the 13th. Zombie was very aware of the elements that defined the original: lakeside forest, horny teens, a machete-wielding maniac that never seemed to be in much of a hurry. However, like a tasteless soufflé, the sum of its parts lacked any flavour.

#5 Give it to a comedian

http://youtu.be/Iaz4p6lcv3A

There’s a frightening association between comedians and bad remakes. Any curiosity and/or optimism you may have for a rebirth of one of your favourite movies is swept under the cynical rug when you see “starring Will Farrell!” Is there a cause to this correlation?

Sometimes, a remake serves as a quick-n-dirty vehicle to push a new comedian into the limelight (Russell Brand in Arthur). Sometimes, a comedian wants to adapt their own brand of humour onto a film that didn’t need it in the first place (Chris Rock’s Death at a Funeral). But most of the time, we don’t really know what the hell they’re thinking (Dinner for Schmucks, The Pink Panther, Land of the Lost).