Why I Despise Remake Culture · 5:33pm Sep 11th, 2020
Not "remakes". Taken in the abstract, a "remake" is not inherently a sinful thing, though it is easily predisposed to sin. But then, a puppy on its own is not automatically a bad dog: having a hundred and one of the damn things in your home will pretty quickly reduce it to a shitty place to live.
"Remake Culture" is that shitty place.
I'm going to start with a relative gesture of goodwill, by gushing over a very 90s remake I very much praise to the dark sky and back: Batman: The Animated Series.
Batman's been around for ages and, naturally, has been and still is reimagined over and over in various incarnations. When I first watched Batman: The Animated Series, I had basically no idea it was the latest in an already long line, and took it as a kind of First Example. It was only much, much later in my life, upon revisiting it, that I learned it was actually an adaptation of several original comic stories, some reproduced faithfully, others blended together or twisted in some way.
By the logic that "remake = bad", I should now utterly hate this series. Since that is not my logic, I just took it as interesting trivia. This was, after all, where I was introduced to the Batman mythos, and while I do profess to a little annoyance over just how often it's been reimagined and reincarnated - seemingly at the expense of, you know, maybe some new hero who could go on to be a cultural icon in their own right, in a similar way to how Batman was the successor of the original Shadow anti-hero - in the main, if Batman: The Animated Series is going to be the result, then God bless remakes, says I.
You know why this doesn't bother me? Because A) Batman: The Animated Series was bloody good craftsmanship, made by people who clearly loved the material they worked with, and who worked hard to give it its own identity that influences what cartoons can do years later, and B) it wasn't the goddamn norm.
The other potential pitfall with my approach is that so many other things can get caught in the crossfire. Cross-media adaptations, TV show tie-ins with popular films (the 90s had quite a few of those), the obviously toyetic nature of some TV shows (again, the 90s had quite a few), and, of course, fanfiction. All of these would make pretty good examples of the Book of Ecclesiastes' "There is nothing new under the sun." Hell, quite a few classic films (Psycho, The Godfather, It's a Wonderful Life, The Princess Bride, Jaws, The Shawshank Redemption) were basically book-to-film adaptations. What I will loosely call "remakes".
If we can flip the script for a second, nothing about being original or theoretically imaginative guarantees a good time. For starters, we could have "original" and "imaginative" content. There's still the possibility of having a whole plot be a reference or parody of something, or of stealing plot points under a different name. Furthermore, if we broaden our scope to whole genres (or at least subgenres), then we could lazily accuse every time travel story after H. G. Wells' The Time Machine of being a rip-off.
More to the point: Just because you avoid one problem, doesn't make you suddenly immune to countless others. Being a brand new story still leaves you vulnerable to being badly offensive, badly paced, badly acted, badly written, badly in need of editors or a lesson in basic logic, and just plain bad. "Quality" and "originality" are not synonyms.
And if we're going down this route, then along the way, we're inevitably going to open a can of worms regarding the issue of when something becomes "creative" or "imaginative" in any objective or absolute sense, or if the enterprise is doomed to failure by the sheer haziness of the concept. Ecclesiastes was written long, long, long before modern culture, after all.
But then, practically anything looks as solid as mist if we get too philosophical about it. That advanced level is not what I'm on about here.
With all that in mind, what I'm on about is not necessarily existential - i.e. that remakes exist - but circumstantial - i.e. what remakes are doing in a particular context.
That is: Remake Culture.
The Disney remakes are obvious targets here - if only because their blatantly nostalgic cash-grab nature is impossible to ignore - but it became a personal issue for me in two other spheres of influence: a sequel film elsewhere, and a similar trend in video games.
The sequel film was Jurassic World. Ish. It's kinda a weird case because it seems to combine sequel and reboot all in one go.
On its own terms, the film isn't one I particularly care for. It's a CGI-heavy dino disaster movie with some typical traits of disaster movies: people making stupid decisions to enable it, efficient agents of death suddenly being incompetent when up against anyone with plot armour, and any excuse to have big, noisy spectacle when it's not cribbing off genre classics like Aliens and Predator.
Some of the dino violence is at least entertaining to watch, and occasionally the film touches on something scientifically interesting without really doing anything of interest with it (most obviously the idea of social health among captive animals, but also how human influence on wild instincts is tenuous at best). On its own terms, it's ultimately just another action film.
Except it's a remake.
That is, it taps into a pre-existing audience who have strong feelings for a prior property. So of course this story about a dino theme park going off the rails is explicitly tied to Jurassic Park, an early 90s film that captured the imagination of the entire world both by bringing extinct dinosaurs back to life in ways hitherto unimagined and by being a pretty tense, tragic tale of (well-intentioned, as it happens) human hubris.
Now, the original is an adaptation of a book by Michael Crichton. It's not an original movie unless you count Spielberg's rearrangement of the narrative furniture. And I'm not going to pretend this famous sci-fi author was a nobody at the time. Heck, his Jurassic Park made it to the bestseller list.
But I think it's fair to say a large part of the success is owed to Spielberg's personal stamp on the movie's concept. It'd still be pretty hard to say that Crichton's popularity was what made the original film so profitable, or what propelled the original film straight into the cinematic history books: if anything, I tend to find most people are surprised to learn there even was a prior novel. The parts that hew the closest to Crichton's themes and even borrow his original dialogue... I'm glad they're there, myself, because some of them work well, but they tend to be a little awkward, subdued, and go-nowhere compared with the more obvious attraction of watching Tyrannosaurus rex tearing a Ford Explorer apart.
(Plus, I'll take Jeff Goldblum's charismatic pessimism over whatever the hell new age anti-science preacher Ian Malcolm was trying to be in the book. Let me put it this way: trying to prove chaos theory renders science null and void is like trying to prove the Council of Nicaea renders Jesus' prior preaching null and void. It was a key game-changing moment in the field's history; what it was not was some kind of "bury the predecessor" revolution.)
Regardless, my point is that, twenty-two years after a very good and commendably directed disaster movie claimed itself as a 90s landmark on its own merits, along came a pretty run-of-the-mill disaster movie, which raked in tons of cash and dominated mainstream cinematic culture for no better reason than because it sucked up to something more successful.
I'm not going to go into petty gripes, like how the raptors have been cheaply humanized, or how scientifically illiterate the pick-and-mix genetics involved is (certainly not the braindead militarization subplot, a trite and awkwardly shoehorned-in angle for what was originally a more believably clever sci-fi premise).
I'm certainly not going to complain that, twenty years after a film revolutionized public views of dinosaurs, its closest equivalent can do nothing better than actually take steps backwards from that angle. A lot of these boil down to unfavourable point-by-point comparisons with the original film, which isn't, overall, my point.
But, regardless of the movie's own merits, it's actually the nostalgic theft that got rewarded. One of the biggest cinematic events of the 2010s ended up just being a clone of a prior success story. Because it made loads of money. Because people watched it in droves. Because... honestly, Ian Malcolm's diatribe comes to mind pretty cleanly here:
I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it, well...
The other catalyst for me personally - I say catalyst because I've always been slightly wary of remakes, even before more recent years cranked it up - were the video game remakes of 90s properties which, not entirely by coincidence, I happen to love and look back on very fondly.
Look, I get it. Nostalgia makes apologists of cynics. If someone wants to say my love of older works is blinding me to the merits of newer ones, then there is not a thing I can say to change that. I'm going to make the case anyway, because it's either that or not speak out about something I think is a growing and increasingly annoying problem.
In fact, to make that easier for you, I'm going to admit something that reduces my credibility, for the sake of honesty: I haven't played the remakes I'm about to talk about. Everything I know about them is second-hand.
The remakes are: the Resident Evil series, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon.
And to show I'm not purely shooting myself in the foot, I'm going to take it as an iron-hard given that the remakes are great games. Because I am convinced my point still stands regardless.
In the case of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, saying their remakes are great is easy: they're basically reskins of old classics which were great to begin with. As far as I can tell, the remakes' main accomplishments can be summed up as:
- Tweaking certain game mechanics and level designs to fix problems from the original trilogies, and
- Higher polygon graphics.
Note I didn't say "better graphics". It's taken for granted by a lot of people these days, but "more complicated, even nigh-realistic, graphics" do not equate with "better graphics" in my book. That would be the same logic that suggests animated films are automatically inferior to live-action ones, an assumption that can frankly go to hell, along with the narrow-minded assumptions that "comedy isn't art", "sci fi is just lasers and spaceships", and "girls' shows can't be good".
Crash and Spyro make obvious cases for my stance here because they basically are "animated" video games, in the sense that the originals used an aesthetic to turn their technical limitations into a triumph. The resultant cartoony aesthetic gave each one an identity: wacky Looney Tunes in Crash's case, Disney fantasy land in Spyro's case (with, weirdly, a bit of Muppets when it comes to mouths). Everything from level design to character animation to something as simple as how music matches setting runs with the respective styles each one adopts. Neither of them would qualify as vaguely snooty high art, but they do what they do tremendously well.
So forgive me if I recoil a bit from screenshots taking two very different aesthetics and running them under the same simplistic "realism makes it better" paradigm, a paradigm born from the insultingly reductionistic idea that "realism" equals "better".
No, it damn well doesn't. It doesn't equal better because, if realism was the end goal of art, it would ultimately render art itself as nothing more than life's filing cabinet. That is one of the things that pisses me off about video game remakes in particular, because it betrays nothing more than a pedestrian lack of imagination. And we end up with games where it takes a detailed knowledge of each game's internal content to tell where the hell one franchise stops and another starts.
Besides, a slavish devotion to realism in a form that has to be built from the ground up runs its own risks. Have we never heard of the "uncanny valley"? I swear it looks far more massively wrong to see a hyper-realistic model clip on something accidentally than to see a reasonably stylized alternative do the same.
Hell, my favourite example of the triumph of artistic style over "realism" is a PlayStation 2 game, Okami. Originally, the main character's design was going to look more realistic, but it - and the broader world - ended up being stylized similar to the ancient paintings of Japan, a fictionalized and mythology-laden version of which makes up the game's setting.
The result? A frankly gorgeous and committed visual experience that still holds up tremendously well fourteen years later, because it doesn't commit to a paradigm that can only mark itself down as a mere stepping stone. The game is unique. The game is no slave to someone else's standard: it has its own standard, and points to itself and says this is it. It is not a real life wannabe. It is a living painting and its own world, which you can visit anytime.
All this interactive-painting setup even has an in-universe point: not only is artistically changing the world a gameplay mechanic, but the beauty of the artwork rewards the player personally for enhancing said beauty on their travels. Enemy battles involve graceful manoeuvres as much as speed and strength. Divinity and passion are major themes in the plot. I could go on, but the point is that this is a game of such breathtaking artistic ambition.
This is art, for goodness' sake. I don't care if the art involves moving avatars through virtual obstacle courses. Art is and always has been multidimensional. "Realism" is only progressive if your idea of progress is a one-dimensional line.
As for tweaking certain problems in the original games, I'm a little more sympathetic. Especially in the heat of a particularly obnoxious moment, who wouldn't want to switch to a version that does away with the annoyance? We can't deny an upgrade with tweaks is a perfectly respectable technological advance, especially since we can't do the exact opposite and reinvent the wheel over and over.
Take the big picture, though, and I still don't think this justifies a remake mindset. Boiled down, the tweaks add up to nothing but a cosmetic distraction from what's really going on: selling the same game back to you in different packaging. I don't care if I personally swear at "Cold Hard Crash" for that one sidepath: that doesn't mean I want to fork out more cash just to have the same level with the edges sanded off.
Added content and "reintroducing the classics to a new audience" ultimately are the same bells and whistles. It pains me to say the latter, because someone could point out my praises for Batman: The Animated Series is exactly that - proof of the good of reintroducing classics to new audiences. Would I have picked up any of the old Batman comics otherwise? Not likely. I still haven't, to be frank.
But that also leads to the opposite argument: that was then, and this is now. I don't know if I could mount a successful case for Batman: The Animated Series being enough of its own thing to defeat that argument, or if it'd just be better to claim it as a special case (to say nothing of stuff later down the road, like The Dark Knight, that can also stand on its own with bold confidence).
Yes, this stuff was great when it was new, but we're decades later. Crash and Spyro were video game successes in the 90s. Should it really be a goddamn success in the 2010s too, especially when they're basically the same games in new skins? What do our times have to contribute to the continuity of history? What do we have to show for it? Because an annoying trend in the late 2010s is that we're basically cannibalizing the 90s, instead of, you know, figuring out for ourselves what we should do next.
Enter Resident Evil 2, as close to a demolition of my argument as I think we can get.
Unlike the definite cartoony aesthetic of Crash and Spyro, RE seems like it could only benefit from a dose of realism. It worked spectacularly well for the first entry in the series, didn't it? After all, blocky zombies don't compare exactly to ones that look like they could stumble right out of the screen, to say nothing of the frankly cheesy voice acting the series was (in)famous for. And, more damaging for my argument, apparently the remake of Resident Evil 2 in particular is utterly brilliant.
Again, I haven't played it myself, but I'm going to be generous and proceed on the assumption that yes, it really is a massive improvement in every way over the original and is so substantially different in gameplay style and general design that it could legitimately stand on its own two feet as a great game. (This isn't entirely blind on my part; second-hand sources don't give the full experience, but they give something I can appreciate).
I'm not here to argue that Resident Evil 2 (Remake) is a bad game. I'm not here to argue it's a remake that by definition shouldn't exist (the ghost of Batman: The Animated Series is specifically here to check any argument I might make in that direction). So, taken on its own merits, I got nothing. It avoids all the worst and most obvious problems of remakes. Given those admittedly hefty concessions, what possible problem could I have with it?
Context.
This is where my vitriol is aimed at the culture part of Remake Culture.
See, Batman: The Animated Series clearly isn't the only remake/adaptation/what-have-you of its time, certainly not of comic book superheroes. Still, I don't think we can call its time that of a Remake Culture.
Getting back to RE2, let's look at the celebrated games of its original time. Metal Gear Solid (a sequel to a prior series most people hadn't heard of), the Final Fantasy series, Tomb Raider (basically an Indiana Jones successor), Dino Crisis (Resident Evil with dinosaurs), Silent Hill, Parasite Eve, Driver, Gran Turismo, and the aforementioned Crash and Spyro games.
I'm limiting myself to the PlayStation console for the sake of simplicity. My point is that this sample of bestselling games were a bunch that had strong independent merits. Some of them broke barriers as to what video games could do, some were just really, really good games that inherited from predecessors, and while I can dispute how creative a few of them were in concept, all of them were products of a corporate gaming culture that, while not averse to tie-in media (cough-Harry-Potter-games-cough) or sequel after sequel (take your pick), was a culture that reinvented.
Resident Evil 2 (Remake) reinvents too, but against a culture that doesn't. And even if it did, "reinvention" no longer means making something so awesome it could stand on its own two feet. "Reinvention" now means making something that is so blatantly using its predecessor as a crutch that something like Resident Evil 2 (Remake) doesn't emerge as a cool side curiosity the same way Resident Evil (Remake) did on the GameCube a couple of decades ago. It means that it takes centre stage as practically the game of the year, because that is the reduced context it finds itself in.
And now you know why I especially despise the Disney remakes I've managed to avoid for most of this blog post, because they are so fucking blatant about this cultural cannibalism, it's a wonder people don't see the rotting skin and hear the braindead moaning when they watch these things in the cinema. They make traditional franchise zombies look merely wan.
One of our biggest cultural touchstones is, frankly, the ugliest expression of one of the worst impulses in (to be fair, long-standing) modern corporate culture: a completely craven refusal to serve up something new and fresh and engaging (or at least as part of a respectable culinary tradition), preferring instead to serve up reheated leftovers and ask us to pay extra.
What annoys the hell out of me is that it goddamn works.
If it was a temporary fad that faded out as soon as audiences went off it and companies responded to that response in turn, I wouldn't mind so much. The past few decades are littered with odd fads and equally craven trends that we thankfully got out of our system (heck, it's one reason why we tend to be suspicious of sequels).
But it clearly isn't. If anything, it seems to be a growing and accepted thing, all over. There's outrage, and people calling it out, and some degree of awareness even from people who have no problem with it. Here and there.
None of it is changing anything, and the direction of this "progress" is a rich one only in financial terms and a poverty-stricken one in any other. By now, it's easy to imagine this is our new normal, this is our touchstone, we literally have no stronger cultural statement to make other than to copy-paste entire scripts and then make a few token efforts to disguise what is effectively mass plagiarism. Only it's plagiarism without the harsh academic penalties from fields that, you know, have less stake on our hearts and minds than what we like to do for fun.
Look, as much as I don't like fanatics who take entertainment too seriously - to the point of them making assumptions like "comedy isn't art", as if "art" was almost the same as "morality" - I doubt the opposite kind of non-effort is a healthy approach either.
Consider this: leisure is about as personal an activity as you can engage in, because unlike a career or chores, it's as clear an expression of yourself as you can get. I don't mean something simplistic, like "braindead people like braindead movies": I mean engaging in leisure is, in a sense, like engaging with other people.
Someone intellectual might like Jurassic Park because cool dinos, and that's fine. Someone casual might like Jurassic World because the bit about taming raptors caught their ethological imagination, and that's fine. In fact, a lot of reasons for liking or not liking certain stories are just that: fine. There are plenty of good ways of approaching stories, and spectacle and cool stuff is not somehow lesser. It might be less intelligent, or less emotionally complex, or possibly less moral in the sense that a depiction of cool doesn't care if the one doing it is squeaky clean, but in a world of artifice and make-believe, there's a license to relax such high concerns for an hour and a half.
Like people, stories are endlessly varied and fascinating in their unpredictable complexity. Please don't believe for a minute I come to bury remakes as some special evil subculture, as if I was railing against bikers under the assumption they "look criminal" or something shallow.
My point is that, when a particular type of remake comes to dominate the cultural scene, it would be nice if we didn't have to resort to cheap excuses like, "Well, we still have the original." Yes, we have the original. We had the original before the remake came along. Except this remake is wearing their clothes and going through their motions and, surprise surprise, the imposter is fooling people and trying to get some unearned cred rubbed off on them. When a student is caught copying old essays verbatim, he doesn't get a pass because, "Well, you still have the original." The original earned its own marks. Do your own work, you lazy sod.
Of course we still have the original: that's what the whole scam is banking on. It's still a scam, and it's an awful scam because it's working on such a massive scale. Even good remakes end up helping to make the sort of receptive environment when the scam becomes easier, cruelly ironic because you can claim those particular remakes are innocent in and of themselves. Again, context.
Sure, there's always room for stuff like mindless entertainment and nothing's new under the sun and so on, but what does it say about us collectively if we get comfortable with a blatant scam being the dominant kind of entertainment?
God, I'm really not trying to be hoity-toity here - I mean, I don't want to be overshadowed at the cinema by artsy-fartsy movies I can't be bothered to pretend I care about - but neither can I pretend all this remake laziness is happening in some netherworld completely independent of any other considerations. Like, can I have even a basic movie culture meet my intelligence halfway?
I despise the very idea of a Remake Culture. And the worst part? There's not a damn thing I can do about it.
For starters, who can I blame?
Heck, I'm not even blaming the corporate reasoning behind the obvious cash-grab: from a money-making angle, remaking something with a built-in audience and plenty of cultural cachet is a perfectly efficient means of making profit, with the added benefit of incurring fewer risks and relying on prior goodwill to get it off the ground. If people will pay for it, the companies will sell it, because that is what they are supposed to do.
So am I blaming the audience, then? How can I? Most are just looking for a way to pass the time, and for all the talk about consumer choice, what the companies serve up is what you gets. Some like the movie, some don't, and I'm not here to tell them they're bad people for doing so. Even if this was purely an issue of quality, then I should be crusading against only the most unpopular movies, which apart from being redundant is - in an age where difference of opinion is as rich and open as the natural variety of a niche-ridden ecosystem - also pretty philosophically difficult unless we've finally distilled the essence of good quality after all these years of opinions, criticisms, and cultural fads coming and going.
That's sort of the problem. This is a case where I definitely notice something wrong, but either everyone's guilty and I blame the whole system and everyone involved, or I blame no one and just shrug my shoulders and say, "So it goes." Neither suggests an obvious reasoned solution, because as the saying goes, you can't reason your way out of a position you didn't reason yourself into.
Or to put it less glibly: what's hard for me in my current rage-induced state is that there is no conspiracy. There is no obvious bad guy. If the audience suddenly boycotted all remakes, the companies would have to sit up and take notice. By the same token, if the companies stopped making them in the first place and made something else, the audience would silently just watch whatever was available instead with no issue. Neither side is made up of moustache-twirling jackasses; they're just people either making money efficiently or wanting to enjoy a couple of hours as they please. How the hell could anyone make a workable battlecry - hell, a workable policy - out of either scenario?
Ultimately, I have to admit I can't. I have nothing but a blog to bitch and moan on. Besides, I don't think there is an easy out.
But neither do I have to pretend I like it.
Impossible Numbers, out.
5353389
I'm going to admit up-front I don't have anything objective against what you say, but I still strongly disagree with some of it. This bit struck me because it goes some way towards the heart of the matter for me: good or bad or whatever, the point about a remake is that it is a matter of identity, not about quality. All remakes could be gold, and I'd still have a problem with a culture full of the things.
I have to admit I tend to the idea that, if some element's worthy on its own merits (better diversity of - and less narrow-mindedly designed - female characters, for instance), then it shouldn't need a crutch to help it slip past people. If anything, a new venue would be the best place for it, because it creates something unique that can say, "I am me and no one else." I'd rather something like that was a cultural touchstone than "I am that old thing version 2.0." It suggests more confidence in the element itself. What would it say about good female characters that the best we can do for them is not give them their own pride of place, but smuggle them in via rehashed tales?
If I may explain further: I personally find the idea of blurring a remake and an original by association vaguely revisionist, and not in a good way. For one thing, when an older property does something sexist or immoral/questionable by modern standards, it seems to me more historically responsible to just own up to it and add, "But we don't do that anymore" loud and clear, rather than revamp something old and act like that's the "true" story (as if "true" meant "good").
So to me, if a parent wants their kid to see a classic, then they either do just that - warts and all - or they change their priorities to something like "wants their kid to see something decent". Remakes as some kind of replacement is like trying to pass off a crude twin as an old friend - even if RE2 (Remake) is a great game in its own right, pitting it against the original and the time and place and circumstances around it is where the issue of identity doesn't work in its favour. I don't care if it's a better game, it's not the game, and I treat it exactly as I would treat a complete stranger saying they're better than an old and dear friend of mine.
Using remakes as vehicles for good new ideas seems to me a combination that makes less than the sum of its parts.
I only really take issue with remakes if they're taking away from producing new content. For example, since you mentioned Disney quite a few times, yeah, some of the remakes have been bad on their own merits, but I'm not especially bothered. Walt Disney Animation Studios made 9 movies last decade (6 originals, 2 sequels, 1 reboot). As far as I'm concerned, that's pretty good output for a single decade, especially since those movies were all pretty solid. If they have the extra resources to produce some remakes that may or may not be good, sure. Whatever. If those numbers go down next decade, then yeah, I might take more issue with the practice of focusing so much on remakes. Until then, though, if we're getting both, I feel like it's kinda shrug-worthy at worst. Or perhaps more accurately, a situation of "your mileage may vary" at worst.
Very fine points addressed here. Remakes tend to mess up details present in the originals and only occasionally offer something new. Original works are usually made by people with a passion for their work, but remakes just feel like a desperate attempt to capture the charm of the works they were derived from. Unnecessary sequels (Pokemon) are in the same vein. Because of this, I like to stick to the originals most of the time.
This isn't even always the case. Some time ago, the first Dark Souls was delisted on Steam and replaced with its remastered version. I haven't played either game, but I do recall seeing complaints of the remastered version at around the time the game came out. I think both of these games offer multiplayer features, so this also probably caused a rift in the community. If I ever want to play the original, I'd now have to find it through less conventional means.
5353532
Yeah. Theoretically speaking, a good story is a good story regardless. I say "theoretically", because no story just springs out of a vacuum, pure and uninfluenced. What I mean is that there's nothing to say a remake has to be bad, or even unnecessary. I just feel that it's a lot easier to avoid certain traps with original works.
To say nothing of how the profit incentive tends to encourage the kind of "play-it-safe" outlook that makes remakes so attractive. If there's one advantage a casual fanficker enjoys over a studio exec, it's that I don't have to answer to anyone else if I don't produce reliably popular works frequently.
Well, you always hurt the one you love.
I'm glad you found the blog post interesting, at least.
5353538
I am entirely open to the charge that I'm being elitist here. For the most part, I do ignore the remakes, same as I ignored Disney's sequel craze way back. Between the frequent online exposure to these things, though (I read some film review sites), the growing tendency to raid the past and revive prior successes in other domains (cough-Star-Wars-sequels-cough), the fact that Disney is buying up damn near everything, and the fact that these things are just so profitable and set an unfortunate precedent... well, I have to admit I feel incredibly unhappy - even uneasy - about where all this is going.
5354203
I think a case could be made for the Tim Burton style of "reimagining", wherein someone remakes or adapts a prior story because they want to put an exciting new spin on it. Batman in general is a pretty good example of that, and there are things like good adaptations and good sequels and so on that show laziness isn't a given for something like that.
God, yes, I hate it when stuff like that happens. Incredibly infuriating.