With a new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still due in theatres this week and sequels to The Terminator and Transformers on the horizon (and a remake of Rosemary's Baby threatened) it is time for us to consider the peculiar world of the remake (or "reimagining").One wonders, with so much great material out there that's never been done (like the stuff produced by the members of this group), why do filmmakers continue to do the same stories over and over (and in some cases, over)? The reasoning is contradictory: filmmakers want to simultaneously court the "built-in audience" from the original while making a "new" movie “accessible to those unfamiliar" with the source material. And in this paradoxical process, they invariably trash everything you liked about the original, confuse the newcomers and then wonder why their megabuck project sank.(Perfect example: The Wild Wild West. The most endearing thing about the original (aside from Robert Conrad's athleticism and sprayed-on outfits) was the camaraderie between Jim (the Old West 007) and Artie (his steampunk Q). Turning them into Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in the first Lethal Weapon film removed whatever chance this badly-conceived project had of redeeming itself.)What follows is a list of movies where their money and our time could have been saved had somebody pulled the plug.
  • Planet of the Apes: Sure, the makeup was better and the way the apes moved was cool but the story was a mess and the ending didn't have the same punch as the original's. (And Zira looked too much like Michael Jackson.)
  • Psycho: I’m not really a fan of this movie anyway; I think it’s not as great as the sum of its parts: Janet Leigh's and Anthony Perkins' performances, Bernard Hermann's score, the shower scene... and that's about it. Maybe it was all shocking in 1960 but it's pretty much cliché today. A scene-for-scene color remake adds nothing.
  • Godzilla: Forget Why would Godzilla rip open a fishing vessel when there are all those fish swimming around in the sea; forget the Spielberg rip-offs and no explanation why Godzilla would swim all the way to New York City to nest or how they evacuated Manhattan completely in a couple of hours. The part that bothered me was using a home pregnancy test to find out Godzilla was pregnant.
  • Superman Returns: To 1978 where the make the same movie again. The effects are better but too many subplots and couldn't they come up with a better crime?
  • The Stepford Wives: Was the remake supposed to be a satire? And if so, of what? And that tacked-on double "happy ending..." I miss the 70s, when you could have a movie with a downer ending that did not mean it would be cleared up in the sequel.
  • The Andromeda Strain: What was a taught techno-thriller in the original version became a lame melodrama in this remake. Did we really need the subplots with the troubled teen, the reporter, the president? And that whole stopping the bomb sequence? How did this get an Emmy nomination?
  • I Am Legend: Of the three versions of this film (so far), my favorite is still Charleston Heston's (The Omega Man, 1972). And they want to do prequels?
  • Poseidon: They remade The Poseidon Adventure not once but twice. The ship was capsized by terrorist’s bombs in the 2005 TV version and by a rogue wave in the theatrical release the following year. The "making of" featurettes on the DVD were more interesting that the film.
  • The Mission: Impossible series: I had a big problem with turning Jim Phelps into a traitor (M:I). I don't remember much about M:I-2 except a sexist Hannibal Lecter as the head of IMF (and why would a British guy head up an American agency?), Thandie Newton, disease and breaking into a building—again. M:I:III should have been called Male-ias because it resembled nothing so closely as an episode of the Jennifer Garner series, and an average one at that.
  • The less said about Death Race, the better.

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