Opinion: It’s time to look at remakes differently
Some people — myself included — seem to be burned out on the ever-flowing stream of adaptations, sequels and remakes that have been trickling out of Hollywood for the last decade or so.
I understand the criticism aimed toward remakes in particular, especially the claim that they are the result of a drive to generate profit without investing the relatively more intense consumption of time and resources required to flesh out a new piece of intellectual property.
However, people are quick to rattle their sabers once a new remake is announced. Anyone aware of the Twitter dissent regarding the announcement that “The Princess Bride” is slated to be remade will probably agree.
People can be too harsh towards the idea of remaking a pre-existing piece of intellectual property. In a world where art is interpreted and reinterpreted more than ever, what’s the harm in allowing someone to give life to their perspective of a work?
Allow me to backtrack slightly — I realize that some remakes are just plain bad, and can’t manage to hold a candle to the original. For every remake that manages to outshine the original in every way — think John Carpenter’s “The Thing” — there seems to be a sprawling mass of garbage remakes churned out by production companies.
Regardless, recent remakes of “Aladdin,” “The Lion King” and “Dumbo” haven’t interested me enough to warrant a trip to the theater, though I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with their existence.
Personally, I’d rather see Disney continue where “The Princess and the Frog” left off and return to traditional animation for a while.
Could the live-action remakes be bad? Possibly, but I can’t exactly weigh in on them considering I haven’t made the time to watch them.
What I’m getting at here is whether or not a given remake is bad is not dependent upon the source material or at least shouldn’t be. Is 1994’s “The Lion King” good? I’d like to think so, but even if it is, it isn’t sacred. If the creative minds at Disney wish to remake any of their IPs, they’re free to do so, and the criticism of the ensuing product shouldn’t be dependent upon whether or not it “respects” the original film.
Something that’s easy to forget amid the tide of Twitter outrage is the medium non-specificity of remakes — movies aren’t the only things being remade these days.
The medium that perhaps best lends itself to remakes is likely that of video games simply due to the overwhelming reliance upon technology.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the graphical difference between The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, a 1993 game for the Nintendo Game Boy, and its remake of the same name that released last month for the Nintendo Switch.
I’m not going to weigh in on whether the graphics are better in either version; however, it should be quite obvious that the remake was created without the tight graphical limitations of 90’s video game hardware.
Video game remakes tend to provide old classics with newfound accessibility on account of more palatable graphics, often with updated music and tweaked mechanics, which is ultimately for the best.
The medium with the coarsest relationship with the concept of remakes is definitely the written word; for the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on literature.
There isn’t anything quite analogous to a remake for literature unless you count the publishing of revised editions of a given book. Otherwise, the closest thing to a remake of literature is fan-fiction. Fanfiction elicits the same spectrum of reactions from fans of a piece of source material, from outrage to overjoyed comments.
If anything, I wish people were more open to the interpretive spirit of fan-fiction, even if much of it can end up being poorly written — a fact that’s easily forgivable considering that many writers start out writing fan-fiction.
Let’s stop treating remakes as if they’re inherently bad or inferior purely because they re-examine an IP, and instead assess them as pieces of media rather than basing our assessments on a sliding scale of homage to an older work.
