A quick scan of Warner Bors. upcoming releases shows that the company, since it's change of leadership, is planning to remake every film you've ever fucking seen.
Alright, I'm exaggerating, but really, only slightly.
The upcoming slate of remakes is mind boggling, from the pointless and tacky ("Lethal Weapon", "Tarzan") to the outright sacrilegious ("The Wild Bunch", and, pun retroactively intended, "Oh, God!")
So, obviously, everyone, everywhere is pissed off. It's understandable.
A hundred years ago, people would go and see films just for the novelty of seeing a moving picture on a screen. Then it was the novelty of a moving picture with sound, or at least sound that wasn't some asshole over-playing a piano.
Then there was the novelty of colour, and then everyone was more concerned with blowing up Germany than art, so most of the films of the time became about blowing up Germans, or stabbing the Japanese with a bayonet.
Once that fell out of fashion (and bear in mind, the actual act of stabbing a Japanese person to death with a bayonet fell out of favour long before movies on the same subject did), movies started to focus on the sci-fi future promised by - and the paranoia that came with - the atomic age. Movies were either about spacemen ("Forbidden Planet"), invasion by Communists who happened to be spacemen ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers") or monsters created by (probably communist) radiation ("Them!", "Godzilla.")
Around this time, studios realised that, when not making good films, they could turn out any old shit they felt like and people would still go and see it because hell, what else was there to do? A typical day in the fifties was 30% fear of nuclear annihilation, 10% drinking too much, 10% smoking, 5% beating your wife and 50% waiting for the internet to be invented. It must have been hell. People who didn't have Call of Duty games had to actually go out and shoot real foreigners, a trait which is yet to be entirely bred out of western society. (Last time the Playstation network went down, they killed Bin Laden. I'm just saying...)
So, escapism being the order of the day, people would go and watch a movie just to kill time, and that's a lesson that film makers have never gotten over.
Even a few years ago, studios were still pumping out films left and right that had the basic premise of "Here are some popular actors. Give us money to look at them."
Lately, that bubble hasn't so much burst as detonated violently in the faces of executives, leaving them burned and whimpering in various corners.
It turns out that what the movie going public wants to see is intelligent, exciting, well made material.
As that's incredibly hard to make, the studios have just decided to take other material they know we like and give it to us again, with different wrappers. Constant sequels and remakes, for ever and ever, amen.
It's frustrating, it's cynical, but it is at least understandable, and maybe the real issue is this: Nowhere in the cycle of cinema, from it's inception right up to, well, "Inception", did we allow stories to take on the classical qualities of myth.
Sure, there are plenty of franchises, or even single films, with mythical components, but the truly iconic characters in cinema, from Tarzan to Riggs & Murtaugh to everyone else who's about to be "re-imagined", all lack one fundamental component that truly mythological characters lack: They don't die.
For all the stories written about, say, King Arthur, or Hercules, or Robin Hood, the mythology always includes a death. It's taken as cannon that these characters died in established ways.
In modern storytelling, characters don't ever have deaths. At least, long-running ones don't. Hollywood is a culture of youth-worship and dream fulfillment; they're afraid of death and aging as a society. Very few films ever have the balls to look at death at all. "Unforgiven" confronted the idea of heroes fading and the inevitability of mortality, but, brilliant though it was, even Eastwood's masterpiece stopped short of showing our hero dying. Like Rocky Balboa after him, or Ethan Edwards before him, at the end of "Unforgiven", Clint's character just fades away.
So what does Hollywood do, as a society, when telling stories solely about characters we already know, and already paid money to see? It has to start over, again and again, until we have a hundred movies explaining where a character came from, but never any that show where they finish.
Surely, I can't be the only one who wants to see a movie where an established hero dies, and gives a flagging and aged series a bit of dignity in the process? I'd much rather see characters die well than return badly every few years.
(This article will be re-posted next year, with some words changed and a better looking author.)
[A thought, as I'm about to publish: The Wild Bunch did die in mythic fashion, but that's one more reason not to fucking re-make it.]
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