Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Clash Of The Remakes: Do We Need Another 'Excalibur'?

By Mike Gillis

We've commented before on the growing and aggravating trend in Hollywood to remake perfectly good movies, sometimes for no other reason than to shift from black and white to color ("Psycho?"). Movies from a few years to a few deacdes old now get the makeover regularly.

Two recent entries into what I like to call the repeat genre remind me how barren the well of creativity in Hollywood has become. What's more, both remakes are themselves based on works hundreds of years old. And in both cases, I suspect, they serve no other purpose but to road test new and improved digital effects.

Bryan Singer, who leveraged the critical success of "The Usual Suspects" to carve out a career as a mediocre, big budget director, is now tackling a remake of John Boorman's "Excalibur."

According to various accounts, Singer secured the rights, along with Warner Brothers, by agreeing to conditions laid out by Boorman, presumably that the story not deviate from the original.

It's odd for a host of reasons, not least of which is that "Excalibur" was based on Sir Thomas Mallory's "Le Morte d'Arthur," if not in scope, certainly in mood (excepting a bit of explicit sex stripped from the PG version for schools). And I don't think one needs to buy the rights, since Mallory has been dead for five centuries. So, I'm guessing Singer and Warner Brothers bought a name more than a story.

What's worse, though, is that "Excalibur" is actually a fine movie. It may suffer a bit from the lingering hippie prism of the 70s (the film was released in 1981) but it's a showcase of solid acting (a young Gabriel Byrne and a mesmerizing Helen Mirren) and thoughful and calculated directing. Better than that, it's a movie built from the ground up, without heavy-handed special effects or digitally enhanced set pieces. The locations are real, and as in the original story, presented as characters. There are no sweeping battles between legions of computer generated soldiers here, only the brutality of medieval melee. (The battle scenes owe some gratitude to Orson Welles and "Chimes at Midnight"; see our review of 'Chimes' here.)

It's a shame that Boorman even shopped it around, if that's the case, and that we'll likely end up with X-Men go medieval.

Another remake, already complete and ready to hit theaters is "Clash of the Titans" (see the trailer below). I guess this one at least makes some sense. Personally, I'm a childhood fan of the original, which featured the stop-motion magic of Ray Harryhausen. Stop-motion animation, of course, has long since been supplanted by digital FX, but I have yet to be convinced, for all the advances in digital cinema wizardry, that we're closer to lifelike illusion. And, no, I don't think James Cameron's "Avatar" gets us there, either.

But at least "Clash of the Titans" is simple mythology -- well, an amalgamation -- and no matter how it's wrapped up, it's still an old story that's told again and again. The remake, which again seems to be only an attempt to commandeer a popular title, is aiming for a new generation of computer gamers and VFX aficionados. The original may have been campy, but it was slick camp that pushed some technical boundaries. The remake? Not so much.

If you don't agree with me on these, how about these remakes in the works?

"They Live"
"Creature from the Black Lagoon"
"Angel Heart"
"Last Tango in Paris"
"Near Dark"
"The Rocky Horror Picture Show"
"The Dirty Dozen"
"Conan the Barbarian"

See the trailer for "Clash of the Titans" here: