Recycling isn't the answer
Sara Gregory
Issue date: 9/30/09 Section: The Edge
While surfing the basic cable stations today, I happened to come across an advertisement for "Fame." Remembering the original makes it hard to take this remake seriously.
Then I got to wondering - exactly how many movies released in the past decade have been remakes? It seems like a lot, so I checked out the trusty Wikipedia list of remade films.
Out of 650 listed remade films, over half of them have been produced in the last decade. 357 remade movies were released in the last 20 years, a statistic that seems to only be increasing exponentially.
This number makes sense, with new technology we can see stories like we've never seen them before. For instance, Tim Burton's take on "Alice in Wonderland" in 2010 will surely be different from Disney's.
Despite the intent of remade movies, it starts to feel like we're just recycling the same stories over and over again. How many times will we rewatch Batman, Superman and Spiderman before we die?
It's like we just decided as a film industry that all the good plots have already been made. Since we can't produce anything better, we should just improve them.
Well, I'm bored. Technology can only go so far, and if I see another movie like "Fame" I'll puke. I'm tired of sequels, and I'm tired of remakes.
If you reasonably conclude that every person on Earth has a different story, then there are at least billions of unheard stories out there. And that's not counting fictional plots.
So why are we just reprocessing old stories? There's more than enough creativity out there, yet we seldom see a legitimately original film.
It just seems like the industry has taken over the art, yet again. I want a film industry that reflects the people, not the technology that allowed us to copy past art.
It's not that there have been no original films in the past decade or that the remakes and sequels are all bad, it's the concept. We need to stop recycling past glories and create our own.
Then I got to wondering - exactly how many movies released in the past decade have been remakes? It seems like a lot, so I checked out the trusty Wikipedia list of remade films.
Out of 650 listed remade films, over half of them have been produced in the last decade. 357 remade movies were released in the last 20 years, a statistic that seems to only be increasing exponentially.
This number makes sense, with new technology we can see stories like we've never seen them before. For instance, Tim Burton's take on "Alice in Wonderland" in 2010 will surely be different from Disney's.
Despite the intent of remade movies, it starts to feel like we're just recycling the same stories over and over again. How many times will we rewatch Batman, Superman and Spiderman before we die?
It's like we just decided as a film industry that all the good plots have already been made. Since we can't produce anything better, we should just improve them.
Well, I'm bored. Technology can only go so far, and if I see another movie like "Fame" I'll puke. I'm tired of sequels, and I'm tired of remakes.
If you reasonably conclude that every person on Earth has a different story, then there are at least billions of unheard stories out there. And that's not counting fictional plots.
So why are we just reprocessing old stories? There's more than enough creativity out there, yet we seldom see a legitimately original film.
It just seems like the industry has taken over the art, yet again. I want a film industry that reflects the people, not the technology that allowed us to copy past art.
It's not that there have been no original films in the past decade or that the remakes and sequels are all bad, it's the concept. We need to stop recycling past glories and create our own.
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