Just a little biweekly poll here at FTS, just a little question of This or That? What do you prefer and why? You can take any reasoning you want but you must chose one over the other. The poll can also be found on the sidebar of the blog page.
In the last This or That poll, British beauty Kate Beckinsale won over her Total Recall costar Jessica Biel with a 18-12 victory. The new match-up might be a tough nut to crack:
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VOTE NOW! This or That?
This or That? Remakes or Reboots
- REBOOTS (69%, 11 Votes)
- REMAKES (31%, 5 Votes)
Total Voters: 16
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I’m going to give the edge to reboot, because the implication with a reboot is that they are going to attempt to improve on a movie and not just remake it shot for shot. No one makes a reboot to makes a worse movie, but remakes just imply a cash grab.
I prefer reboots because they suggest the filmmaker wants to improve on the original (usually with the intention of opening something up for a sequel/franchise), but sometimes remakes actually are better than the originals. They’ve remade Count of Monte Cristo dozens of times, but I loved the Jim Caviezel version better than the others I’d seen. (though I guess you COULD call it a reboot, since even the older movies were adaptations of a book.. hmm)
What’s difficult about this poll is that functionally, reboots and remakes do the exact same thing: they let studios cheat with stories by retelling the same ones over and over again under the guise of lending the narrative a fresh perspective. Most of the time, it’s a bullshit sentiment that resonates not one iota in the finished product. Sometimes, of course, we get good reboots (and while I’m not crazy about Nolan’s Batman films, Batman Begins far and away exceeds the quality of the reboot crop) and remakes (The Departed, though I still prefer the original films). But I think those films are the exceptions that prove the rule– remakes and reboots are garbage. (Note that when we point to examples of good films under both categories, we’re talking about Nolan and Scorsese.)
If I have to choose between one or the other, I think I’m going to choose “remake”. The idea of a remake is far less insulting to me than a reboot, since again, most reboots wind up just being rehashes of the story they’re rebooting. The best example of rebooting that I can think of outside of Nolan would be The Incredible Hulk, which doesn’t tell the full origin story– whereas Marc Webb does exactly that in that horrible Spider-Man reboot. Basically, rebooting limits itself based on verbiage; the idea is to restart a franchise from square one, and therefore tell the exact same story. Sure, details can differ, but going back to Spider-Man, how is it really all that different from what Raimi did ten years ago?
A remake, on the other hand, is much more open-ended, and while most remakes end up being the same film that the studio wants to remake (because why would they change it? They’re obviously remaking it because it makes financial sense for them to do so, therefore they’re going to screw with the films they remake as little as possible except to make them more palatable for a mainstream audience), the very term “remake” suggests a greater amount of possibility and room for creativity. You could remake a movie like Oldboy and have it be vastly different from the original film without eradicating the connective tissue that binds them together. (Note that in the case of Oldboy, this is especially true, since that film was adapted from a Japanese manga which is SIGNIFICANTLY different from the film in really big, tangible, thematic ways.)