So there was this Ghostbusters remake/reboot that caused a lot of angst among various peoples. Since I’ve yet to see it (I’ll probably wait until it’s on Netflix.) I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another. But the existence of the film has made me ponder the idea of remakes/reboots in general; why they work (Battlestar Galactica, Casino Royale), limp past the post (Star Trek, Miami Vice), or explode in an incandescent glory of fail (The Wicker Man, The Day The Earth Stood Still.)
One obvious thing is that decent quality source material doesn’t guarantee the quality of a remake. In fact, it often seems that there is an inverse relationship; the better the original, the worse subsequent attempts seem. That may be simply a side effect of comparing the two. After all, it’s easier to improve on a crappy movie than improve on a great one, and making any movie worse is the easiest task of all. It also seems to me that the best remakes take the existing property and do something new with it (counter-example and failure: Psycho). Much is made of “gritty reboots,” so much so that it’s now a cliché, but there’s also the “campy reboot” that can also work/not work just as well (see Dragnet or Dark Shadows), what matters is that the change in tone gives a reason for the remake to exist. The gender flip in Ghostbusters obviously serves a similar meta-purpose, to change the story enough to justify the movie’s existence.
With that in mind, here are five stories I’d like to see getting remade.
#5 Starship Troopers (1997): This is probably the most fun movie that not only fails as an adaptation, but also fails spectacularly as a critique of the original story. Paul Verhoeven went so far over the top in the neo-Fascist imagery that the movie comes across as reveling in the propaganda it presumes it’s critiquing. Verhoeven does not have the subtlety of a Spinrad, and his move ended up less Iron Dream and more Triumph of the Will. There’s still a move to be made here, critiquing Heinlein’s vision or not, since the existing one doesn’t successfully critique the source or adapt it. Also, we need to have our powered armor!
#4 Silent Running (1972): This strange and dismal movie is the bastard love child of 2001: A Space Odyssey and every 70’s eco-disaster flick you can name. I’ll let the IMDB describe it for you:
In a future Earth barren of all flora and fauna, the planet’s ecosystems exist only in large pods attached to spacecraft. When word comes in that the pods are to be jettisoned into space and destroyed, most of the crew of the Valley Forge rejoice at the prospect of going home. Not so for botanist Freeman Lowell, who loves the forest and its creatures. He kills his colleagues taking the ship deep into space. Alone on the craft with his only companions being three small robots, Lowell revels in joys of nature.
Given that the movie is all about a twitchy Bruce Dern straight-up murdering his crewmates as he goes quietly insane, this would be great if remade as a horror flick.
#3 Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth (1967): Speaking of horror, this is a classic Hammer Films remake of an earlier TV drama, I would love to see this come full circle and have the folks at the BBC behind Doctor Who and Sherlock take a stab at bringing this gem back for a modern audience. This is, in my opinion, one of the scarier horror movies of the era, and manages it largely on atmospheric buildup of existential dread rarely seen outside Lovecraft or the Exorcist. The story has a climax that deserves to have the full apocalyptic treatment. (If you have time for the whole movie, it’s on YouTube.)
#2 Logan’s Run (1976): Another entry born of 70’s neuroses that might have some current relevance. A sort of mashup of Malthusian fears and the rise of youth culture, we have a sealed city where everyone is killed off at the age of thirty. (Well they’re told they’re being “renewed,” but we know better, don’t we?) There is a lot someone can do here with dependence on technology, authority, and the deliberate erasure of history. Just, please, change the ending so it isn’t the hero talking the computer into catastrophicly short circuiting.
#1 The Starlost (1973): This has to be one of the saddest missed opportunities in Science Fiction history. The premise came from Harlan Ellison. From Wikipedia:
The show’s setting is a huge generational colony spacecraft called Earthship Ark, which has gone off course. Many of the descendants of the original crew and colonists are unaware, however, that they are aboard a ship.
They had Ben Bova as a science advisor, they had a pilot script “Phoenix Without Ashes” that won Ellison a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. . . and the producers completely screwed the pooch. By the time the filming started, technical snafus, budget cuts and dumbing down of the scripts caused Harlan to bail and have his name removed from the project. This is a damn shame. I don’t know who has the rights, but if anything deserves to have a Battlestar Galatica-style revival, it’s this. This whole premise is made for the current style of “mystery-box” world-building in genre television.