Well, I got a chance to see the first two episodes of the new Star Trek and here are my thoughts: If you obsess about canon, this series will trigger you hard. There is no way you can sensibly integrate this into the same universe as TOS without serious mental Read more…
I’m two episodes further along than I was my last post. And damn. [POTENTIAL SPOILERS] Luke Cage manages a mid-story twist that’s on a par with the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or the shower scene in Psycho. It’s all the more impressive because it’s not an information reveal— Read more…
I’m only five episodes into Luke Cage and I think I can say Marvel’s managed to hit it out of the park again. Like the prior two Netflix series, Daredevil and Jessica Jones, Luke Cage manages to draw on all the strengths of the MCU in a smaller-scope more street-level Read more…
Just finished watching Stranger Things on Netflix, and it is fantastic. By now you’ve probably heard that it is a nostalgic throwback to 1980’s cinema, and you’ve probably heard people name-drop Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and John Carpenter when describing it. This is all true; we have a host of Read more…
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.
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There is a very old trope in SF, epitomized in the novel Slan by A. E. van Vogt, where a subset of humanity “evolves” some form of mental/psychic gift and is subsequently persecuted by the majority “normal” population. It’s a theme particularly suited to expressing alienation, and the term “Fans Read more…
Two things converged in my head recently. I didn’t comment about the whole Game of Thrones rape kerfuffle last month. Mostly because I don’t watch Game of Thrones. But the controversy about it seemed (to me) to spring from a deep conflict between the contemporary ethos of sexual morality and a fiction portraying a Read more…
I’ve just recently started catching up with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on Netflix, and I started thinking about how well Marvel has done with its properties since Iron Man came out all the way back in 2008. A lot has been said already about the “shared universe” idea, and how “revolutionarily” Read more…
Over at Mighty God-King we have a critique of the new series, The Event. Now, I haven’t seen the show, and from what I’ve been reading about it, I don’t have any desire to, but MGK’s post brings up some very good points that are not just applicable to series Read more…
I put these on Facebook, but I figured they also rated a spot on the blog.