First of all, these movies are never as good as the originals – no exceptions. I know everyone raved about Scorsese’s adaptation of Infernal Affairs into the hit movie The Departed, but, even though it was a decent (and Academy Award winning) movie in its own right (and I happen to love Scorsese) it still did not carry the same punch that the original did.
Another movie that simply did not need to be remade was the amazing Swedish vampire flick
Let the Right One In. What emerged from Hollywood was pretty much the same film, except without the directorial excellence. Let Me In was like a decaffeinated version of the original.
The worst is the seemingly endless horde of Japanese, Korean and Chinese horror flicks that keep getting reprocessed for sale. Much of what makes those scary films scary is the cultural context involved. The nuances are lost in translation and what started as something more psychological (a movie like Pulse, for example) ends up turning into screaming teenagers and the “murder-by-numbers” cliché format that movie studios love to churn out.
Now Hollywood is set to commit further blasphemy by letting Spike Lee remake Park Chan-wook’s masterpiece Oldboy. Chances are that curiosity will get the best of me and I will saunter down to the theater and take in the new version when it gets released, but I am already predisposed toward the opinion that it will never measure up to the original.
It’s nice that famous directors are seeing these great films and being inspired to redo them within their own cultural context, but perhaps they should resist the temptation to devour someone else’s work and stick to making something original and unique to them.