Memento was adapted from a story written by Jonathan Nolan, the director’s brother. I’m not sure when he wrote the story exactly, but I’m pretty sure he was inspired by a newspaper article about a man with retrograde amnesia. Blank Slate doesn’t enter into the picture. On the other hand, 50 First Dates might seem to owe something to Memento.
And Caboblanco. And Havana.
Aliens owes more than a little to Them!
And I’ve always thought the plot similarities between The Third Man and Renoir’s earlier The Crime of Monsieur Lange were particularly uncanny (though the tones couldn’t be more farther apart).
8 mile is Purple Rain. Hell, a lot of movies are Purple Rain, and Purple Rain is probably something older that I haven’t seen.
Don’t forget about the latest big remake - A Bug’s Life
I’ve heard this before, but I don’t buy it. The similarity comes from the idea of fighting a colony of hive insects, but beyond that there’s not a lot of similarity. The little girl in trouble at the beginning of them! disappears right away, unlike Newt, and she was a staple of 1950s monster flicks (see , for instance, The Monolith Monsters).
I think Aliens owes a lot more to Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers, which it’s arguably a better version of than Veerhoeven’s film.
I must protest, sir! The talking spaceship in Battle Beyond the Stars did not have tits. It was a giant flying uterus with fallopian tubes for cannons.
I hate to disagree with you. Cal, but Aliens doesn’t owe squat to Starship Troopers! The only connection between the two is that both feature an alien race that has a hard black exoskeleton. There is no similarity in their behaviors, life cycle, motivations, or anything.
Or is the connection that both movies feature soldiers in spaceships? Again, not even close!
You might just as well say that The Empire Strikes Back is a remake of Dune because Jabba the Hutt is a large worm-like creature and Dune has sandworms - or, alternatively, because the soldiers in both armies in wear a full-body suit!
Or have I totally missed something?
Velvet Goldmine doesn’t have the same plot as Citizen Kane, but it borrows its structure, several shots and other visual elements, and some of the basic events. In Velvet Goldmine the Charles Foster Kane character is a Bowie-esque glam rock star, and the reporter is doing a “whatever happened to” piece about him.
There’s no Rosebud, though.
Neurological nitpick: That’s anterograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is the more familiar soap opera kind of amnesia, where people lose their memory of the past. Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new long-term memories.
I too doubt Clean Slate had anything to do with Memento, and “man suffers from anterograde amnesia” isn’t a plot anyway. It’s barely even a premise. I haven’t seen Clean Slate, but glancing through the IMDB info it appears to be about a professional detective trying to deal with his memory problem in preparation for testifying at a trial. Memento is about an ordinary man turned vigilante who’s trying to solve his wife’s murder and avenge her death, despite his memory problem. Those aren’t totally dissimilar plots, but neither are they remarkably similar once you look past the fact that the main characters suffer from the same neurological problem.
I almost forgot this one. I’m sure it’s a coincidence (or rather, the result of being inspired by the same classic horror films), but The Rocky Horror Picture Show has the same basic plot as MST3K favorite Manos: The Hand of Fate.
Naahh – disciplined, competent Space Marines with integrated weapons facing an army of Bugs organized into hives. And Cameron is a big SF fan and good at portraying it. What I meant was that Aliens conveyed the believability and feel of ST infinitely better than Veerhoeven’s exercise did. Not to be taken literally.
*'Assault on Precinct 13" is not so much a remake as a riff on an old familiar plot: The fort is surrounded, and the defenders have to fight off the attackers and deal with possible traitors in their midst.
Howard Hawks did versions of this so often that after John Wayne starred for him in “Rio Bravo” (1959) and “El Dorado” (1966), he told Wayne he was sending over a script for “Rio Lobo,” and Wayne told him, “I’ll make it, but I don’t need to read it. We’ve already made it twice.”*
From here.
It did, of course, offer elements from NotLD as well. 
Every American film that has made more than $5.00 has been remade in Bollywood.
Throw in a couple of songs, subtract out most of the sex, and throw in a family issue and you’re all set.
Samurai, perchance, Cal. But my first impression lo those many years ago was that Vader’s helmet was a passing attempt at getting some mileage from the Nazi soldiers ‘coalscuttle’ style helmet.
And the ship in Battle Beyond the Stars? Clearly boobies.
Jonathan Chance, you just ain’t seen enough samurai helmets:
http://www.quanonline.com/military/military_reference/japanese/samurai_helmet_drawing.html
Since Lucas was lifting from Kurasawa, it seems likely to me that his borrowing from Japanese culture. But he did take a lot from WWII movies as well.
“Honeymoon in Vegas” and “Indecent Proposal”.
Really? Were the Seven Samurai and the Magnificent seven dudes actually out-of-work entertainers mistaken for itinerant enforcers/paladins?
A Bug’s Life is more properly reminiscent of The Three Amigos.
I heard that The Wizard of Oz was some kind of homage to Dark Side of the Moon, but I wouldn’t know about that.
The Core was Armageddon inside out.
Both were pieces of crap, BTW. What was Hillary Swank thinking?
I’ll agree with fusoya about A Bug’s Life owing a big debt to Seven Samurai – Village about to be beseiged by marauders whjo steal their food send out rep(s) to find warriors to protect them. The warriors end up interacting with the community, and the community finds the strength within itself to fight the intruders themselves. The “circus bugs” bit was original with ABL>
I haven’t seen Three Amigos, but if it’s as similar as this, it seems another candidate for ripping off Seven Samurai.
Probably, “WOOHOO! I’m getting paid for this!”
Not like I don’t agree with you. But the angularity of Vader’s helmet always struck me as more Germanic (and therefore more potentially threatening to a western audience of the 1970s) than Japanese.
Three Amigos is pretty much exactly what you described. Except, in the Three Amigos, they were silent-film stars. So the “circus bugs” bit wasn’t so much original either. Also, I would include Galaxy Quest on the list of Seven Samurai ripoffs…