Right. Alien (the first one) was a remake of **It! The Terror From Beyond Space. ** Wasn’t Them! the one about the giant ants in the sewers of Los Angeles?
And while Sorcerer may not have lived up to The Wages of Fear, it was far from useless. I thought the truck stunts were absolutley astounding, and the movie also introduced me to Tangerine Dream!
Cripes! All this time I’ve had this nickname, and I never knew it was a brand of yogurt!
Um, I mean yes, it’s great yogurt, and I work hard to keep it great, so make sure your kids appreciate it, all right? 
I may not have emphasized enough how much I loved Logan’s Run at first, and even after they get out the line “That must be what it looks like to be old” really is a good one. If I were casting it today I would probably want Jude Law for Logan Five and Natascha McElhone for Jessica Six.
I’m one of the few people that liked the Harrison Ford/Greg Kinnear/Julia Ormond remake of Sabrina. I would put that in the good remake of a good original category.
Not better, but good.
I read today that Jackie Chan will be remaking Jerry Lewis’s The Bellhop. I like some Lewis movies, but Bellhop was not one of them. Plus I am left wondering if this means Jackie won’t be doing martial arts.
Let’s see…
Family taken out by mysterious horde of infesting monsters, leaving wide-eyed semi-catatonic little girl as sole witness. Check
The havoc the monsters create includes stowing away on a vessel and wiping out the crew. Check
To wipe out the horde, a co-ed group of scientists and military types (check) must infiltrate the nest located in a labyrinth of dank tunnels (check) until they encounter the queen, which they destroy (using a combination of firepower and flame throwers), but not before she inflicts casualties upon our heroic group (check)
Though it may not be a “formal” remake, the Cameron film still does owe an awful lot to the earlier movie. “Vastly different”?–not really (unless you consider The Magnificent Seven “vastly different” from The Seven Samurai).
Archive Guy:
Selectively choosing your points doesn’t make it a remake. I’m reminded of the synopsis of “Wizard of Oz” that reads something like “A Girl from Kansas comes into town and kills, then takes up with three loners to kill again.” Aliens resembles {B]Them!** because they are monster flicks with the same basic imperative (“Kill it before it reproduces!” ), and because Cameron chose to emphasize the insect-like nature of the Alien beasts. But that’s far from a remake.
Gone in Sixty Seconds benifted from better filming and technology.
I don’t want to argue with you, but I am not merely “selectively choosing” points–not only is the story trajectory similar (granted, a convention of the genre), but many of the specific story details and the way they are introduced to the story are extremely similar. My examples weren’t general (like your bad WoZ analogy) but rather specific in their details. Like I said, it’s not a remake in the traditional sense, but for you to assert that they’re “vastly different” is, well, not really accurate.
But whatever–we’re at an impasse I guess.
Get Carter was terrible. The original trailer was included with the DVD, showing Michael Caine as Carter. It looked horrendous. I won’t even try to find the original 70’s flick.
The IMDb seems to agree with Arc:
A remake can vary from the original considerably in plot. I don’t think any degree of plot similarity alone should label a movie “remake,” although in some cases it might warrant the label “ripoff.”
I think a remake is more a movie about the same protagonist(s) that takes place at the same time as the original movie (so it’s neither a sequel nor a prequel). Basically, a movie that could not take place in the same reality with the previous movie.
I’ve heard that A Fistful of Dollars copies Yojimbo almost shot for shot, but I still wouldn’t call it a “remake” because Mifune’s character and Eastwood’s clearly are not the same person, and the storyline of one movie does not contradict the storyline of the other.
The Granger Prisoner of Zenda is what I would call a remake because they’re both about Rudolf Rassendyl (sp?) impersonating the king, and they’re clearly set at the same time (i.e. we’re not supposed to believe that he impersonated the king twice).
My personal favorite candidate for a remake would be * All Quiet on the Western Front *. THe 30’s version is good, but suffers from the technology of the time (although what they did with it was excellent, and how it was improved with remastering (gee, but the one-track sound was so…authentic?)
The 70’s TV movie was also good, but suffers from a low explosives budget, I was never quite convinced this was WW1 they were in during the battle scenes. The cast, while excellent, was all too ‘British’ for my tastes. The earlier cast is very earnest, but a bit hackneyed.
Done in a hard-hitting ‘First 30 minutes of SPR’ with good actors and a better adherence to the book, I think this is due for a remake. Not exactly summer movie material, though.
Archive Guy:
I will, indeed, agree to disagree. I must admit that there are ore similarities than I’d expected, and interesting ones at that, but I stand by my “vastly”.
I still haven’t seen 12 Monkeys, believe it or not, but I have seen La Jetee, which is a fascinating flick in many ways.
Just to keep things going, I’m going to post a new one.
Fist Of Fury (US title “The Chinese Connection”). starring Bruce Lee
Fist of Legend starring Jet Li
The original starred Bruce Lee, and it was his first good movie. The remake, with Jet Li, is undeniably superior in almost every aspect. In detail:
Look: “Legend” looks better. This is partly due to better film techniques used in China in the 90’s compared to Hong Kong in the 70’s. Set design, costumes, etc., all look better in “Legend”.
Story: Both have the old martial arts movie plot of “You killed my master, I must get revenge”, but “Legend” adds elements that make for a better story. There are many, but to illustrate. In “Fury” Lee must leave the school because he is wanted by the police for beating up a Japanese shodan school. In “Legend” Li leaves the school because those in the school refuse to accept his Japanese girlfriend, despite having earlier accepted the prostitute girlfriend of another master. This brings up another difference.
Racism: In “Fury”, all of the Japanese are bad guys, and the Chinese are good guys, with the one exception being a Chinese translator, who is a Japanese sycophant. He is a traitor to his people. In “Legend”, Li’s Japanese girlfriend sacrifices her honor to save Li in court. The school’s racism at rejecting her due to being Japanese is portrayed as small-minded. Li is willing to abandon the school to be with her–he cares more about who she is as a person than her race. The high Japanese master is portrayed as an honorable man, and he actually teaches Li what he needs to know to defeat the dishonorable Japanese general. “Fury” has no honorable Japanese, and no dishonorable Chinese.
Fight scenes: The fight scenes in “Fury” are no doubt above par for the time. Every fight scene in “Legend” is great; this film is arguable second only to Drunken Master 2. The final fight scene in “Legend” is the best one-on-one fight scence ever recorded on film. Yuen Wo Ping is the master when it comes to fight coreography; Lo Wei was merely competent.
Lead: Bruce Lee or Jet Li. Neither is much of an actor; I think Li is a bit more convincing dramatically, and Lee could not play a love scene. But what we care about is how they play a fight scene. I give it a toss up.
Final Tally: Legend–4, Fury–0, Tie–1.
Re: Logan’s Run. While I too saw the film at twelve and still have images of it in my subconscious (plus Jenny Agutter, god what a talented and beautiful woman) and consider it the film that did for me what Star Wars did for the other kids a couple years later, it is not Nolan and Johnson’s (book authors) Logan by a long shot.
So, no remake, but rather a fresh adaptation of the novel. The novel has one hell of a twist/spoiler concerning the identity of the old man, Ballard, which I won’t reveal.
Plus I want to see what the Crazy Horse statue will look like on film, finished.
Sir Rhosis
Don’t be so quick to shun the Michael Caine version. It’s very British but once you get into the pace, it is quite good. (not that being British is bad, but I think some of our younger dopers sometimes don’t always understand the plot-driven film [a trait of British films of the 60s and 70s]as opposed to action-driven films of today.)Note to self:You have now managed to insult both the British and young people, do you really want to continue?
I agree with many of the other posters, but some of the positives that I would echo are Maltese Falcon and Heavan Can Wait.
Generally speaking I believe that movies should not be remade merely because of technical advances in film making. It has been my observation that in the cases that this has been done, the people in charge try to make technology the star. Look at the remakes of The Mummy, King Kong, and Godzilla.
I do think that silent to talking films may be the exception to this generalization. But in a lot of ways the talkie versions did little more than share a title and a couple of characters with its silent counterpart. Zorro, Hunchback of Notra Dame, Three Musketeers.
I think movies become great because of a unique chemistry among actors, script, director and sometimes location. You try to tamper with that chemistry and you lose something. Bogart was the essense of Casablanca, Grant and Hepburn the essense of Charade, McQueen was it for the Getaway. It’s like recreating a rose or something. Yeah, you can make it, but it wouldn’t be the same and the recreation would always suffer in comparison.