I personally liked the Dune miniseries. I actually bought the DVD.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/
I’m not sure if a good remake of Starship Trooper can be made. When you come down to it, it is a very talky book, with action almost as filler.
Yes, but with 12,500 cores that is 25,000 frames per day. They could render the whole movie in a week. Of course they probably end up rendering the movie several times for 2d and 3d and DVD and Blu-ray. If you want the best possible results, then you can’t just thunk it down.
I expect we will see an announcement one day that they are using a million cores to render one movie.
IIRC, TRON used a Perkin-Elmer 8/32 to render the frames. Starfighter used a Cray-1, which was the most powerful computer available back then. Even a Cray-1 looks like a pocket calculator compared to a single core on a modern super-computer.
Really? But it wasn’t that complex!
ETA: My first rendering was of a simple wheel lug and it took 20 minutes on a Saturday and 45 if there were other people on the system. Twenty years later an entire home theater, with multiple light sources, took 45 seconds, and that would be slow today. Pixar wasn’t even shooting for photorealism.
Yup. There was a recent Cracked article that made a very good point: the goal of the prequels should have been to answer one question: how did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? Everything else (the droids, the trade federation, Chewbacca, etc.) is unimportant.
The sad thing is that the clone wars(mentioned by name by Obi in ANH) were a perfect chance to show us how Anakin became Vader, you had millions of slaves being used as cannon fodder(Anakin was a slave remember) entire worlds engulfed in war, billions of civilians slaughtered, the human suffering would be unbelievable. That would be the perfect conditions to twist and warp someone’s morals, instead Lucas put goofy slapstick droids on screen.
Not just unimportant, it ruined the movies. Here’s the article, scroll down to the Star Wars prequel part. I couldn’t watch anymore after Phantom Menace, but even in that movie I thought it was ridiculous that I was seeing the same droids, etc. as I had watched in a movie set, what, 100 years later or something.
That article made a wonderful point: you should be sad that Anakin turns into Vader, not just thinking, “Jesus, will this asshole just shut up about his sandy love?” and being delighted when instead he puts on a Vader suit and does his angry gorilla impression. Anakin’s corruption–and his fight with Obi Wan–should break your heart.
Definite opportunity for a remake.
As for me, I’d love to see Aardman productions (or possibly Pixar, although I don’t think either of them do adaptations) take on The Tale of Despereaux. It’s among my favorite children’s books of all time, but it needs handling by someone with a soul, who can deal with oddball heroes without turning them into wisecracking Indiana Jones knockoffs.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned War of the Worlds, this time done as a period piece as Wells envisioned it.
In general I hate the idea of re-making movies, only because, as Mr. Shalit noted, they tend to only remake movies that were already very good. That said, there’s a couple that I wouldnt mind seeing remade, because I think the first version had poor production value and/or totally missed the point of the story:
Wicked City was a confusing mess of a narrative.
Krull had some great cinematography, but the story and acting just lacked too much. With some re-writing this could have been a terrific movie.
Bachelor Party was a fun enough movie in it’s time, but today it looks and feels horribly dated. As long as Judd Apatow had nothing to do with it, this could be a decent movie to remake.
House is another '80s flick that is good for it’s time, but frankly, we’ve so far past this and raised the bar for both humor and horror so high nowadays, it could do with an update. The basic story is still solid, tho.
My last one is an animated film that had a predecessor but completely missed the point of not only that movie, but also it’s very reason for being: Heavy Metal 2000. Look, Julie Strain is a terrific lady: she’s beautiful, sexy, got a great sense of humor and she loves sci-fi. But making a movie to showcase her under the cover of making a movie for fans of the magazine was a shitty thing to do. Also, since the first movie was so flawed, many of us thought this would be a chance to do an anthology film correctly, finally, and so there was much disappointment when it turned out to be an 80 minute Julie Strain promo. Last, most of the music they chose for the soundtrack by and large sucked. This movie could have been awesome but it was pretty much the exact opposite of awesome.
I was going to mention Forever Amber, too. The book has SO much interesting historical stuff (and sexxxy stuff).
Dammit my pizza got here while I was typing that last post and I forgot to mention a couple of things about HM2k: the story sukt ass and the art style was shite. We fans deserved better than Taarna’s Descendant In Space.
Candy. A terrific book, a great cast, a script by Buck Henry… This should’ve been a great movie.
Has anyone ever remade a movie using the exact same script as the original?
Gus van Sant’s Psycho not included.
Speaking of which, of all the movies that BEG to be redone, it’s this one, just to get the taste of the Vince Vaughn version out of our mouths. Why this was ever done is among the world’s mysteries.
There’s also Never Say Never Again, where I think the terms of the court decision that allowed it to be made specified that it use the same script as Thunderball.
The Prisoner of Zenda. 1937 version, starring Ronald Coleman, and the 1952 version, staring Stewart Granger. Not exactly identical, but close. I think they were both based on the stage play.
Speaking of which, I would like to see a film of Arsenic and Old Lace, with Christopher Walken in the Raymond Massey/Boris Karloff role.
Yes, this is so obvious that almost all fans just ignore it.
It is the ultimate ‘elephant in the room’.
Well, at least given ‘Star Wars fans’ as the observer group.
I don’t think the transition was done well in the movies.
There were too many inconsistencies from what the fan base expected.
I listened as my friends commented when we watched the movie.
The usage of Ani as Ankin’s diminutive really bothered all of us.
I mean, when any of us heard it we thought of Annie.
Lucas is really amazingly bad choosing character names.
Lord Dooku?
Oh, come on man, that is comical.
Naming the aquatically based race ‘Mon Calamari’ is just silly.
I could go on.
Thanks for reading.
It wasn’t at all, but there was a lot of potential there. Anakin’s statements at the end of ROTS that in his eyes the jedi are evil made no sense in the context of the films.
Viewing some of the expanded universe material like The Clone Wars it makes more sense, the jedi are lawful DUMB! The jedi are so fucking blind they served a Sith lord, the jedi pretty much caused directly the clone wars. If they were not present or refused to fight a war the seperatists would have gone their way, all the jedi did was play into evils hands and fuck up the entire galaxy. And after all that Obiwan still refuses to think there could be problems with the jedi.
The second movie should have covered the clone wars and Anakin as a feeling human being unlike the other brainwashed jedi traumatized and ruined mentally by the whole thing, hes bitter and cynical which makes him ripe for Palpatine to manipulate.