You’re my new hero.
I’ve mentioned this one several times before so this is once more, but Gone With the Wind as a premium channel miniseries rather than as a movie. The film version should be ignored, it should be filmed on location in Georgia and the many side characters dropped from the film (particularly Scarlett’s older children and the county neighbors) should be introduced. Rhett should have a beard (as he did in the movie) and the houses, sets, and scenes of wartime Atlanta should be more realistic.
I was thinking of Highlander the other day. I love the movie but it is very flawed. Would work well as a remake and its been long enough.
I would fear for a remake. They’d probably dumb it down, put it in 3D, amp up the action and turn the characters into WWE action figures. Also, they’d get M. Night Shyamalan to direct it.
Actually, there is a Highlander reboot coming. Directed by Justin Lin, whoever he is, and possibly starring Vinnie Jones as the Kurgan, which is not who I’d pick.
Will the swordfights involve backflips and such?
I’d kinda like to see then take a page from Deadliest Warrior (an entirely ridiculous but entertaining show which describes the history, weapons and tactics of various historical elite military units and speculates on who beats who) and have the immortals represent a clear variety of styles and swords, representing the cultures that spawned them.
In a way, that’s what they tended to do on the series (and the film a bit, Ramirez fight more in a Spanish fencing style). Though it doesnt make much sense for Immortals, some of them having long outlived their culture of birth.
I hadnt thought of backflip style fighting, God, I hope they dont go for the “New Star Wars” road there, where strength in the Force was measured in how much somersaults you could do. As opposed to the “Old Star Wars” where strength was in lashing out mind-shattering repartees to your opponent at the worst moments (very useful if you ever get married).
IMHO the original film is very lacking compared to what the series was able to do, still, the way they depicted fights (I’ll skip the Black/Moor guy with scimitar in African boubou getting impaled in the middle of NY. Kind of flamboyant there, might makes sense if the Gathering is near, as caution and stealth in not blasting away the existence of Immortals is less critical.), with back alley pure fencing styles was spot on, and one of the reasons Highlander was (and still is) regarded as a cult movie. Highlander is also a landmark in the "Supernatural creatures waging a secret war " that would be so popular in the nineties in RPGs, video games and comic books. They really should understand that that aspect is the heart of the concept, and try to keep it as pure as possible. Instead of muddying it up with trend of the day fightiing styles.
It’d be nice to see an all-around decent version of The Island of Doctor Moreau. I saw an interesting take on it in a play on PBS (that I later found on VHS, luckily) awhile back.
I’d love to see any remake, though, that doesn’t just toss out anything charming with the original in favor of better special effects, or a timely political subtext.
Amazing how many Robert Sheckley ties there are in the above responses.
As I’ve noted before, Total Recall may acknowledge the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” as its inspiration, but they exhaust that material in the first 20 minutes or so. Most of the rest is, I maintain, lifted wholesale from Sheckley’s book The Status Civilization. And Sheckley himself though King lifted most of The Running Man from his story “The Prize of Peril” (which was actually turned into a French TV film before King wrote his book). And Condorman actually is adapted from a Sheckley book, The Game of X.
I’d like to see Sheckley filmed properly. No adaptation (including “Watchbird” on Masters of Science Fiction) has done him justice. The movie Freejack was supposed to be based on his book Immortality, Inc./Immortality Delivered, but you couldn’t prove it by me. It got too enamored of having Mick Jagger and Anthony Hopkins in it. It’s ripe for a reboot.
Some time ago I heard an hour-long radioplay adaptation of *Metropolis *on the BBC World Service which incorporated elements of 1984. It was stunningly good and incorporated much deeper (and more modern)socio-political critiques than the original. The ending would be a bit of a political hot potato (it involves a suicide bombing) so would never get made.
That’s good news. Farrell could be really good in it.
I didn’t like Blade Runner in the theater. Harrison Ford had been making Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies and I thought BR would be in that vein. It took a few years for me to realize that the movie I saw was way better than the movie I was expecting to see.
I also liked Minority Report quite a lot. I hadn’t read either Dick novel prior to seeing those movies, so no preconceptions of what they should have been. I have read five or six Dick stories and they all seem to have great, inventive ideas but also some weak spots. So it’s OK with me if movie makers want to change some things around, but any movie based on a Dick story that doesn’t have a dark or paranoid tone is probably missing a good bet.
How the heck did I miss A Scanner Darkly? Thanks for the tip.
That would be interesting. The original Cold-War-era Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based on the premise that the evil aliens are trying to get into our nice society and take it over. They Live, made in 1988 when the decline of the American middle class was beginning to be apparent, is based on the idea that they’ve already done that – our ruling class is the evil aliens and that’s why everything sucks. I can’t wait to see what the Twentyteens (??? – say, what are we calling the present/coming decade?) twist on the theme will be.
There’s talk of rebooting the TV series Dallas with the main characters being J.R. & Bobby’s sons (John Ross & Christopher). Could work, especially if they have cameos from Hagman and Duffy and work in things like the oil spill and Federal bailouts to show Ewing Oil in serious trouble.
I’d love to see a Fantastic Voyage remake. And another go at Flash Gordon could be fun as well.
They need to remake Street Fighter and just have the different characters go around throwing fireballs. No explanation, we’ll just have to accept that they can do this
A Jurassic Park reboot could be pretty cool, simply for the fact that it could update the appearance of the dinosaurs (Velociraptor is now known to have had feathers, for example).
I loved the scenic shots in Highlander, but they probably wouldn’t seem all that spectacular by today’s standards. On the plus side, I do think that a reboot would be able to attract a lot of interesting actors, so getting people who want to be there and are willing/able to put in quality performances would be a lot easier.
I disagree. They don’t need The Gathering to be a major plot point, but I do think that, as part of the game, having something akin to the playoffs is necessary. They could, instead, leave it as something more nebulous, as in, the fewer there are, the stronger the urge is to seek out and fight eachother or something.
Definitely. The feud they had was pretty weakly brought about. They ought to be able to fit in a few more run-ins over the centuries, rather than having a 400 year gap.
The original soundtrack is a bit dated. I’d expect, instead, that a re-recording of a couple tracks and a similarly influenced sound would work well. I could totally see a modern power metal band doing it justice, Blind Guardian, for instance, I would think could do a solid interpretation.
And Clancy Brown would absolutely have to have at least a cameo, but it might be too distracting if he played any significant role, even a lesser one like Ramirez.
Puppet Masters and Starship Troopers. Heinlein deserves to be done right, for once.
I, Robot and Nightfall. So does Asimov. They struck out twice with Nightfall.