Having watched the original years ago when it came out, haven’t really been following the news about the remake though I remember vaguely about some major studio buying the rights.
For some background, the movie is a critically acclaimed korean thriller about this guy who gets imprisoned in a motel-ish room for 15 years without knowing why and then released to figure it out. Noted for some of the more violent scenes and the grandiose, Shakespearean revenge theme. Ebert review here.
…And lo and behold, ‘Oldboy’ is being remade or “reinterpreted” as Spike Lee put it in an interview, with Josh Brolin as the protagonist. An interview with Brolin also seems to indicate they’ve departed from the original quite a bit, which could be a good thing (after all why remake a movie if it’s going to be the same as the original?), or it could mean they watered it down. But Spike Lee doesn’t strike me as the type of guy to water down his movies too much.
The poster seems to indicate that the imprisonment time as been extended to 20 years instead of 15.
The original was amazing, I can’t imagine any way they won’t fuck it up completely. On the outside chance it’s any good, I’ll definitely give it a chance. Hollywood doesn’t have a great track record of remaking awesome foreign films into awesome domestic films, so I don’t have high hopes.
There’s no way this film won’t suck six ways till Sunday. Just not possible. Even though I generally like Spike Lee’s work, unless he makes a completely different film, it’s going to blow.
As stylish as the original was, there was always a huge suspension of disbelief required to go along with the (let’s be honest) completely ludicrous plot. I feel that (in the English-speaking world at least) Oldboy really profited from being Korean and foreign and exotic-looking. In the world of the original you really could believe in a world where there are private prisons run out of seedy-looking apartment buildings and mind-controlling hypnotists. It’s a world of magic and fantasy, essentially, and you really need the visual style of the original to sell that.
Set in New York, or somewhere equally recognizable and mundane, the whole movie quickly turns preposterous. Set in a Blade Runneresque nightworld, then, yes, we can believe in the fantasy.
While I think Spike Lee has gotten to be a much better filmmaker than he was in his early career, I just don’t see how this won’t suck.
The original was, as EatTheSun says, amazing, in it’s own way. It was a fantastic, relentless, brutal film that in the end left me drained, disgusted and, to be honest, disappointed. It was so ludicrously over the top in setting up the protagonist for his fate, so unforgiving in it’s with-holding of a payoff for the viewer for the investment of time and emotion that that became it’s own strange (and for me, mostly unsatisfactory) payoff. It was a spectacle, a fantasy set in a fantasy world, as Erdosain says.
I just can’t see how this won’t suck because frankly, it sort of sucked to begin with. I’ve never been able to sit thru the whole movie a second time. I’ve watched the fight scene approximately 20,000,000 times but the denouement was so grotesque, so utterly without hope or redemption or proportion, that it made the overall experience of watching the film extremely unpleasant for me.
So I guess that not only can’t I imagine this not sucking, I also can’t imagine this being a complete flop with audiences, at least here in the States.
ETA: On re-read, I realize that I said that this movie was both amazing and that it sucked. It’s a complex film, no doubt. I hope I was able to explain myself well enough in those two brief paragraphs, but if I wasn’t exactly clear, well, it’s a complex film that elicits complex reactions.
Agreed. This is a movie that doesn’t need to be remade.
To me the only reasons to remake a movie is if the original director completely flubbed a good premise (Star Wars prequels), to update special effects (The Last Starfighter), or both (Dune).
Or to make it more palatable for American audiences by removing subtitles/dubbing and foreign actors who may not be as relatable. (See ‘Infernal Affairs’ remade as ‘The Departed’). But I haven’t seen either of those movies but the general consensus seems to be the original movie was pretty awesome (often said to be superior) but the remake was respectable. It won several Oscars after all.
If it was helmed by say Joel Schumacher or Michael Bay, my attitude would be completely different but going off of mostly ‘25th Hour’, I think Spike Lee could make it work.
…But I could see it turning into a total turd also but I want to believe.
Well before it was a Korean film, it was a (recommended) Japanese manga. I haven’t seen the 2003 film, but I understand it differs in some ways from the original.
So Spike Lee has a variety of materials to work with. That said, I’m a little dubious about the author of the screenplay. Mark Protosevich - Wikipedia