Possibly not surprising, considering my DoperName, but I’d like to see This Island Earth remade, but much better.
The original movie was a.) iconic, and b.) deeply stupid. It took a “:fix-up” novel* by Utah SF writer Raymond F. Jones with some great stuff in it, jettisoned almost all of the plot, and substituted a sort-of plot that seemed to have been generated by getting inspiration from pulp SF magazine covers (and ignoring the contents). No exposed-brain Metalunan Mutants in Jones’ book. No Metaluna, either, for that matter.
Even the part they didn’t get rid of, they got wrong. The book, like the movie (ignoring the Green Ray shenanigans) opens with intrepid , handsome scientist Cal Meacham getting some bewildering and miraculously performing parts from an electronics firm he never heard of. He then gets a catalog of equally impossible parts, and orders what he needs to build an “Interociter”. In the film, he gets a schematic that shows him how to put it together, so he does. But in the novel, there is no such plan – Meacham has to work out how it goes together from what he can glean from the catalog. This is supposed to be a test of his engineering and reasoning capabilities, after all. Putting it together from a spelled-out plan, as if it’s an interstellar Heathkit, would only demonstrate that he was a good technician. “You’ce successfully assembled an Interociter,” says the voice from the assembled device, “ak of which few are capable.” Pshaw! Joe Wilson, his assistant, could’ve done it with all they gave him. In Jones’ novel he had to figure out how the parts went together, and even repair one. When he got it assembled, it was a significant accomplishment.
Another detail I like in the novel is that we get to see some of the other “tests” that were sent to other scientists and engineers at the same facility – Cal Meacham wasn’t the only one to be examined. These were devices in other specialties, like Mechanical Engineering. The other candidates didn’t succeed. If they had gotten just that part of Jones’ story right, it would have been far, far better than the film that did come out.
There’s so much more that they pointlessly changed – “Exeter” was, in the book “Jorgasnovara”, which is more provocactive. The Earth Scientists weren’t chosen to perform R&D for the aliens – they were basically hired as lower-class talent to help with the grunt work (albeit high-level, high-yech gruint work) needed to help in the fight against an opponent in an interstellar war. (Maybe the filmmakers thought that was too demeaning). There were, as I say, no Metalunan mutants. The home planet wasn’t “Metaluna”. The home planet wasn’t incinerated and turned into a star. Nobody wanted the Earth scientists brain-wiped. et cetera et cetera, ad nauseum.
Jones’ book sort of peters out, without a satisfactory ending, but I’m sure that can be fixed. With CGI you could do great effects, much better than in the original film. (The original story, by the way, doesn’t have a Flying Saucer – the alien craft is an ovoid. Flying saucers were such big news in the 1950s that it affected not only this film, but others as well. The alien ships in the stories The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing were based on weren’t flying saucers, either.) And the original movie never even bothers to explain the meaning of its own title.