I think this is going to be a very YMMV post, so I will start with the disclaimer: by “justified”, I mean one’s subjective opinion. It’s a free country and anyone can make a remake if they want; I’m merely looking for people’s non-binding personal opinions based on their tastes, I.E., when does it make sense to re-make a movie?.
With that out of the way, there have been a lot of discussions about various remakes, how they’re badly done, redundant, skew or miss the point of the original, add something unpopular to the original story whatever. OK, so when, then, is a remake a good thing?
My first thoughts on this matter would be that there are remakes which are not remakes. That is, they are actually filmings of stories that come from other previous source material, mainly literature. So for example, you’ll have a classic story like “Pride and Prejudice”. Logically, different generations will want to give their own interpretation of these, and so we have many filmed versions of “Pride and Prejudice” or “The Three Musketeers”. People will have their own opinions of which version is better, but the different versions are not nominally related to each other. For one good example of a “remake that is not a remake”, I will mention a favorite of mine, “True Grit”. This was originally a novel written by Charles Portis, published in 1968. In 1969, it was made into a Western film starring John Wayne, Kim Darby, and Glenn Campbell and directed by Henry Hathaway. I saw it on TV, and liked it for what it was. Then in 2010, the Coen Brothers made a new version of “True Grit” starring Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, and Matt Damon. This was not a remake of the previous one, but went back to the source material and was in fact truer to the novel than the 1969 one, which was a typical John Wayne film. I liked the 2010 version for what it was as well, and it was in many ways different from the 1969 version.
Also, in general, I think it makes sense to remake a film where you can improve on the technology, acting, etc. as opposed to the earlier version. This is a no-brainer, but there are various films that are remakes of silent films. Or for example, films from the 1930s may have a theatrical acting style that may not sit well with modern audiences; re-making them in color, with modern technology and with a more natural acting style would make perfect sense to me.
My final thought is that a film might be worth re-making if you can add some real improvement to the story or cinematography as opposed to the original. This applies especially if the original was very good to begin with. Here are two examples of two very good films that were re-made and I consider the remakes redundant:
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“The Beguiled”. This is a favorite of mine, a 1971 Clint Eastwood movie. Set during the American Civil War, it starts when a wounded Union soldier on Confederate territory is found by a girl attending a ladies’ seminary (a small boarding school for girls), and is taken in by Martha Farnsworth, the proprietor / principal. So now the soldier is both their patient and their prisoner. The story examines the interesting situation where a handsome wounded soldier finds himself surrounded by nothing but girls and women (students and teachers, and one slave woman) of various ages, and some of them start vying for his affections, until it goes quite wrong. In 2017, Sofia Coppola remade the story (which, like “True Grit”, was also based on a novel, published in 1966), with Colin Farrell as the soldier and Nicole Kidman as Miss Farnsworth. Were it a stand-alone film I would say it was a good movie. However, given that it re-makes the story, I feel it to be completely redundant given the previous movie. IMO it adds nothing to the story but rather subtracts from it. Basically, Coppola wanted to give the story a “feminist perspective”, and I think she royally failed in this goal. She claimed to want to show the story “more from the women’s perspective”, but I think all she did was give the soldier less airtime. Furthermore, I think the original movie showed the women’s perspective very well, that’s probably one reason why I liked it. One thing that Coppola did was to remove the character of the slave woman. She did this on the pretext that she didn’t want modern girls to have the example of such a character, but I think that this was completely unnecessary as the way she was portrayed in the original did not in any way attempt to justify or mitigate slavery, was period-appropriate, and in fact impoverished the story. Specifically, there’s a scene in the original where Miss Farnsworth orders the slave woman to shave the soldier, because she’s tired of looking at his whiskers. When she goes to do this, she tells the soldier that she thinks it’s not God’s will for men to be bare-faced, but that she takes her orders from Miss Farnsworth, not from God. This I think shows very well the condition of a slave, far from “tolerating” or “justifying” the institution, and removing it from the story weakens the film.
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“Papillon” is a classic 1973 prison film (based on a not completely factual autobiography) starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. This was remade in 2017, with a Charlie Hunnam reprising McQueen’s role and a Rami Malek reprising Hoffman’s. This remake was certainly not all bad. The cinematography was very good, and it added some interesting scenes (e.g. what led to the main character’s conviction, his fantasies about back home when in the penal colony, his eventual publication of his book), and other scenes were in many cases reminiscent of the original. However, the two main characters were played by actors that just couldn’t come close to the the original ones. In particular Hunnam, who was reprising a role by, of all people, the King of Cool. Sorry, but there was a pretty evident gulf there.
One remake on which I’m neutral is the 2020 “Rebecca” movie. It was not bad on the whole (and not the first remake). One would compare it to the black and white 1940 Hitchcock version. I haven’t seen the latter in a while, but I would say each was a good telling on the story in its own way.
