Film remakes: a heartfelt return to childhood memories or a cynical collection of nostalgia bait?

By Ian Yip

With the release of the new live-action series of Cowboy Bebop on Netflix in mid-November, and the casts of live-action adaptations of One Piece and Avatar: The Last Airbender (commonly shortened as ATLA) having been announced, this is the perfect time to discuss remakes of old shows and films, due to the oversaturation of them in the current market. Many directors continue to fail at capturing the charm of the originals, including this new live action Cowboy Bebop, but companies still continue to churn out more and more unnecessary remakes and adaptations.

This begs the question, why do companies keep remaking old shows and films, and what is the value of them?

Disney: the king of remakes

*The above shows the posters of The Lion King 1997(left) and it’s 2019 remake(right). Image Source: Disney*

Are film remakes as new and refreshing as they claim to be? There have been many remakes of movies and TV shows over the years, but in the last decade, the number has drastically increased, with varying levels of quality. A majority of these have come from a particular multi-billion dollar corporation most people have heard of: Walt Disney Pictures.

In the Disney renaissance, back in the 1990s, they created various animated films that formed the childhoods of many and are still considered classics to this day. Modern Disney, seeing an opportunity to use the nostalgia of the population as a source of income, started putting out remakes of their old animated movies for the now-adult generation who watched their films when they were children.

Since the Sleeping Beauty live-action adaptation in 2014, Disney has been consistently releasing and remaking their old movies almost yearly. The most egregious of these examples is the “live-action” adaptation of The Lion King. This is by no means a poorly made film, and it has been called “one of the most beautiful movies to come out in 2019”, as well as better than its predecessor in some areas. However, it is the most evident example of a copy and pasted movie without the heart of the original, only pandering towards audiences in an attempt to sell even more merchandise.

The film is no doubt beautifully crafted with lots of attention to detail, but it lacks any emotion due to the animation style. The original was vibrant and expressive, with clear understanding from each of the actors for the script and what they should try to portray, while this version was more intent on letting Beyónce do whatever she wanted because it would get more people in the theatre. The remake fails to capture the charm of the original and takes more from it than it adds, resulting in a film that generally received negative critical reception.

The Last Airbender: an unnecessary abomination

“The Last Airbender is an agonising experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.”

Above is the opening paragraph of American film critic Roger Eabert’s review for M. Night Shymalan’s adaptation of the popular animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA), perfectly encapsulating the emotions of fans of the original series. It was clear that Shyamalan wanted this to be his own Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, a sprawling fantasy epic spanning multiple films. However, there was one thing he did not take into consideration, he was trying to adapt all 20 episodes of book one, or around 460 minutes worth of content into a single movie. This led to whole plot points being cut out and a lack of moments of characterisation for worldbuilding and character’s personalities.

The original series tackled issues such as war, genocide, and depression, but because it was aimed at children, they included comedic moments that helped add some levity as well. It also reflected on the protagonist, Aang, hiding from his problems as he was still mentally very young and did not know how to process grief very well. The jokes in the show were usually delivered very naturally, and the slapstick made full use of the animation medium. The live action tried to look like a much more mature and realistic interpretation of the show, mainly because Shyamalan is not used to including comedic elements, and there were a total of two jokes that both just involved splashing water onto Sokka. This removed the levity from the story, which would have been fine for movies about books two and three where the characters have grown more, but not for the context of this movie.

Book one only served to introduce us to the stakes at hand as well as the world of the characters, serving as a more lighthearted entry to the series. It was more intent on providing funny moments and fun action sequences than explaining the geopolitical landscape of a world mostly controlled by genocidal fire wielding elitists. Removing the comedic fun elements from the story left us with an incompetent teenager chasing after a depressed twelve-year-old for two hours straight, and left out the charm of the first twenty episodes of the animated show.

Generally speaking, this seemed to be another cynical cash-grab hoping to milk the original show’s nostalgia a bit more before they released The Legend of Korra, a sequel to ATLA.

Robin Hood/Arthur: Giant elephants destroying castles?

*Everyone’s favourite Arthurian legend characters, the giant murder elephants.*
*Image source: Warner Bros. Pictures*

The tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur are arguably some of the most retold and remade stories of all time, with each of them having around seventy adaptations each. Most had decent critical reception, but the two latest adaptations of their stories, King Arthur and the Legend of the sword, as well as Robin Hood (2018), have been regarded as bland and uninteresting.

However, despite both of these movies having negative critical reception, they fail in very different ways.

Robin Hood attempts to convince the audience that the film is completely new, providing a refreshing take on the character, though in actuality not too different from previous adaptations. At the beginning of the film, there is a line saying: “But listen, forget history. Forget what you’ve seen before. Forget what you think you know. This is no bedtime story.” However, the rest of the story remains mostly the same except for the fact that it is trying to start a continuing franchise of films that could possibly branch out into a larger cinematic universe. The largest change they make to the story is turning the sheriff from a relatively level-headed ruler who holds power through corruption, into a generic rich evil person who likes to deliver monologues to the heroes while he’s in striking distance.

King Arthur on the other hand, desperately wants the audience to believe that it is still a King Arthur story, even though the only thing in common are the names of the characters and the fact that there is a sword in a stone. The movie opens with a shot of a giant elephant destroying a castle, and then it switches to a shot of Mordred (a common antagonist used in many stories of Arthurian Legend), so the viewer is supposed to think “Oh wow, he was in the book!” It overcomplicates the original story and changes the characters to such a degree that it would have been a lot less jarring if they just didn’t have the same names as the original tales.

Dune should get a “sanding” ovation

Many fans of the book believe that Dune (1984) was a poorly made film that failed to capture the appeal of the original story, mainly because the actors delivered their lines with such bravado that it made the movie almost a parody of the original book. Personally, I really enjoyed the film because I found it hilarious, and because I was not the biggest fan of the original book, but many fans were left disappointed and even frustrated with the outcome of the film.

Dune (2021) aimed to correct the mistakes of its predecessor and deliver a tonally consistent, more epic adaptation of the book. It included quite a few more fights to appeal to a wider audience, but generally kept the same ominous tone of the original story. The CGI managed to capture the vast lands of Arrakis, as well as the technology, in a believable way, and the score was both haunting and beautiful. Because of this, it was generally well received from both fans and critics, much more successful than the original.

From the four short studies above, I have determined that film remakes can be done well only when there is a necessity to tell the story. Films like The Lion King and The Last Airbender did not need to be made because there were already well-received versions of the story told before, while the stories of Robin Hood and King Arthur have already been told dozens of times in the past few decades. Dune succeeds only because the original fails to capture the appeal of the original story, making it one of few film remakes that general audiences seem to genuinely unironically enjoy.

However, when all is said and done, Disney is just going to continue to churn out nostalgia-bait movies that adapt stories from the 1990s, and some people are still going to enjoy recapturing the old memories of their youth on a new big screen.