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Remakes that aren't carbon copies

 
 
 
repoman

repoman

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I saw the remake of Robocop last week and I thought it was a pretty decent movie. I appreciated that it switched quite a bit of the plot, tone and theme up from the original. Even from the trailer I saw a while ago it looked a lot different so I decided to see it.

Are there any other fairly different remakes that anyone here can recommend?

By the way, Suicide Squad will partially be a loose remake of The Dirty Dozen. Should be very good.
 
I don't always like remakes of things such as movies, songs etc as I don't feel they ever capture the same essence as the original.

I wonder if it's because that is what we get used to, and so a newer version just seems wrong on so many levels.
 
Let's see, it depends on what you mean by different.

Yours, Mine, and Ours. The original was a family comedy about a merger between two families when a couple of career Coast Guard personnel become acquainted. The remake changed things by making everything nonsensical and shitty.

Ocean's 11. A lot more style in the remake than the original. Both come off as good films.

It Happened One Night - Hollywood ran out of ideas in the 50's and started to make remakes but making them musicals. To best of my knowledge, Jack Lemmon was never in another "musical".
 
repoman said:
I saw the remake of Robocop last week and I thought it was a pretty decent movie. I appreciated that it switched quite a bit of the plot, tone and theme up from the original. Even from the trailer I saw a while ago it looked a lot different so I decided to see it.

Are there any other fairly different remakes that anyone here can recommend?

By the way, Suicide Squad will partially be a loose remake of The Dirty Dozen. Should be very good.
Click to expand...

Suicide Squad is a comic book that probably was based on the Dirty Dozen, but it's been careening off in different directions since.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Ocean's 11. A lot more style in the remake than the original. Both come off as good films.
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I was going to mention O11 too. The Soderbergh remake is one of my all time favorite movies. Heist flicks is probably my favorite genre.
 
I absolutely hated the Robocop remake. The original Robocop was a B movie, and it embraced it. The remake was just awful.
 
Underseer said:
repoman said:
I saw the remake of Robocop last week and I thought it was a pretty decent movie. I appreciated that it switched quite a bit of the plot, tone and theme up from the original. Even from the trailer I saw a while ago it looked a lot different so I decided to see it.

Are there any other fairly different remakes that anyone here can recommend?

By the way, Suicide Squad will partially be a loose remake of The Dirty Dozen. Should be very good.
Click to expand...

Suicide Squad is a comic book that probably was based on the Dirty Dozen, but it's been careening off in different directions since.
Click to expand...

What repoman is referring to is an interview that director David Ayers did a couple of years ago, in which he said that Suicide Squad would be like the Dirty Dozen with Supervillains. This was in 2014, when the cast, and even which Suicide Squad members would be in the movie, was unknown. I think it was just more Ayers trying to describe what the Suicide Squad is for those who have no knowledge of the comics. This will likely not be anything close to a remake of Dirty Dozen, though Ayers did seem to indicate that he would be drawing inspiration from that movie, in particular with the movie being about the characters, and how heroic acts can come from unlikely people (supervillains in this case, war criminals in the case of the Dirty Dozen).
 
The Force Awakens was a fairly decent remake, it made a lot of bold choices with regards to shifting around character names and genders and such while adhering completely to the original plot.

IMO the musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors is substantially superior in every way to the original.
 
prideandfall said:
The Force Awakens was a fairly decent remake, it made a lot of bold choices with regards to shifting around character names and genders and such while adhering completely to the original plot.

IMO the musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors is substantially superior in every way to the original.
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Well, it was a movie based on the musical that was based on the original movie.

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prideandfall said:
repoman said:
But it wasn't a shot for shot remake.
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neither was total recall, but that movie also sucked balls.
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But it had Jessica Biel, so at least it had that going for it.
 
The movie you're looking for is called Dredd.

The original Judge Dredd was a cartoon. Not literally animated but a cartoon take on a graphic novel. Starring Sylvester Stallone. Rob Schneider as comic relief. An over the top farce filled with catch phrases and an over abundance of shiny costumes.

The 2012 remake actually took the source material seriously. There was no comic relief. No shiny costumes. Karl Urban never showed his face, and he was relentless.

It wasn't a great movie, but it was so much better than the Stallone travesty.
 
My favorite example is His Girl Friday, a remake of The Front Page which adds a lot of sizzle by gender-flipping one of the main characters.
 
MarkW said:
My favorite example is His Girl Friday, a remake of The Front Page which adds a lot of sizzle by gender-flipping one of the main characters.
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Really? I thought the main difference between the two (other than Russell and Lemmon having difference sexes) was that Grant's character was a psychopath while Matthau's character was just a sociopath.

Although, after writing a paragraph and then convincing myself otherwise, I think you are right. Russell and Lemmon are different sexes and that is a big enough difference. It think it also advanced the plot into the 20th century in sex relations. I did not care for the ending in His Girl Friday as Russell's character is better than that. Reminds me of It Happened One Night, ~'She deserves a man that'll pop her one every once in a while, even if she doesn't deserve it.' ... and that was supposed to be a good thing!
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Well, it was a movie based on the musical that was based on the original movie.

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prideandfall said:
repoman said:
But it wasn't a shot for shot remake.
Click to expand...
neither was total recall, but that movie also sucked balls.
Click to expand...
But it had Jessica Biel, so at least it had that going for it.
Click to expand...

Same with the latest Texas Chainsaw Massacre. She's a lovely girl who brightens whatever film she's in. Curiously, much of that brightness issues from super tight jeans and white tanks tops that are in the habit of getting drenched with water.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
MarkW said:
My favorite example is His Girl Friday, a remake of The Front Page which adds a lot of sizzle by gender-flipping one of the main characters.
Click to expand...
Really? I thought the main difference between the two (other than Russell and Lemmon having difference sexes) was that Grant's character was a psychopath while Matthau's character was just a sociopath.
Click to expand...

I actually was comparing His Girl Friday with the original 1931 film version of The Front Page, with Adolph Menjou and Pat O'Brien, not with the 1974 version with Matthau and Lemmon; all of them, of course, are adapted from the stage play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
 
MarkW said:
My favorite example is His Girl Friday, a remake of The Front Page which adds a lot of sizzle by gender-flipping one of the main characters.
Click to expand...
I was just thinking of The Front Page. That's been remade a couple of times, I think, including Switching Channels, where the newspaper reported becomes a News Network Anchor.
 
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