In Hollywood, no one can hear you scream … because you just heard that one of the greatest horror movies of all time is foolishly being remade. That’s right, they’re doing it to Ridley Scott’s “Alien”. According to this site, they’ve even managed to grab ol’ R.S. Himself to be involved with this, which just blows me away.
So, here’s where my perplexity draws close and humps my leg: at the heart of it, “Alien” is nothing more than humans meet monster, monster kills humans, one human survives. That is a plot so simple that any idiot can put a movie together around it, and I know this because hundreds of idiots do. So why does it have to be an “Alien” remake? The only possible reason: name recognition. They’re betting that fans of the original will come see it.
Except that if you’re a fan of the original, then a remake is the last thing you want to see with the “Alien” name on it. Because for it to be a remake, it has to take away everything that made the original great and replace them with things that are new and different. There are maybe three iconic alien designs: the Alien, the Predator, and the Greys. In fact, the Classic Alien is so iconic that the design gets reused all over the place as it is. Are you trying to tell me this movie is going to give us something new and equally classic? Something that no movie has been able to do in the decades since the original? It had better, because if all they’re thinking is to do more of the same, then they’ve already lost.
Essentially, this remake is already a victim of its predecessor’s success. There’s no way that it can outdo the original, and to slavishly mimic it will be as much of a failure as the expedition that decided to drop down to the planet’s surface in the story. So, yeah: thumbs up.
Comments
Mike
May 28th, 2009 - 3:37:20 PM
Are new ideas that hard to come up with? I feel like we've been getting remakes for a little too long now. time to change things up HOLLYWOOD