My thoughts on the remake of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

I'm a couple weeks late reacting to this, but I wanted to put in a few thoughts about the announced remake of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.  No, that's not a joke. Deadline reported two weeks ago:

This one is being written by Oculus co-writer/director Mike Flanagan and partner Jeff Howard who are adapting the 1973 Lois Duncan book again. Producing is Neal Moritz (Fast and Furious franchise) who also produced the original 17 years ago.

The original film came out in 1997 and starred Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar, and since there's no better way to put this, it's mostly remembered for the assets that led to this quote from Jennifer Love Hewitt, "We had this joke on the set... All the girls wore tiny tops, so we called it 'I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer.'"

I guarantee that if the producers get nothing else right, they will strive to be faithful to that aspect.
 
I was a teenager when the original movie came out and because of that I have a couple reasons for being a bit ambivalent towards this remake. The first is just the feeling that I'm really wary of the fact that we're now reaching into not just the 90s, but the LATE 90s for our remakes. How far off are we from remaking Austin Powers and American Beauty?

The second reason is more self-serving - I wanted to be the one to remake I Know What You Did Last Summer!

This is true. You can find me on record in both 2009 (in the comments) and in 2011 talking about the potential in a remake. I've long said that remakes shouldn't be about remaking what was already successful. There's almost zero chance you could hope to make a better film and the shortcomings of the latter production are only more pronounced when stacked up against the classic.

Instead, a better way to go would be to remake a film that had a germ of a good idea, but failed to execute it properly. For years, IKWYDLS was my go-to film when discussing something with a lot of unrealized potential. Instead of a slasher, I saw an opportunity for a morality play. The set-up is the same - four teens accidentally kill someone while out joyriding, then dump the body and vow to keep the secret. 

My vision was to have the drama focus on how keeping the secret weighs on each of the teens involved, as that's a hell of a character-based concept. Honestly, it's an element that could have stood to be woven into the slasher version more. You'd need an antagonist of some sort who'd send the notes reading "I know what you did last summer..." but I'd probably not go for a psycho slasher. My gut would be to make that "villain" someone slightly sympathetic, someone we might even be tempted to root for.

I probably wouldn't go the route of being faithful to the Lois Duncan novel, though. My recollection is that the novel had fallen into relative obscurity by the time of the first movie. I read it years ago after seeing the movie, and it's pretty fair to say that the book would be unfilmable if you were determined to preserve the exact plot and mystery.  A key twist relies on the reader not realizing that the characters of Bud and Collie, who have separately interacted with each of the girls in the story, are actually the same person. While it's a shocker on the page, it's not a twist that works in a visual medium.

Whatever direction the remake takes, I hope that it can be a little more character-driven than its predecessor. And now I'm going to have to find another go-to answer for "What film would you want to remake?"

A review of the ROBOCOP reboot from someone who's never seen the original

Confession time, folks. I've never seen the original ROBOCOP.  I was seven when it first came out, making me way too young to see it in theaters and as I got older, it was never something I felt compelled to seek out.  Now, to hear fans of the original speak about it lately, you'd think this was akin to never seeing Citizen Kane or Psycho, but the truth is that among my circles, ROBOCOP was just another 80s sci-fi action movie.

However, it's clear that if you want to stir up an audience of a film, all you have to do is threaten to remake it.  The mere threat of such a desecration tends to provoke an uprising that would have you thinking there was a mission to put arms on the Venus de Milo.  Over the past year I've heard more about the original ROBOCOP in fanboy circles than I had in the 25 years that preceded it.  As it became clear that the pending ROBOCOP remake was trying to take a different path than the original, I decided to do something that I wish I'd had the chance to do on Total Recall - I was going to go in totally fresh.  I wanted to see if this movie could stand up without any affection or nostalgia for the original getting in the way.

The verdict?  It definitely stands on its own.  There's really no point where I was lost and had a feeling, "I bet this all makes a lot more sense of you've seen the original."  If there are jokey, inside references to the original, they're integrated well enough that I didn't feel them sticking out like sore thumbs.  (This is more of a sequel thing than a remake, but a good example of this might be something like the extended "zip it/sush" callbacks in the final Austin Powers.)

It's an unspecified point in the near future and OMNICorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) is faced with a problem.  His military drones have proven to be effective peacekeeping forces abroad, but thus far, Congress has passed legislation banning their usage on American soil.  It seems most Americans are squeamish about the idea that a drone decides independently if a target is a threat and warrants the use of deadly force.  (Which, to be fair, is a pretty a solid point.) 

Enter Detective Alex Murphy, who's all but killed in an explosion arranged by a drug lord.  With two limbs blown off and most of his body covered in fourth-degree burns. Sellars sees an opportunity here.  In order to get the congressional act against his drones overturned, he needs to sway public opinion.  What better way than to find a paralyzed law enforcement officer, restore him with the cybernetic limbs that OMNICorp research has developed and turn him into a drone, essentially putting a man inside of a machine.  If he can use drones on American soil, Sellars' company stands to make billions.

This leads into what is probably the most effective part of the movie, where the reconstituted Murphy discovers he's little more than a head, heart & lungs and one organic forearm held together with robotic parts.  Even his brain has cybernetic impants, which among other things, allows him quickly assess targets as threats or neutral, and accomplish things like calculating his escape from a building and over a high wall.

Gary Oldman features in these scenes as a scientist named Norton, who's working out the kinks of Murphy's new state and it's interesting how his character arc slightly parallels Murphy's.  When we first meet Murphy, he's working with amputees, helping them achieve normal lives with their new robotic limbs.  Initially, he rebuffs Sellars' efforts to exploit his work with a military application, but the promise of additional funds has probably won over many a scientist, and Norton is no exception.

Murphy is pitted against a drone in a side-by-side simulation and while Murphy performs well, compared to the drone's efficiency, he's a failure.  The drone dispassionately neutralizes targets while Murphy's concern for simulated hostages makes him hesitate and act less decisively.  Basically, the moral contemplation that the American public wants is a liability to Sellars' drones' effectiveness.  The man in the machine might be an asset in terms of PR, but it's a detriment to performance in the field.

Ordered to find a way to fix this problem, Norton rewires Murphy's brain so that when he goes into "Combat Mode," the drone program takes over entirely.  Murphy thinks he's still in the driver's seat, but that control is an illusion.  It's a little chilling to realize this "fix" has taken away a piece of not just Murphy's soul, but Norton's as well.

Throughout the film, we don't chart just Murphy's path to becoming less human, we see Norton is on a parallel track.  Norton is faced with a problem that his professional ethics get in the way of, so he discards them and merely follows his objects.  This is precisely the same "problem" that Murphy's ethics cause until he is made to merely follow orders.

But the most disturbing moment of the film comes later.  Just before he is to be introduced at a ceremony with the Mayor, Murphy undergoes a procedure that will upload the entire Detroit police database into his brain.  This includes the Closed Circuit TV footage from the cameras in seemingly every corner of the city.  Oddly no one involved anticipates that it might agitate their cybernetic patient when he processes the footage of the bombing that nearly killed him.  Murphy has a total freakout and it comes at the worst time.  Norton needs to make him ready to step on stage with the mayor in mere minutes, so he orders his team to drop Murphy's dopamine levels to below 5%.

The effect of reducing that particular neurotransmitter basically turns Murphy into a zombie that follows his programming without question.  Norton has almost literally robbed the man of his soul, which is an incredibly disturbing thing to see coming from the guy who appeared to be our moral center when the film began.  Norton does what he has to do in that moment, and the moral implications of his actions are probably more unsettling to the audience than they are to him at that point.

ROBOCOP is largely a story about two men losing their souls to technology in different ways.  The man vs. machine element of the script is generally the meatiest stuff and the storyline that carries the most weight.  The drone aspect adds some interesting elements to the plot as well, and between the two, there are enough moments that leave a viewer thinking this is a movie that could have been really, really good.

And then there's stuff that the film just leaves on the table.  It's utterly baffling to me that the script is so blase' about the massive invasion of privacy that the CCTV cameras seem to represent.  Once he surrenders to his programming, Murphy is able to access seemingly every CCTV camera at will and there seems to be no corner of the city he can't instantly watch.  Later it's even demonstrated that he's capable of retrieving audio from those cameras and even enhancing reflections on shiny surfaces to he can see things not directly in the camera's line of sight.

It's Big Brother taken to an extreme.  I suppose it's possible that in the future, the CCTV cameras have been so pervasive that no one gives them a second thought.  There's also probably the fact that until RoboCop, there hasn't existed a method to collate and compile all that data quickly.  Murphy is able to instantly process data and find connections that would seem to justify a warrant and also give him the means to find people and place them under arrest.  That's both as impressive and as scary as it sounds.

If artificial intelligence is supposed to have advanced to this degree, I can't help but wonder why computers were never deployed in this manner.  If Murphy can solve crimes so quickly just by matching archive footage with other evidence, you'd think that the police would have attempted some application of this tech before Murphy's rebirth.  It also occurred to me to wonder how this process would affect the act of getting a warrant.  Most of the time we see Murphy acting on previously issued warrants, but certainly when he goes in to arrest two crooked cops, he's acting on his own authority and probably hasn't gotten a warrant via what we know as the proper channels.

(I realize it's a minor point that can easily be hand-waved by "It's the future, the law is different." Still, when most of your audience probably knows the basics of the law just from decades of cop procedural, it probably wouldn't hurt to give them a little more to go on in terms of how the legal system works.  I'm not saying I wanted to see Law & Order: Special Robo Unit, but a little more texture to the world would have done wonders here.)

Another weak point in the film is its tendency to stop dead for on-the-nose exposition.  The Samuel L. Jackson character (who's clearly playing a riff on the Bill O'Reilly/Keith Olbermann sort of cable pundit who trades on outrage and fear) shows up several times in the film in scenes where he directly addresses the audience.  He's a stand-in for just about any other method of dramatizing the pro-drone perspective.  His first appearance isn't bad at setting the stage and taking shots at the propaganda of cable news.

The device gets diminishing returns when it becomes clear that he's an easy tool for the screenwriters to get information out to the audience without dramatizing it.  There are also probably a few too many scenes of OMNICorp characters sitting around a table spelling out the logic that gets us from Point A to Point B.

Just a little more depth to the characters would have mitigated this somehow.  As good as it is to see Michael Keaton, his Sellars character is underwritten.  Keaton gives the guy enough humanity initially that he doesn't seem like a two-dimension evil corporate badguy motivated only by greed, but the script fails to add any shadings to his character throughout.  I like that his motivation to put a man into the machine isn't that he thinks it will improve the performance in any way.  It's a pragmatic PR act and him taking advantage of a loophole to get what he wants.  If he thought a human brain was really the key to making a better drone, then I'd have issues with his motivations.

The problem is that by the third act, Keaton has little to work with except going through the motions of the CEO who needs to dispose of a PR problem.  I'll grant that Keaton plays him with just enough weight that he comes across as a driven guy who's making the most efficient decisions he can.  The problem is that he's still stuck being the bad guy in a script where the whole point is to see the "man" triumph over the "machine's" programming.

This necessitates a climax where Murphy will have to overcome his drone directives.  There's an basic, easy way to do that - put his family in danger.  Even more obviously, the most cathartic solution there is to have the man who tried to exploit him be the one they need saving from.  Thus, Murphy faces off against the man directly responsible for taking away the little that was left of his humanity.

But that means that Sellars would have to create a situation where he is a direct danger to Murphy's family, smug in the knowledge that Murphy can't take action against him.  And honestly, Sellars hasn't been written as a guy that hands-on or recklessly stupid up to this point.  That's why it feels so false when (SPOILER) he points a gun at Murphy's family while gloating that he could shoot them both and there's nothing Murphy could do about it.

Keaton doesn't really sell the moment, though you can feel him trying.  The problem is that this climax plays like a first-draft scene that isn't being true to the characters.  It's servicing the needs of plot and story constraints, but I don't believe that Sellars would take the action that provokes just enough will in Murphy to allow him to strike.  (And at this point, Sellars knows that Murphy has grown beyond his programming when he's found an emotional touchstone, so why in God's name would he tempt that by threatening his family when Murphy is all but subdued already?)

There's some good stuff here.  I wouldn't say that ROBOCOP is a movie that deserves to be totally dismissed out of hand.  But I'm not blind to its flaws and I feel like what ended up being shot was a draft or two away from being a strong film.

I plan on following this up with a review of the original ROBOCOP, but it's a "very long wait" on Netflix at the moment, so that review might be a while in coming.

Does Hollywood not care about scripts that are bad and unoriginal?

Last week, I said on Twitter that it's a logical fallacy to believe that since "every movie released this summer sucked, was a remake or both, so I guess my writing doesn't need to be good or original."  A couple people asked me to defend that, saying that "Hollywood" clearly doesn't seem to want new or good scripts.

No one sets out to make a bad movie.  Bad movies happen sometimes because plans go awry, sometimes because missteps were made in the translation from script to screen, sometimes because the cumulative effect of too many opinions and compromises eventually crushes the film.  This is obvious, but I feel like I should state it because it seems like some people making the above argument might actually believe that there are some executives deliberately looking for bad scripts.

You can never forget that this is a business - a very expensive business.  We can waste time complaining about that and getting into a lot of high-minded arguments about art vs. commerce... Or we can just accept that as an immutable reality of the film industry and try to understand why things work this way.

A studio has to release a certain number of films a year that do a certain amount of business so that they can keep their bottom line healthy and thus, continue to stay in business.  As with any business, it's about releasing a product that will produce profit.  That also translates to releasing products with market appeal.

To put it more bluntly, Hollywood is giving you what you want.  Or at least what the best information available to them leads them to believe you want.  They don't release bad movies to piss you off any more than Ford would produce a car that suddenly ejected you from your vehicle without warning.

I'm not saying that this reality means they should get a free pass from criticism or Monday Morning Quarterbacking either.  If bad product comes to market, you as the consumer should absolutely let your voice be heard.  Even better - don't spend your money on said product.

The problem sets in when there's a film that everyone seems to consider terrible, but it makes an insane amount of money.  Look at Transformers.  There are plenty of people who are quite vocal in expressing their belief that Michael Bay makes very unintelligent films that are nothing more than boobs and pyrotechnics.  Some people might even argue that his movies are among the worst ever made.  In the case of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I might even agree with them.

But look at these numbers:

Transformers - $319 million domestic gross/$709 million worldwide
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - $402 million domestic/$836 million worldwide
Transformers: Dark of the Moon - $352 million domestic/$1.1 billion worldwide

Someone saw those movies.  And on a worldwide scale, each film was more successful than the one that preceded it.  Why wouldn't you continue that series?  Because some people on the internet talk shit about Michael Bay?  Sorry, that doesn't fly in the business world.

So let's say you're the guy sitting in an executive office at a competing studio, trying to set the slate for the coming year.  This is a business of home runs and you've just seen Paramount and DreamWorks hit a massive home run with Transformers.  They figured out what the audience wanted and they gave it to them - so it's on YOU to find that same audience.

This is why you're going to take note of the fact that Transformers had massive awareness as a brand and an audience hungry for new material even some 15 or 20 years after the cartoon was last significant.  It only makes sense that you would explore other popular brands to exploit in a similar manner.

And if it just so happens that your studio already OWNS such a brand (let's say He-Man), it would practically be malpractice NOT to put such a project in development.  Or maybe you'd rather explain to shareholders eager for their own Transformers-sized hit why you're sitting on a goldmine.

So why is there such unoriginality?  Because you, the consumer, have told Hollywood that there's gold in them thar' remakes.  So long as reboots, remakes and re-adaptations rake in the cash, you're sending the message that's what you want.  It's not like all the powerbrokers in Hollywood sat down together like a meeting of the Five Families and decided as a whole to produce these films.

It's not any more complicated than that.

Let's talk a little bit about the issue of quality.

So you've greenlit He-Man and set it as your big tentpole for Summer 2014.  You've got a few other big movies lined up for that year, but this is the one you see as your crown jewel.  You've probably got several other big movies on the slate during the intervening years between now and then and so as much as you're shepherding each one as its own individual property, you've also got to be cognizant of their importance to the whole.

It's very unlikely that in summer 2012, you'll take a look at the tentpole that's about to go before the cameras for release next year and decide, "Maybe if we delayed everything another six months we can make this even better."  Delays like that cost money.  What if the actors and director are already committed to projects that would start shooting at that later date?  If you delay six months that means you lose your big release for Summer 2013, so what is going to plug that hole?  Can you move something else up?  Would moving another project forward by six months compromise that project?

I could continue in that vein, but I think the point is made - at a certain point, movies like this become too big to fail.  You can't stop the freight train, you can only hope to get it under control.  There will always be unexpected problems, whether they're production problems, or they're simply the result of a complicated script that needed more time in development.

"Films aren't released, they escape," is an old saying that pretty aptly describes this.  There's a property and a release date, and with rare exception, one simply cannot afford to miss that release date.  Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels once said, "The show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's Saturday."  That's pretty much how it works in the movie business too.  That's also why it's incredibly remarkable that earlier this year, Paramount delayed the release of the second G.I. Joe movie from June to next March.  A delay of that sort on such short notice is pretty much unheard of.

A lot of this might be met with a resounding "Duh!"  My purpose in writing this is not to offer a pardon to those "bad, unoriginal" films, but to explain them.  Moreover, the preponderance of such product should never deter you, the writer, from pushing yourself to write new and original ideas.  You should never look at something like Wrath of the Titans and say, "Well, that sucked so clearly Hollywood just wants to make shit."

Companies stop making products when said products cease to be profitable.  That's a fundamental principle of every business. Why pretend that there's something wrong with that mentality when it comes to the movie business?

Bad movies are a fact of life, but good movies still happen.  Though the reboots and remakes may be more visible, there will always be a need for new ideas.  Even Transformers was a new idea at one point.  You can decry the business realities that make franchise films a commodity, or you can look at the big picture and try to figure out how to make your work part of the solution.

But you can't just stick your head in the sand and pretend that the current studio output is part of some active effort to quash original ideas and render quality irrelevant.  It's not only naive, it's a completely unproductive and unhelpful attitude to have.

Because at the end of the day, the problem isn't that Hollywood that doesn't care that so many releases are remakes and films of questionable quality.

It's that YOU don't care.

At least that's what the box office numbers often tell us.

Reader question - When are remakes justified?

A Twitter-submitted question from @Swiss_Fox:

When do you think a remake is appropriate? What conditions/qualities need to be present/met in the original? In the remake?

My personal feeling is that there are few good reasons to remake a good movie. Would anything be gained by remaking Star Wars? ET? Back to the Future? If the original is already timeless, remaking it is a losing game.

In the case where the original film was based on other source material, then there might be room for reinterpretation - particularly in cases where the original adaptation took some liberties with the source material. Thus, I could see someone justifying a remake of To Kill a Mockingbird... but would it be wise to remake Gone With the Wind? I've long thought that you could get an interesting movie out of re-adapting The Wizard of Oz so that it's more faithful to the book. However, the problem there is that the original is SO iconic that the filmmakers would probably be facing an uphill battle.

I think there's more justification for remaking a film that might have had an interesting idea, but unsuccessful execution the first time around. If there's something new to be said with the material - a different tone, a reexamination of how the old themes play in a new, modern context - it also gives more justification for the remake.

Most of the time, though, the studio finds remakes attractive because they're pre-sold... so remaking a bomb would run counter to that desire. Having said that, I'd love to remake I Know What You Did Last Summer the way it was meant to be.

Just my opinion. How do you guys feel?