Reboots

Posted on 05 January 2010

First, happy new year!  Anyway.

So it has been the big thing lately for movies to be reboots or re-imaginings of already existing properties.  Either there are more books-to-movies being made or comics-to-movies or just redoing old movies new, the old phrase “originality is dead” has never seemed more true than at the theater these past couple years.  Why, and is this a good thing?

Well, the why is kind of easy.  As in easy money.  Cheaper and easier to just write a new script and story in an existing world and then spend your budget on actors and fancy SFX than to having something wholly original.  Also, you get the nostalgia crowd, those people who see the movie just because it is Ironman or Batman or Narnia.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this is even residual effects of the Writer’s Strike.  Well, better than feature length reality TV, right?

Now, I’m not going to say money is the sole driver, although in Hollywood, as I understand the dirty backside, it is a majority shareholder.  Some of it can also be the SFX themselves.  Could anyone really see the Ironman movie, or Where the Wild Things Are, or the new Batmans, or . . . or . . . or . . . without all of the nifty computer things we can do nowadays?  Heck, for the longest time, they said Lord of the Rings was unfilmable ever, but I think Peter Jackson did a spiffy job.  Also, I will admit, the new Star Trek was visually appealing, even if the Enterprise looked a little like an over-inflated balloon toy.

There can also be nostalgia on the other end too.  Directors and producers and writers wanting to see things from their youth redone in a fantastic new way.  Not like Sherlock Holmes hasn’t been “redone” on television and the silver screen plenty of times.  So yeah, lots of reasons why.

Now, the bigger question, is this good?  I am going to straight up say that I was not happy with the new Star Trek movie.  It was visually appealing, I admit, and a wonderful action romp.  Star Trek was always the first, not so much the second though.  Yes, there were fights and starship battles, but long extended scenes of combat?  Nope, at least not in bullet time with telescoping katana (that he fences with?  Nah).  The core of what Star Trek was, an optimistic future with altruistic heroes, that was gone.  As someone who watched reruns of the original series as a wee child, got to see the sixth movie in the theater (Undiscovered Country), and watched all of TNG as it aired, yeah, not a fan.

Then I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie.  I am not exactly a big S.H. fan.  I know who he is, I love the concept of the character, but I had never actually read any of the original material.  I adored the new movie.  Both for the action scenes which I fully accept were most likely not part of a Conan Doyle story, and for the plot and portrayal of the characters.  Now, as I understand it, the characters were not all that far off in portrayal as the Star Trek ones were, but there were still substantial changes to the concept of Holmes, and I heard some of the “purist” (much as I am a Trek Purist) declaiming the problems with the movie.  And, as I left, even before I read reviews by people I respect that are fans of the source, I knew that I had just seen “the other side”.  I just got to enjoy Holmes in the way that someone who was not all that familiar with Star Trek was able to enjoy the J.J. Abrams movie.

Yeah, things change, but a reboot is not really a reboot.  You are not trying to tell the exact same story in the exact same universe.  That story has already been told.  Could they have done the S.H. movie without even calling it that?  Just make it a fresh, un-attached to anything following the established S.H. tropes?  Yeah, but then it would have just been called a S.H. knockoff.  Now it is a retelling, a new way to look at characters.  Perhaps, just maybe, these fictional beings of authors’ minds are alive and breathing too.  And, just like people, they both age and change, sometimes look different to different people, and above all else, have their own destiny to fulfill.  I think I’ll enjoy watching reboots a little more from now on.  At least, so long as they don’t just have hideous faux-science about black holes in the middle of planets.  Come on, you can only ask so much of me, right?