To Remake or not to Remake?

When Frank Oz announced he was directing a remake of Bedtime Stories in 1988 (eventually released as "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels"), a reporter asked him why he would bother remaking a mostly forgotten box office flop. Oz replied that those are the only films worth remaking; "there's no point in remaking a film if they got it right the first time."

We all know that Hollywood in general doesn't necessarily agree with Frank Oz. No movie is truly safe from Hollywood's remake machine, no matter how much the original is considered a classic. Case in point: In 1995, Sydney Pollack announced that his next film would be a remake of none other than Casablanca, starring Harrison Ford in the Humphrey Bogart role. Fans of the original movie screamed heresy, but it was only after the box office flop of Sabrina -- another Pollack/ Ford remake of a Bogart film -- that this plan was abandoned, and then only out of an obvious fear of commercial failure, rather than artistic respect for the original.

Is Frank Oz right in his opinion that good movies shouldn't be remade? Ostensibly, his opinion sounds wiser than Hollywood convention, but I'd counter that there is no steadfast rule; whether a film "should" be remade (and by this I mean whether a remake would have artistic value) can really only be made on a case-by-case basis.

To illustrate my reasoning, I'd like to take a look at two movies with Internet rumors of "remake." Both movies are entertaining films with a mixture of drama, humor, suspense, and science fiction that contrasts concepts of past, present and future: Back to the Future and Westworld.

Now, before I go any further, let me assure my fellow Back to the Future fans: In this case, the Internet rumors are just that, Internet rumors, with no basis in fact whatsoever. They are fueled by one thing and one thing only: speculation, sparked by IMDb postings comparing the movie with 17 Again, and openly wondering if a remake would see that movie's star, Zac Efron, in the role of Marty. It bears repeating: There is no truth to the rumor whatsoever!

That being said, I can see why people would speculate about a remake. We are now considerably closer to the year that the movie considered "the Future" than we are to what it considered "the Present," a fact which makes some of the questions concerning such a hypothetical remake intriguing; what types of culture shock would a 2010 teenager experience in the year 1980?

Still, I have to reject a remake of Back to the Future as a legitimate artistic enterprise. I originally thought that a remake could succeed only if they kept Gale and Zemeckis's Oscar-nominated screenplay, more or less word for word. Then I reflected on how many other elements of the film are just right: Robert Zemeckis's inspired direction, Alan Silvestri's suspenseful theme music, the way the songs so perfectly reflect their respective time periods, Christopher Lloyd's iconic performance as Doc. I could go on. My inescapable conclusion is that Back to the Future is as close to perfection as a movie can get; other films may match it, but none surpass it. Quite simply, I cannot imagine any circumstances in which a remake could come even close to meeting the original's artistic value. Even an attempt at creating a nearly exact duplicate would probably fail, as Gus van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho illustrates all too clearly.

Westworld is a different story. Granted, I love the movie -- not as much as I love Back to the Future, but Westworld is a lot of fun if you can get past the slow pace. Still, there are several factors that make me interested in a potential remake. First of all, the film is more dated. While Back to the Future is at once very 80s and yet somehow also still very contemporary, Westworld is simply too much a product of the 70s, from the massive computers used by technicians in the film, to the 70s 'stache on Richard Benjamin -- and no amount of digital remastering for the DVD can hide the grainy cinematography. (And speaking of how dated the film is, how amusing is it that the genius technicians of Westworld are baffled by the very concept of a "technological failure much like an infectious disease"? In our modern world, when even the most noviced computer user is familiar with the concept of computer viruses, the Westworld technicians' puzzlement seems laughably quaint.)

More to the point, Westworld is a less precise film. Think about how many aspects of Back to the Future -- everything from major plot points to minor sight gags -- depend on precise attention to detail. The more you pay attention -- both to the dialogue and to what you see on the screen -- the more you get out of it. Much of this would probably be lost in any attempt at a remake. Yet the appeal to Westworld lies mainly in its main ideas, that there is an amusement park that creates a seemingly exact duplicate of the Old West, and that a mysterious technological breakdown causes the robots who occupy the Western town to turn into physically superior killers. Even if you consider the original's climactic chase sequence as indespensible to any potential remake, there are any number of ways in which all of this can be played out. I, for one, would be very interested in seeing how modern filmmakers would interpret the story's contrast between "past" (in the form of Westworld itself and its fellow historically themed resorts) and "future" (in the form of the control room and other aspects of the "outside world" in whatever year that the story takes place).

I guess my conclusion is that even good movies can be remade with artistic value, as long as there is honestly room for improvement or further exploration of the concept. With a nearly perfect film like Back to the Future, the mere concept of remake seems blasphemous. With a flick like Westworld -- there's still much to be explored.