Film remakes: do they ever succeed?

I agree, but what's worse is where the remakers try to weasel their way through by calling it a "re-imagining".

The recent one that really grates with me is the Hollywood rehash of the excellent and subtly unsettling Swedish film about child vampires Let the Right One In, rehashed for the US because they couldn't trust the audience to cope with subtitles. I saw the US version on DVD, and it was in truth a pretty good attempt - but utterly pointless and a huge waste of money when the superior original was immediately available.

There is an essential flaw in the concept. Revisiting the same source material is fine. There have been at least three stabs at telling the a titanic story for instance, but as someone else said a remake of a BIG commercial success is a business venture not an aesthetic one. And yes good foreign language films are very often re made for the US market (as are TV series like The Bridge or A Killing) because of a widely held perception that a large part of the population can't handle sub titles (and dubbing long since went out of vogue). But sometimes a remake is something so different it succeeds in its own right. I think the Seven Samuari/Magnificent Seven is a case in point.

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Originally Posted by Prospero

There is an essential flaw in the concept. Revisiting the same source material is fine. There have been at least three stabs at telling the a titanic story for instance, but as someone else said a remake of a BIG commercial success is a business venture not an aesthetic one. And yes good foreign language films are very often re made for the US market (as are TV series like The Bridge or A Killing) because of a widely held perception that a large part of the population can't handle sub titles (and dubbing long since went out of vogue). But sometimes a remake is something so different it succeeds in its own right. I think the Seven Samuari/Magnificent Seven is a case in point.

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Interestingly enough Sky remade The Bridge but made the protagonists French and British and set it in the Channel Tunnel - and it was almost good enough to make you forget the original.

But the US version of The Killing was execrable rubbish.

And sometimes they are so legion they don't count ie Dracula

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Originally Posted by Prospero

And sometimes they are so legion they don't count ie Dracula

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New series of The Bridge has got me gripped already. Thankfully nobody has attempted to remake the wonderfully gritty French policier series Spiral = Engrenages.

The Bridge... love the way Saga laughs overly loud when she imagines someone has made a joke. And Spiral is a treasure.