Total Recall

Movie Monday: Reboots

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I’d like to use this weeks Movie Monday post to talk about the current trend of Rebooting movies and franchises. In the last few years we have seen An A-Team reboot, a Spider-Man one, Total Recall. We saw Judge Dredd come back to our screens in Dredd. We also have Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. I’ve also heard a rumour that there will be a Starship Troopers  and RoboCop reboot too.

Most of the time these movies are very uninspiring. I found the Spider-Man reboot just that, although Andrew Garfield was very good as Peter Parker and the rest of the cast was mostly very good. The storyline and the fact that the original Spider-Man films are still quite fresh in our memories.

The A-Team movie was okay at best Liam Neeson was as always very solid. Quinton Jackson as B.A. was good and so was Sharlto Copley as Murdock. I felt Bradley Cooper did not do justice to the character of Face. I remember Face to be very Suave when he was played by Dick Benedict in the TV series and Cooper made him to much of a loud mouth. I like Bradly Cooper but he didn’t pull this one-off.

Total Recall I’m still on the fence with. When I watched it I was half asleep so I’d like to give it another watch before deciding once and for all.

Out of the movies that I have mentioned the only remakes that has impressed me was Dredd and the Batman trilogy. Dredd was a lot more raw then the original version and Christophe Nolan gave Batman a whole new edge which worked really well.

I am not anti-reboots, but they have to be good. They have to do something more than just make money. Rebooting Spider-Man so soon after the first three movies were made was not needed really. People know the origin story, so why do it again?

I would love to see Hollywood taking a few chances and make some original movies like Moon by Duncan Jones. Or Christopher Nolan’s Inception. District 9 was an amazing movie as well. If you’re going to do a reboot it needs to be something different to what we have seen, not the same old story time and time again.

Movie Monday

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I want to use this week’s Movie Monday to give a couple of quick thoughts on a few films that I have seen this year that I have not mentioned here.  Firstly The Amazing Spider-Man. I kind of expected this film to as it was, predictable.  My favourite part of it was the chemistry between Martin Sheen and Sally Field.  Andrew Garfield is a far better Peter Parker/Spider-Man then Toby Maguire was.  Emma Stone is also very good as Gwen Stacy, although both her and Garfield look far too old to be high school students.  Rhys Ifans is not really convincing as Dr. Curt Connors.  It was nice seeing a little bit about Parker’s parents though but most of that was clearly in place for any sequel that may be in the pipeline.

The story was not too bad, but the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies are still too fresh in our memories for it to really make a mark on me.  I would have been tempted  to have carried on from the end of the third Raimi film, but with a new cast and director and so forth. Doing a re-boot though opens all the doors that Raimi closed.  The writers, producers and director(s) of a new series of films can pull almost anything they want from the Spider-Man universe.

Another Re-booted movie that was out this summer was Total Recall.  I’m a little unsure of this one, I think I’d like to see it again before really giving a strong opinion on it.  The cast is pretty good, although I’m still to see a film where Jessica Biel really pushes herself as an actress.  Kate Beckinsale is good in it, nice to see her playing a different role to what she normally seems to do.  I do generally like Len Wiseman as a director as well.  If I had to voice an opinion of the film though I would say that it’s not got the edge of the original, and although I do like Wiseman I couldn’t help but think that someone like Duncan Jones or Christopher Nolan would have been able to bring something a bit more to it.  Both of those directors have made films which challenge the viewers interpretation of the world.

I hate writing blog posts like this because it feels like a really negative post and I have no doubt that many of the people involved in these films worked incredibly hard to put them together.  They were not the films that I had hoped that they would be.  We are in a stage in our (movie) culture where Hollywood is recycling so many movies it’s kind of hard to get really excited about some of these re-boots.  I know I list The Dark Knight Rises as one of the best movies of the year so far, and yes that is a re-boot but it is an impressive re-boot.  There’s not been many other re-boots that have been as impressive or better, well aside from Dredd that is 😀