These days the vast majority of the movies that Hollywood makes are either franchise sequels and reboots or remakes of successful films from other countries. This has the advantage of giving people more adventures starring characters they know and love, but it can also be creatively stifling and lead to diminishing returns. Some of the remakes are of original Asian movies and we decided to look at a few of the best – as well as some we would all be better forgetting.
The Magnificent Seven
This 1960 movie demonstrated the perfect way of adapting Asian films for a US audience. It is the 1954 Kurusawa classic The Seven Samurai moved to an American western setting. There are clear parallels to be drawn between the Samurai in the culture of Japan and the cowboy in US culture, so nothing about this reimagining says ‘forced’. For that reason and the superb acting from stars like Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen it is almost as fondly regarded by US audiences as the original is with Japanese film fans.
Godzilla
If the Magnificent Seven showed how to get Asian movie adaptations right, then the various remakes of the 1954 Japanese movie Godzilla demonstrated how to make a complete mess of them. Firstly Hollywood took the Japanese film called Return of Godzilla and hacked it to pieces to create Godzilla 1985, ruining the story, then it went on to make two duff remakes of the original in 1998 and 2014. By the time of the last one, Hollywood’s fixation with sequels was in full force, and thus inevitably we were forced to endure a follow up!
The Departed
Martin Scorsese looked to Asia for inspiration in 2006, adapting a 2002 movie called Infernal Affairs by Andrew Lau. The plot of two undercover agents trying to identify one another and stay alive remained the same, but Scorsese moved the action from Asia to Boston. He kept all of the violent action and themes of each of these two moles being mirror images of the other, but also managed to draw a performance from Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello that was even more memorable than that of Eric Tsang in the first film.
Oldboy
The 2003 original by Park Chan-Wook is considered a classic by fans of horror movies, whereas the 2013 remake by Spike Lee is considered a horror by fans of classic movies. The almost total lack of subtlety in Lee’s version is amazing for such a gifted director, but he removed most of the psychological horror from its tale of a man seeking revenge for 20 years in solitary confinement and relied on heavy doses violence and gore. That made for a clumsy and unnecessary remake.
Hollywood has shown that it can adapt Asian films in a way that keeps the best elements and sometimes even adds intriguing new ones. Unfortunately, at other times, the adaptations have been driven by laziness and money.
