It usually begins with a shiver running up your spine or a flock of birds suddenly departing a tree. The TV airs a movie trailer, and you see that one of your favorite childhood films is being remade. No, not like this. “Why are they remaking that?” you cry out. “Why couldn't they just leave it alone?”
It's unfortunately become part of growing up, seeing a prized film franchise diluted to meaningless flotsam with repeated remakes that no longer have any connection to the spirit of the original. It tends to star actors you don't like and is helmed by a director you've never heard of, all of whom appear to be wearing your cinematic nostalgia like a skin suit. Many don't find it to be a big deal right up until the moment that their favorite film gets remade. One instant they’re chiding fans of Star Wars or Indiana Jones or Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory for over-romanticizing films they grew up with, and the next moment they’re shooting the television like Elvis because of a remake of Red Dawn.
Sequels and prequels and re-imaginings abound. Where did Hollywood hurt you? Maybe it was Ghostbusters, Mean Girls, Pink Panther, Ben-Hur, The Lion King, Point Break, Old Boy, one of the 10 Spiderman movies, one of the 20 Batman movies, all the live-action remakes. I just learned they remade White Men Can’t Jump last year, and somehow got retroactively angry.
As more and more re-releases spill into the culture, you gradually feel like an old man who's witnessed lifeless condominiums rise up where buildings with character once stood. The words from that Barry Corbin scene in No Country for Old Men echo in your mind: “What you got ain't nothin' new. This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.”
They're just movies, after all. But in a sense producers out of ideas are doing you a slight favor by remaking a film you once thought sacred and untouchable, because it's a small preview to similar disillusionment you'll likely soon feel when it comes to politics, relationships, friends or work.
With politics, there's usually a moment in adulthood when you realize that most on your so-called “side” don't really believe anything they claim to. With relationships, it could be a lost love previously thought eternal. Old friends might fade, a career could go askew, and that candy bar or cereal you've loved for years just doesn't taste the same as it used to. They must have changed something the recipe.
This isn't all gloom and doom nihilism. Change doesn’t always imply death. It's just that seeing a film you love remade into something with a trite script, and starring an actor from the Mickey Mouse Club, can alert you to the realities of personal readjustments, a shifting culture, and generational decline. We learn that the sacred is never invulnerable, or even worse, that the original version isn’t the perfection we imagine (Ghostbusters).
Bad remakes are the early warning system to disorienting changes in the social and cultural landscape. Every decade or so, the terrain shifts, and if unprepared it can feel like that moment in a videogame when you wake up in the desert and all your stuff is gone. Some movie franchises survive the war of attrition and remain prized despite the bad copies, and people can do the same. One learns over time to weather the deluge of bad remakes, and that the sacred is not what the ephemeral culture deems worthy, but what you value in the window of time that you've been given. An older generation may be disappointed by an Alien or Robocop remake, but a younger generation will one day react with horror when the same happens to Hunger Games or Lord of the Rings. They'll realize they should’ve listened to their parents when they told them to stay away from drugs, crime and remakes.
Perhaps all these generations can bond over their communal disappointment, sharing stories of how they never thought the franchises could get so bad, even if it prepared them for much harsher letdowns in life. Still, the most enviable among us may be that rare person who has successfully avoided every awful remake of their favorite movies, unaware of how stories ultimately went bad. They may be walking through life on an easily-shattered cloud, but that innocence could see them through to the end.