If there's any popular movie that desperately needs a remake, this would be the one. Kubrick is usually very good, but this was definitely one of his weaker films.
- MrMacPhisto
THE FUCK IT DOES!
I assume your feelings of its "need" to be remade is the dated architecture and fashion sense of the original, and that a remake would make it more accessible to a modern audience. In my opinion, that's an excuse for people to ignore the good works of the past for a milquetoast modernization that always falls flat (
War of the Worlds ring a bell?).
Kubrick's vision of the future was a speculative projection of Modernist fashion, which was popular in the late 60s and early 70s, and an outgrowth of the Futurist art movements of the 1950s
EX: Futurist architecture, popular in the 50s
EX: Modernist architecture, popular in late 60s and early 70s
Modernist architecture was obsessed with merging industrial function and aesthetic; incorporating the utilitarian with the casual so that it could co-exist and in the process rebuke the traditional aesthetics popular from the Renaissance and Romantic periods. It's self-aware art that draws attention to its artifice and the materials used in its creation. Wood, concrete, glass, and porcelain were among the most essential materials in Modernist design, and vibrant, contrasting primary colors were crucial schemes to the a/symmetry of the entire aesthetic. Compare the Futurist pictures with the Modernist ones and you might see the similarities between the angular, jagged designs of the exteriors of the buildings and the rounder edges of interior space, especially pertaining to light fixtures. If you've been around long enough to see shopping malls or bank buildings made in the 1970s, you'll have noticed these shapes and textures still around if they haven't been thoroughly renovated. Airports with thin multi-colored wall tiles are a classic staple that still remain.
The entire city of Brasilia was designed with this in mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasilia
Since no other film besides
Blade Runner has successfully predicted the look and appearance of the future without already BEING IN IT ALREADY, Kubrick had to incorporate the then-futuristic look of Modernism and project what it might look like in the future for the audience. If somebody went back in time and designed a future that looked like today, nobody would have been able to relate to it, let alone build it (HDTVs would have been an optical printing headache).
Now perhaps in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the gaudy period aesthetics would overwhelm the timelessness of the film, but Kubrick's photographic fundamentalism is exactly what gives it the immortal and still influential quality it enjoys today.
If
Clockwork was re-made today, it would be a hyper-stylized action movie that throws out all of its potency in exchange for a happy ending (
Minority Report, anyone?). It would inevitably include some romantic subplot to create empathy for the main character in the audience and fuck all of the complexity he has.
And Gawd only knows who they'd cast as Alex. I doubt they'd cast anybody of the right age given the violence, however watered down it would inevitably be. And do I REALLY have to be the one to point out that they'd shoot for a PG-13 rating and that even an R-rated cut would be tame by comparison to the original, regardless of how tame the 1971 version is by today's standards?
And it would look like crap; all Michael Bay Teal-and-Orange color grading. Read this article for more:
http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html
However, I will concede that Kubrick's screenplays were incredibly sparse and inferior. Kubrick was more interested in formalism and idiosyncratic behavior than he was in operatic grandeur; he famously said to Jack Nicholson that "realism is fine, but interesting is better." I don't think you could find a Kubrick film outside of Dr. Strangelove (thanks to Terry Southern and Peter Sellers) and Barry Lyndon that had a well-written script with well-written dialogue. Kubrick dials everything in directly and relies too heavily on his imagery and his hyper-stylized performances to fill it all in.
So fucking LEAVE MASTERPIECES ALONE! Remake the BAD MOVIES, not the GOOD ONES.
On this note, remember Kubrick's version of
The Shining and Stephen King's remake in 1997? Which one is better? Sometimes interesting IS better than authenticity.
