The Black Hole Remake

[Christopher]

It's generally safe to assume that any '30s through '50s movie based on a classic or public-domain literary work was previously adapted as a silent film at least once. The bromide you keep hearing is that Hollywood "these days" has run out of ideas and is obsessed with remakes, but in fact, remakes were far more common and frequent in the early decades of cinema than they are today. After all, films often didn't get distributed as widely, and they didn't reappear on TV or home video, so one film version of a story might only reach a limited audience and then disappear, leaving the field wide open for another version.

 

[cardinal biggles]

As a kid I was confused by the fact that near the climax they were floating in space with no ill effects - wasn't until the novelisation that I found that the Cygnus's gravity shield also held in the atmosphere - would have made more sense if a couple of lines of dialogue had mentioned that!

I recently rewatched TBH for the first time in ages, and that part really bugged me, with all the very obvious hull breaches, yet nobody is getting sucked out into space (except that brief sequence where VINCENT rescues the first officer) or even having trouble breathing.

 

[JarodRussell]

^Well, The Ten Commandments was a remake too. DeMille originally made it as a silent film in 1923, then remade and expanded it in '56, with many scenes recreated shot-for-shot.

It's generally safe to assume that any '30s through '50s movie based on a classic or public-domain literary work was previously adapted as a silent film at least once. The bromide you keep hearing is that Hollywood "these days" has run out of ideas and is obsessed with remakes, but in fact, remakes were far more common and frequent in the early decades of cinema than they are today. After all, films often didn't get distributed as widely, and they didn't reappear on TV or home video, so one film version of a story might only reach a limited audience and then disappear, leaving the field wide open for another version.

That's why those examples for remakes don't count in my opinion. Charlton Heston Ten Commandments or Ben Hur, for example, is the first modern film version. Silent film is a whole different medium, like a stage play, or a book. And has there been remakes of 1950s Ten Commandments or Ben Hur that come remotely close to the quality of those "originals"?

 

[Owain Taggart]

There was a recent Ben-Hur miniseries that was pretty decent. It was pretty much a shot-for-shot remake.

 

[publiusr]

I loved the movie

Nice physical and CGI models of the Cygnus here
http://www.therpf.com/f11/1-700-1-350-scale-bh-cygnus-builds-145563/index13.html

http://nzpetesmatteshot.blogspot.co.uk/

 

[Nerys Myk]

^Well, The Ten Commandments was a remake too. DeMille originally made it as a silent film in 1923, then remade and expanded it in '56, with many scenes recreated shot-for-shot.

It's generally safe to assume that any '30s through '50s movie based on a classic or public-domain literary work was previously adapted as a silent film at least once. The bromide you keep hearing is that Hollywood "these days" has run out of ideas and is obsessed with remakes, but in fact, remakes were far more common and frequent in the early decades of cinema than they are today. After all, films often didn't get distributed as widely, and they didn't reappear on TV or home video, so one film version of a story might only reach a limited audience and then disappear, leaving the field wide open for another version.

That's why those examples for remakes don't count in my opinion. Charlton Heston Ten Commandments or Ben Hur, for example, is the first modern film version. Silent film is a whole different medium, like a stage play, or a book. And has there been remakes of 1950s Ten Commandments or Ben Hur that come remotely close to the quality of those "originals"?

Scenes remade shot for shot and yet they're different mediums?

 

[Amaris]

I would love to see a well applied remake of The Black Hole. I still love the original, but I'd like to see what can be done with a better storytelling. Hell, we can still get Maximilian Schell to play Reinhardt!

 

[Christopher]

That's why those examples for remakes don't count in my opinion. Charlton Heston Ten Commandments or Ben Hur, for example, is the first modern film version. Silent film is a whole different medium, like a stage play, or a book. And has there been remakes of 1950s Ten Commandments or Ben Hur that come remotely close to the quality of those "originals"?

It's easy to "prove" any premise if you cheat by defining your terms to pre-emptively exclude any evidence that doesn't fit your premise. You've already been given numerous examples of remakes that were, in fact, good, if not better than the originals.

It's just plain wrong and lazy to pretend that an entire category of storytelling is uniformly bad. You can only judge the quality of each individual entry in the category, because of course they're going to vary widely and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise. I mean, how does that even make sense as a premise? Different remakes are made by different creators and different studios, they have different casts and crews, they have different budgets and different objectives. How is it remotely logical to claim that a remake by, say, Joss Whedon or Christopher Nolan or Kenneth Branagh is going to be equally as bad as a remake by Uwe Boll or M. Night Shyamalan? Different people undertaking the same type of project are going to get different results. So it's bizarre to blame the category for the results rather than the specific makers and circumstances of the individual films.

Certainly Sturgeon's Law applies; 90% of everything is crud, so it's easy to look at the 90% of bad entries in any given genre and claim it as proof that the genre as a whole is invalid. But that requires ignoring the 10% of entries in that genre that are good or even great -- and it requires ignoring the 90% of crud in every other genre. It's hardly as if original movies have any better a track record than remakes.

 

[Silvercrest]

A remake of this film - done well - really has some potential

Remakes always have potential. But I know not a single one that was ever done well.

That's why those examples for remakes don't count in my opinion. Charlton Heston Ten Commandments or Ben Hur, for example, is the first modern film version. Silent film is a whole different medium, like a stage play, or a book. And has there been remakes of 1950s Ten Commandments or Ben Hur that come remotely close to the quality of those "originals"?

It's easy to "prove" any premise if you cheat by defining your terms to pre-emptively exclude any evidence that doesn't fit your premise. You've already been given numerous examples of remakes that were, in fact, good, if not better than the originals.

Yeah ... you know "not a single one ... ever" — except for all the examples you don't count.

Careful. You're going to injure yourself if you keep moving the goalposts like that.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I would love to see a well applied remake of The Black Hole. I still love the original, but I'd like to see what can be done with a better storytelling. Hell, we can still get Maximilian Schell to play Reinhardt!

Cumberbatch as Reinhardt. You know you want it.

Oh, and Frank McCrae should be part of the cast, and they should show the (failed) mutiny he brings against Reinhardt. Imagine actually showing the crew being turned into 'humanoids'...

 

[JarodRussell]

A remake of this film - done well - really has some potential

Remakes always have potential. But I know not a single one that was ever done well.

That's why those examples for remakes don't count in my opinion. Charlton Heston Ten Commandments or Ben Hur, for example, is the first modern film version. Silent film is a whole different medium, like a stage play, or a book. And has there been remakes of 1950s Ten Commandments or Ben Hur that come remotely close to the quality of those "originals"?

It's easy to "prove" any premise if you cheat by defining your terms to pre-emptively exclude any evidence that doesn't fit your premise. You've already been given numerous examples of remakes that were, in fact, good, if not better than the originals.

Yeah ... you know "not a single one ... ever" — except for all the examples you don't count.

Careful. You're going to injure yourself if you keep moving the goalposts like that.

Sigh. The fun started when I stated what was clearly my opinion ("I know not a single one"), and people felt the need to disagree with it by stating their own opinion as fact. And when they come with the rather exotic examples, like remakes of silent films, which - again - I don't consider fair comparisons.

And that I don't consider Ben Hur a remake is not a moved goal post, it's an opinion that I have stated here several times over the last years.

True Lies (where my avatar is from) is officially a remake as well, but it's a) so different from the original French film La Totale! (which b) nobody knows, not even here in France) that I don't consider it a remake either.

Comic book films don't count for me either, because they are not remakes of previous films. Just like Star Trek 2009 is not a remake of TMP, or Superman Returns is not a remake of Superman, it's just another story in the same or similar universe.

And just like the CG version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not a remake of either the live action Ninja Turtles or the cartoon Ninja Turtles, sound film The Ten Commandments is not a remake of silent film The Ten Commandments. I can only repeat my opinion here.

What we have here with The Black Hole is the case of a well known, modern film being remade. And there I know not a single remake that was better than the original.

Examples that are comparable (some of which were already named by previous posters) are 3:10 to Yuma, True Grit, Ransom, all those Rear Window remakes, The Fly (in my opinion the 1958 version is better than the Cronenberg remake), Carrie, Lady Killers, The Italian Job, Cape Fear (sorry, Scorsese), The Karate Kid, The Departed (again sorry, Martin), The Experiment (the German version is superior on all counts), Flight of the Phoenix, The Getaway, The Nutty Professor, Ocean's Eleven...

Okay, now that I think about it, there is one remake that I know that is better than the original version: Heat, directed by Michael Mann, is better than The Takedown, directed by... oh, Michael Mann. And even there The Takedown has a lot of aspects that are superior to the remade attempts in Heat.

The Black Hole is one of these films that simply don't need to be remade. There's nothing wrong with it, and the story won't gain anything from another attempt. With today's storytelling style in big budget productions, it certainly will even lose a lot.

 

[Mysterion]

This time can they make the Palomino look much less like the SS Valiant's recorder buoy in Where No Man Has Gone Before?

 

[Mr. Adventure]

On the subject of remakes in general, it seems to me that some of the more well-regarded ones are the ones that are quite a departure from the source material. The Fly is nothing like its predecessor other than the very basic premise, similarly The Thing vs The Thing From Another World (both well regarded, whereas the more faithful 2011 take not so much), A Fistful of Dollars vs Yojimbo, Magnificent Seven vs Seven Samurai and son on. Yet people often get up in arms when there's a departure from the source so go figure.

 

[Solariabsg25]

This time can they make the Palomino look much less like the SS Valiant's recorder buoy in Where No Man Has Gone Before?

I'll boycott the film if that happens! I demand the Palomino looks just like a log buoy!!

Seriously though, the Palomino can be redesigned fairly easily. The Cygnus is such a unique Gothic design though, I'd love to see as little change to that as possible.

Remakes are a fine line, they have to be different enough to make their own mark, yet stay faithful to the original. Not an easy task to get right, as the differing opinions in this thread make plain.

 

[Christopher]

This time can they make the Palomino look much less like the SS Valiant's recorder buoy in Where No Man Has Gone Before?

Actually I loved how plausible the Palomino looked, like a logical extrapolation from existing spacecraft designs. The movie actually had surprisingly solid science, at least compared to the fantasy crap you usually see in space movies. The simulations of freefall were quite good, and it was the first media depiction of a black hole to include an accretion disk -- although it really shouldn't have had an accretion disk since it wasn't part of a binary star system and didn't have anything to accrete, and every screen black hole ever since has repeated the same mistake.

On the subject of remakes in general, it seems to me that some of the more well-regarded ones are the ones that are quite a departure from the source material. The Fly is nothing like its predecessor other than the very basic premise, similarly The Thing vs The Thing From Another World (both well regarded, whereas the more faithful 2011 take not so much)

The Thing From Another World is an extremely loose adaptation of John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?", while John Carpenter's The Thing is a somewhat more faithful adaptation of the Campbell story (at least to the extent that the creature is a shapeshifter as in the original story, rather than a humanoid plant monster or whatever.)

 

[Mr. Adventure]

^^ I know, but I was thinking of them in terms of the movies themselves, in the same way Ben-Hur and The Fly are usually divorced from their original stories.

 

[publiusr]

The Cygnus is a wonderful Edwardian Supertanker.

This time can they make the Palomino look much less like the SS Valiant's recorder buoy in Where No Man Has Gone Before?

I think there was some early art that had it look different
http://mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com/2010/03/space-ship-designer-1.html

More links here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAEK44mdwPU
http://www.oocities.org/area51/shire/6822/prepro.html
http://federationreference.prophpbb.com/topic849.html

I would love to see a well applied remake of The Black Hole. I still love the original, but I'd like to see what can be done with a better storytelling. Hell, we can still get Maximilian Schell to play Reinhardt!

And here I thought he had passed away. Maybe the Most Interesting Man in the World?

 

[Lonemagpie]

I always wanted to write a more serious remake of this.

Mind you, Event Horizon pretty much did it already...

 

[Solariabsg25]

I loved Event Horizon (the last film I saw at the Canon Cinema in the centre of Bristol before it closed), but it wasn't until years later when I recognised that there were a few similarities to The Black Hole storyline.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

What's in common? A black hole and Hell, maybe?

Meh. The stories are completely different, and what little they do have in common isn't even really that similar.