Spielberg has his work cut extinguished dire to turn the 2003 horror Oldboy into a family-friendly blockbuster. PR
It seems that not a week goes by in the geekosphere on the outside of another sequel or remake idea quickening up debate. Most are easily dismissed as hokum Hollywood potboilers, but at least two current projects are looking pretty promising. The first is Steven Spielberg’s and Will Smith’sitting remake of Oldboy, the sudden 2003 Korean thriller/horror from Park Chan-Wook which was based adhering the Japanese manga of the corresponding; of like kind name. The second is the upcoming Predator reboot, which is being overseen by Robert Rodriguez.
- Oldboy
- Release: 2003
- Country: Rest of the world
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 120 mins
- Directors: Chan-wook Park, Chanwook Park, Park Chan-wook
- Cast: Choi Min-sik, Hye-jeong Kang, Ji-tae Yu, Kang Hye-jeong, Min-sik Choi, Yu Ji-Tae
The Oldboy remake is currently at the centre of a lawful conflict involving the manga’sitting publishers, Futabasha, and the Korean producers of Chan-Wook’s film, with the former suggesting that the latter had no equitable to negotiate by Spielberg and Smith over a new translation. That is unlikely to scupper the film life made, however. What’s interesting about the remake, which would feature Smith in the role made famous by Min-sik Choi, a man imprisoned for 15 years in a grubby cell without explanation, is that Spielberg is apparently planning to come the story from the pristine comic book rather more closely than Chan-wook.
“We’re looking at the rights now,” Smith said recently. “Not the pellicle though, it’s the original source material. There’s the original comics of Oldboy that they made the first film from. And that’s what we’re working from, not an conformability of the film.”
The comic book, fortunately for the family-friendly Smith and Spielberg, lacks the octopus-eating scene and incest themes of the original film, and sets itself up as something of a noirish, pulpy detective story, with the central protagonist rifling his way through a nightscape of Yazuka gangsters and loose women, as he tries to discover who set him up, and why. There are still some fiercely adult themes, however. In one exhibition our hero brings a woman to orgasm in regular government to recall a clue that was fed to her via post-hypnotic hint, and there’s a pretty high body count too.
With luck, the Hollywood version determination bear no resemblance whatsoever to Chan-Wook’session curious, mesmeric and downright deviant original. Spielberg proved with the 2002 Philip K Dick adaptation Minority Report that he still knows exactly the kind of to do with genre fare, and can handle darker themes without dumbing them down or greying them wanting. He’s also great at getting the best out of A-list stars: Minority Report is for me, probably Tom Cruise’s most excellent performance in the last 10 years, bar the excellent Collateral.
Having said that, if and when the American Oldboy does arrive, there will not one doubt be some light Spielberg schmaltz sprinkled among the brilliance – remember the of the nature of cheese “happy” ending in Minority Report? But I’ll forgive that if the storytelling is as good as we comprehend he is capable of. What do you think of this one?
Elsewhere this week, the new Predator film moves upon the body apace. Rodriguez won’t be directing, but he is pulling the whole thing together in an elevated charged with execution producer’s role from his own Troublemaker Studios base in Austin. And the film is based on his be delivered of script, which was delivered way back in 1994 when the whole Alien Vs Predators debacle was uncorrupt an apple in some particularly clueless Hollywood executive’s eye. Instead, Nimrod Antal, the Hungarian-American director of the award-winning Kontroll, and who also filmed the acceptable Luke Wilson/Kate Beckinsale chiller, Vacancy, is taking the reins.
What’session interesting for me is that the new film, which is titled Predators (in homage to James Cameron’s Aliens), is stud on the mandible-sporting extra terrestrial hunters’ home planet.
“It involves a actual intense group of people stranded independently of interruption a Predator planet discovering unspeakable delirium tremens (that are not always from outside their group),” Rodriguez told Aintitcool.com. “So like the original movie, the title does have a double meaning. Aliens was a different take on the Alien idea, and an original movie in it’s own right, and that’s what we want to do with this. As to how this movie will be viewed, one of the guys at Fox told me: ‘No one is ever going to parley about AVP again after this film, I will stake my life on it.’”
All of which sounds very promising, but we’ll have to wait and see. Hollywood film-makers have come to be increasingly aware of how to push geeky journalist’s buttons in recent years – witness McG’s desperate attempts to convince us that Terminator Salvation was going to be the excellent sci-fi movie that James Cameron never made, with the star and the scriptwriter from The Dark Knight forward board too. It all sounded incendiary; in the end it was entertaining, but pretty workmanlike stuff.
Are you holding out much dependence for Predators? And would you imbibe Spielberg’sitting Oldboy remake?
