Remakes suggest we don’t really believe in being creative, or at least that creativity is incredibly rare and cannot be mandated or demanded. They also allow us to dwell on stories we love, stories that speak to us at some level, and which, in the telling and retelling, give us a chance to learn why we love them. If we obsessed less about originality, however, we paradoxically might have better remakes because we’d treat them with more respect and therefore the storytellers involved would feel less like hacks and more like friends.
At least on some level, remakes do signal a failure of imagination. The lack of new stories is not really a problem, nor the political correctness of the remakes. These are social circumstances more than anything else. They only gain prominence when we as a society do not know what we want.
That’s where the problem is. It’s one thing for people to tell pollsters they’re not confident about the future, but it’s quite another if people can’t even get what they want at the movies! So the only thing that should cause outrage about these productions is the rampant mediocrity.
Yet this also suggests hope for our predicament, because people are not satisfied with what’s on offer.
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