First Oldboy remake trailer looks exactly like Oldboy

So here it is. The long awaited (ha!) trailer for Spike Lee’s unnecessary remake of Oldboy. It’s two and a half minutes of Josh Brolin putting on his best Choi Min-Sik impression, and it’s every bit as dumb as everybody expected.

Seriously. Parts of it look damn near shot-for-shot. There were a couple of new things (the daughter interviewed on the television, the stuff with Samuel Jackson at the end), but the changes don’t look substantial or particularly worthwhile. That last part especially just seems like it’s there to prove that the film can go even farther than Park Chan-Wook’s film did.

Ugh.

When I wrote about how remakes can impact memory, I talked about how things can just blur in the mind. The fact that Spike Lee’s film looks so much like Park Chan-Wook’s means that it is going to infect the memories of every single person who sees it. Is that Josh Brolin’s head being pushed back into the room in my memory or is it Choi Min-Sik? I don’t know. Who punched the glass? I don’t remember. Was it both of them? Which one woke up on a grassy area on the roof of a building (which is awesome) and who woke up in a field (which is dumb)? Hmm…

Now I’m sad.