By Just to be clear: I’m not looking forward to the remake of Oldboy. I am generally conflicted about American remakes of good foreign films, but the original Oldboy is very near and dear to my heart. It’s one of my favorite (Korean revenge) films of all time, and I don’t want its American image tainted by a poor English-language iteration. The most recent news coming out of an interview Collider had with producer Roy Lee has done little to assuage my fears:
Mark Protosevich [the screenwriter, whose credits include such narrative heavyweights as Thor and Poseiden] has come up with new elements to it that will throw off the audience who have seen the original movie because there are new characters and new situations that present themselves in a way that changes the story but eventually go in the same direction… The ending will be something that the audiences will all be… especially the fans of the original will be very happy with. In fact, some may consider it to be a bit darker.
I honestly like the idea of new situations and characters, but I really don’t like the idea of a darker ending. I honestly don’t know what that would entail. The only way to make that ending darker would be to slaughter an entire orphanage onscreen. This remake could only be darker if Protosevich set out with the express intention of making it darker, and that worries me. A lot. I have very little faith that this will turn out well.
Hopefully I’m wrong. Hopefully it will make a serviceable film that inspires people to see the original so Park Chan-wook’s work can be more widely distributed. We’ll see. The film goes into pre-production in January and is set to start filming in March, meaning there’s not too much time before we will be inundated with information. Maybe some of it will be good. Probably not.
[Via Collider]