So this comes off the back of watching the US remake of Old Boy on Netflix. I mean, I didn't have particularly high hopes, but it felt like both a scene-for-scene rip-off of the original yet at the same time an empty husk - for instance, they tried to recreate the iconic fight scene in the corridor but failed to come even close to pulling it off. Which brings me to the point. Thinking back, I can't remember any English adaptations of international movies which have held up to the original at all. Old Boy was lousy, the US version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo doesn't even compare to the Swedish version, and I only heard bad things about the recent Ghost in the Shell.
So the question is - which films do you think have been well-adapted? Or if there aren't any, what's the issue? Is it the cultural differences making the story disjointed from the setting? The differences in style between US movies and those in other countries? The fact that a remake almost by definition attempts to capture the essence of an existing movie rather than blaze its own trail?
So the question is - which films do you think have been well-adapted? Or if there aren't any, what's the issue? Is it the cultural differences making the story disjointed from the setting? The differences in style between US movies and those in other countries? The fact that a remake almost by definition attempts to capture the essence of an existing movie rather than blaze its own trail?
