Reboots, Reimaginings, Live Action Adaptations & Sequels

Back in the 80s, Film Twitter (notwithstanding Twitter's lack of existence) used to bemoan the infantilisation of movies. After all, the 70s had given us the first two Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation and those were just the work of one director. The 80s gave us, well, Mac & Me. I'm being facetious, of course - the 80s also has some absolutely terrific cinema. In the 90s however, the then equivalent of Film Twitter started to bemoan the preponderance of TV adaptations, some of which have probably sunk back into the ether; The Fugitive, The Flintstones, Maverick, Mission: Impossible & The Brady Bunch Movie are just a few off the top of my head.

Since then, everyone's noticed that reboots and sequels seem to be making up an increasing proportion of new movies released every year. Last year saw the introduction of the third iteration of Spider-Man in less than a decade. While Indiana Jones and Die Hard have been sequelised to the point that new instalments are being dreaded rather than anticipated. Some series are going strong: James Bond - I know, I would say that; Mission: Impossible - although its financial success is unarguable, I've personally found the last couple of movies pretty creatively bereft. Others seem to keep going until audience fatigue kicks in (yup, Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm looking at you). And this trend has been crossed with the rise of the comic book movie - these may tail off at some point, but there seems to be no sign of it happening soon.

What studios tend to refer to as new IP (intellectual property - the foundation for a movie, which used to be a script, a novel, a memoir, but can now be a game, a previous movie or even a theme park ride) has become rarer and rarer. Studios have also shown an increased preference for a movie slate (the year's offerings) consisting of a smaller number of would-be blockbusters than the wider, more varied blend of old, leading to many of the studios actually shutting down their specialist/ semi-independent divisions. Meanwhile, huge increases in global audiences and screen counts mean that China is expected to become the largest single movie market in the world at some point in the next three years and the 'rest of the world' is regarded as even more important than the once-dominant US market.

This has led to simpler/ more simplistic movies than we used to see, with less dialogue (e.g. action movies), as these can then play internationally much more easily than films used to. And although in some instances casting has become more diverse (see how the Fast & Furious films have developed over time) other movies have been accused of cultural appropriation (see Ghost in the Shell), whitewashing (er, Ghost in the Shell again) and pandering (see Looper among others).

What does this mean for what we're seeing now and going to be seeing? If you'd asked anyone fifteen years ago what the word 'reboot' meant in a cinematic context or indeed what the words 'sidequel' or 'reimagining' meant at all, you'd have been met with a blank face. If you'd asked anyone about making a live action adaptation of Beauty & The Beast or The Lion King, you would have been told that there's nothing wrong with the animated originals (for the record: there isn't).

If these trends proliferate and we keep rewarding these movies with our money, this situation will just carry on. The creativity we'll see in movies will be restricted to how they're marketed to us, promising us that a reimagining isn't the same as a reboot, that this time will be different and that this time the movie really will satisfy.

A lot of my needs for narrative cinema are already being satisfied by great novels and the Golden Age of Television. And in a year where US summer box office takings are down for the first time in a long time, it seems I'm not the only one. Martin Scorsese's next movie is being funded by and will premiere on Netflix. Francis Ford Coppola has talked about how cinema as a form appears to have migrated to other forms. The only way to get the movies you want is to vote at the box office and/ or on your television. After all, there's no fate but what we make. Choose wisely!

Directors' Late Periods

Many creative people often follow artistic trajectories similar to three-act/ narrative arc structures so fondly promoted in scriptwriting seminars & (after being dumbed down) prevalent in stereotypical, mainstream Hollywood movies. So it is that many directors nearer the end of their film making lives than their start are often portrayed as being in a creative decline. The careers of three of the great so-called movie brats of the 70s provide interesting & contrasting examples of what later artistic endeavours can look like.

Steven Spielberg is widely revered as a film making genius, one of the few directors alive or dead whose name is known by pretty much all cinema-going audiences. His grip on the popular imagination with movies such as 'Jaws', 'Close Encounters of The Third Kind', 'E.T.', 'Jurassic Park' and the Indiana Jones movies - which between them pretty much defined the blockbuster era - is extraordinary. He has his critics of course, people who accuse him of being overly-sentimental or pandering to cheap populism, criticisms that I personally think have some basis in truth but perhaps ignore the greater marvel of being able to spin a fairytale like 'E.T.' and have as many people emotionally engage with it as they do. He's also long evinced a desire to be taken seriously, starting with 'The Color Purple' (sic) and leading to awards recognition for 'Schindler's List', a film that I think is certainly extraordinary in parts but which is ruined by the, um, overly-sentimental ending. In the first half of the last decade, Spielberg experimented with darker material than previously, leading to the posthumous Kubrick "collaboration" 'A.I.' (one of my favourites) and 'Munich' (a gripping meditation on morality, violence and retribution that's still my favourite Spielberg movie). Since then however he's made a fourth Indiana Jones (which felt like a joyless, almost unwatchable, cheap retread of the iconic original trilogy) and 'The Adventures of Tintin', which is entertaining, forgettable and which owes much of its worth to, well, Indiana Jones. Yesterday, while watching 'War Horse', I found myself looking at my watch every thirty seconds or so in the first quarter of an hour. The first three quarters of an hour - until the first sequence in WW1 - felt interminable and I sat wondering about leaving and maybe coming home and reading the paper. The sequences in the war itself were superb (shades of 'Saving Private Ryan' here) but the interstitial scenes felt completely contrived and lacked any resonance; the film as a whole felt like a Spielberg knock-off made by a jobbing hack (as opposed to the fantastic homage 'Super 8' made by superstar-in-the-making J. J. Abrams). The ending was moving, but - despite being moved - I found it ridiculously treacly. The most curious thing about the movie was its ability to waste extraordinary actors (Liam Cunningham, Eddie Marsan, Benedict Cumberbatch) in what were virtually bit parts, but Spielberg's name is obviously such as a draw that he can understandably work with anyone he likes. I'm not stupid enough to think that Steven Spielberg's not going to make another classic at some point, but his recent run of form does indicate a serious late form decline similar to Woody Allen's and perhaps one to be likewise punctuated with just the odd flash of the old magic.

Born of the crumbling studio system, with an encyclopedic knowledge & love of movie history and cementing his position as one of the first modern American auteur directors, Martin Scorsese exploded into the film world in a big way starting in the '70s with 'Mean Streets', 'Taxi Driver' followed later by 'Raging Bull' and 'Goodfellas'. Has age mellowed him? I don't really doubt it. But whereas many deride 'The Age of Innocence' as a pseudo 'classic', Spielbergian-style shot at Oscar glory, each one of the six times I saw it at the cinema, I watched a gorgeous movie about tribalism that reinvigorated the costume drama while retaining its directors familiar obsessions with people trying to find happiness while trying to conform to society and its expectations. A late, similarly criticised movie was 'The Aviator', which is still my favourite Scorsese picture; it's a beautiful story of ambition, iconoclasm and the price of success - I cried the second time I watched it during the H1 test flight because I'd never seen editing or storytelling anything like it. Scorsese of course did eventually win his Oscar, for 'The Departed', which to my mind was fantastic film making, but relatively minor Scorsese. Do any of these films have the invention, youthful exuberance or vigour of his seminal works from the '70s? No, not really, but what they do have is a craftsmanship that only a filmmaker with experience, wisdom and true mastery of his gift can muster. I personally found 'Hugo' frighteningly dull, but I'm gratified by the warm reception it seems to have received from everyone else who's seen it; Scorsese still has many, many movies on his slate and clearly isn't frightened of adding new tools to his formidable arsenal.

Francis Ford Coppola will of course be forever associated with the Godfather movies and 'Apocalypse Now', possibly the ultimate statement in movie making ambition. The 70s is also his most famous decade, pretty much bookended by those movies, with the Palme D'Or-winning modern classic 'The Conversation' released between Godfathers almost as a light relief, side project and his mentoring of George Lucas resulting in the latter's 'THX-1138' and 'American Graffiti'. The 80s saw Coppola trying unsuccessfully - mainly as a result of the commercial failure of 'One From The Heart' - to wrestle control of his career from studio interference and set up independently, eventually resulting in the where-have-I-heard-that-before 'Tucker: The Man and His Dreams', a biography of a dreamer trying to set up his (car) business in the face of well-funded establishment opposition. The 90s saw Coppola reduced to a director-for-hire on such movies as 'Jack' and 'The Rainmaker', which - while moderately entertaining- is still a John Grisham adaptation. Perhaps inspired by his daughter's burgeoning film career (which in itself seemed to ape the elder Coppola's need to take care to avoid entanglements with major studios) Francis Ford Coppola seems to have reinvented himself as the ultimate independent. Having not seen it, I can't comment on 'Youth Without Youth' but 'Tetro' felt like a film made by a director a third of his age (meant in a good way) and yet was a movie that had artistry, ambition, fearlessness and energy to spare, showing a vitality not seen since 'The Conversation' in 1974. And in his 70s, Coppola seems to have found himself in the middle of a creative renaissance. In some ways, he offers the most positive example of the creative liberation possible for an artist in their later years.