An Introduction to The Relatables

Sometimes a certain film comes out and you can’t help but think ‘I’ve seen that before’ and it can be true. More than ever, especially in recent years, with reboots, remakes and reimagining’s you get films that share several qualities with some that come before it and rather than borrow the things that work, they try to distance themselves from the original.

A sad example of this is what happened to the Amazing Spider Man. They were so desperate to separate themselves from the Sam Raimi trilogy that they went as far as to cut out Uncle Ben’s most important line. But at the same time they had to follow the same plot points and had no way of reimagining them, therefore it just felt like a cheap copy of the original that didn’t want to be noticed by fans of Toby Maguire and called out because of it, like a Youtube video that tries not to get to many views rather than risk copyright infringement.   

So sometimes it can be a good idea to copy the original version in some respects. But of course it can prove disastrous as seen with Psycho, completely failing to grasp artistic beauty of the original and the nerve shredding suspense. The reason was firstly the lack of substance, and the lack of originality. The film was only twenty years old at the time of the remake, it’s like someone remaking Pulp Fiction today, but at the same time we knew that story, we knew what would happen, Psycho wasn’t like a foreign language film and not accessible to the masses of western audiences, the box office numbers of the original proved that. If the writers had somehow found a way to retell that story then t might have succeeded in gripping audiences.

But as I said, sometimes films are just similar, without being a remake and rather than call them out for it, we should encourage them to do it but in their own new way. At the same time of course they could learn a lot from the original inspiration.

So this series covers everything that separates one good film from a terrible one. I’ll highlight what it should have used and what it did on its own to its advantage as well as why one succeeded and one didn’t. So get ready for the Relatables.