How to make (and not make) a 1951 alien invasion movie

I was looking for something short to watch on Sunday night*, and was reminded of this post, in which I came to the realization that the end of the month is a good time to use or lose your five monthly Kanopy credits.

(*I'm starting to wonder if this goes without saying. When have you ever heard me saying I was looking for something long to watch?)

I recently added a bunch of black and white movies to my Kanopy watchlist, and a lot of them are super short.

Take the 76-minute The Thing From Another World, which seems like required viewing for anyone who likes John Carpenter's The Thing. And since most people don't like Carpenter's film, they love it, it seems like required viewing for everyone.

Well, The Thing From Another World may have value for providing us the raw materials for Carpenter's movie. But I'm not sure if it has any other value.

There are a lot of angles of attack on this film, but I'll start with this one:

I'm not sure I would have thrown this movie on if I'd seen this poster first. 

Now I get it, this is 1951. They didn't have the great practical effects or the not-so-great CGI effects to make an alien creature look really good. In a minute I'm going to talk about a movie where the alien creature is biologically indistinguishable from a human being.

But in what exact way is this a thing?

Don't you describe something as a "thing" when it so deviates from your ordinary vocabulary that the only word you can think of to describe it is a word that contains no descriptive qualities whatsoever? Example: "What is this ... this ... this ... THING?"

When the "thing" in questions has two arms, two legs, a head, a torso, and is only a little bit taller than a regular man, it's more of a "man" than a "thing." But The Man from Another World just doesn't sound quite as ... repulsive.

I will say that I got a small chill from the creature the first time it was introduced to me in its two primary forms: once in a frozen block of ice, and once awake and creating havoc. 

Any other time it was on the screen, it was just silly.

And oh so not menacing. The thing basically goes "grrrr!" and then just stands there blinking for long periods of time so that way too many characters can engage in way too lengthy discussions about how to stop it. 

Let's get to the "way too many characters" part, and of course I have to use Carpenter's film as a point of contrast. In 1982's The Thing, if memory serves, there are maybe eight to ten characters in total, fewer and fewer as they get picked off and/or assimilated by the creature. In this film, there are no less than 27 people walking around in large groups within the Arctic station where they're all headquartered. Among them, absurdly, is a newspaper reporter, who dresses in a suit and tie even though he's in one of the most extreme environments on the face of the planet.

These 27 people shuffle around and argue about whether to kill the creature or study it for science, and there was a whole digression that I didn't quite follow about how the creature's blood could make flowers grow more quickly. I may not have been fully paying attention at that point because I had already sort of written the movie off, waiting for "the good stuff" -- which was sorely disappointing as well.

And let's get to the direction by Christian Nyby because that factors into the failure of this movie. Not only are these performances wooden -- it's just one actor after another waiting for their turn to talk -- but the scenes are directed with a discordant approach that involves characters talking over each other and cutting each other off. I'm not talking about the good kind of talking over, favored by someone like Robert Altman. This is actors stepping on each other's dialogue and no one knowing that they should do another take rather stick with the garbled mess they just filmed.

You might be able to guess that the military man and the scientist butt heads, the military man wanting to kill the alien and the scientist wanting to communicate with it. The scientist is right, right? Not in this film, where the scientist is made out to be a megalomaniac who is needlessly putting innocent people in harm's way while twirling his moustache (he actually does have a moustache). The events of the film prove that the military was right and that we need to "Watch the skies!" 

It was 1951, but even in 1951 it didn't have to be this way.

That year also saw the release of what was my dad's favorite when he was a kid, Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not only was that the same year, but it had the same style pulpy title that could have appeared on the cover of a magazine called Tales of Interest! if it were The Simpsons. (Actually, googling it now I see I don't have that quite right -- it was Anthology of Interest on Futurama. But I think you get the idea.) 

But Day returns quite a different verdict about its human-looking alien visitor named Klaatu, and his ominous robot Gort. Sure, Klaatu and Gort have the technology and the ability to turn Earth into a barren wasteland, but they don't have the will. That's not why they are there. In fact, they are there to quell Earth's own violent tendencies -- as exemplified by people like the military man in The Thing From Another World.

I suppose The Day the Earth Stood Still is a bit quaint by modern standards, as it barely has anything resembling an action scene. There's a lot of talking and there's a middle passage of the film where Klaatu is visiting sites around Washington D.C. with a little boy, which could be mistaken for the corniness of someone like Frank Capra at his most Capra-esque. 

But by being thoughtful and well made, and having a message that genuinely tries to promote understanding and to squelch aggression, my goodness is it a more useful piece of art. I suppose they were wise (ha ha) to select Wise to direct the original Star Trek movie, since this film has the same non-interventionist politics of the Starship Enterprise.

The Thing From Another World has a screaming creature and bullets and guns and torn alien limbs and attempts to both burn and electrocute the alien, and it doesn't have a single bit of nuance on its mind.

Why we're so upset about remakes

Remakes are nothing new in Hollywood.

We act as though Hollywood is completely out of ideas, but the truth is, Hollywood was always out of ideas. At least, you have to reach that conclusion about Hollywood's past if you want to reach that same conclusion about Hollywood's present.

Did bloggers scream and yell when The Jazz Singer (1927) was remade 27 years later in 1954? (And then, again, 26 years later in 1980?) Were there conniptions when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1931 and again in 1941? The length of time between an original and a remake has even been much shorter -- the classic Marx brothers comedy Duck Soup (1927) was remade only three years later as a movie called Another Fine Mess (1930). Numerous films had multiple remakes before anyone reading this post was even born. (In fact, for a handy and close-to-complete list of film remakes, check out this page on the ever useful wikipedia.)

I think there are two reasons we consider the current spate of remakes to particularly offend our sensibilities:

1) The people with the loudest opinions on the topic -- people of my generation -- are finally getting to the point where the originals of these movies were made in our lifetime. You notice we don't get nearly so upset about remakes of movies we've never heard of.

2) The movies being remade don't really seem like classics, the way we've come to define "classic."

The remake of Point Break -- which has a screenwriter attached (Kurt Wimmer), and which everyone has been fretting about lately -- seems like a perfect example of both.

For those who can't believe they're remaking Point Break, it seems like all too recently to us that the original came out. Twenty years goes by in a flash, I guess.

But more than anything, it doesn't seem like a "classic" -- it seems like a guilty pleasure, a B movie people embrace as more of a cult film than anything else.

But who says you can't remake cult films? There are numerous examples of that phenomenon, too.

There are two schools of thought on when a film should be remade:

1) When the original was so great that it simply begs to be introduced to a new generation;

2) When the original was a good idea that was slightly botched, and someone wants to get it right.

Of course, this tends to open up the potential field of remakes to almost anything.

However, the difference these days may be that there's a third reason to remake a film: to reintroduce it to the same generation. With films like the new versions of Point Break and Total Recall in particular, the smart money is on the fans of the original films flocking to the remakes in droves. That's consistent with the general Hollywood mentality to reboot, repackage and rebrand.

I think Total Recall has caught some of us by surprise in part because, like Point Break, we don't really consider it a classic. Even though Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall is a film I love, I'd be hard-pressed to define it as a "classic." It may be one of the smartest films Arnold Schwarzenegger has ever appeared in, but it's certainly a lesser film in his canon in terms of sheer name recognition. Or maybe it's just that straight remakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger films -- rather than reboots, of which there have been many (The Terminator, Predator) -- make us feel old. First Conan the Barbarian, now this.

I think the reason these films make us despair about the state of Hollywood is that they make us ask this question: "What won't they remake?" There's an implication that if you remake Point Break and Total Recall, it's because you've gotten to the bottom of the barrel and already remade the more obvious, credible choices.

But thankfully, that's not the case. Back to the Future has not been remade, and has in fact not even had a new installment since 1989. (Let's not ponder the role of Michael J. Fox's health in that particular decision.) Ditto Ghostbusters, whose last (and, modestly, only its second) entry was also in 1989. (I'm well aware that Ghostbuster 3 is moving forward, but at least it's not a remake.) And we can even go back to older movies. Citizen Kane turns 70 this year, and has yet to be remade.

And some of the movies being remade actually do seem like obvious choices. The remake of Footloose, which comes out next month, is one such movie. I guess that means it qualifies as a "classic" in the way Point Break and Total Recall do not. While the appeal of those movies was somewhat selective, simply everyone saw Footloose. And especially with Glee doing as well as it has, Footloose meets the classic definition of needing to be introduced to a generation that hungers for it. Likewise, it does not surprise me that a Dirty Dancing remake has been greenlit.

And if it's really an issue of considering it blasphemy to remake the movies in question, consider it a compliment. Nothing commits a movie to the annals of film history more than to be revisited down through the years with new versions. With any luck, it'll actually introduce fans of the new films to the films that inspired them.

So as you are bemoaning the decision to remake films from your childhood, consider where you'd be without the remakes you grew up on: Little Shop of Horrors, The Fly, Scarface, Three Men and a Baby and The Thing.

Oh yeah, stay tuned for the second Thing remake, also coming out this fall. Actually, it's a prequel, and actually, John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing may not have been an actual remake of The Thing From Another World (1951), since both films were different interpretations of John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There?

It gets messy. So let's just take the movies on a case-by-case basis, and see how they go.

Lord knows, we'll have plenty of opportunities to do so.