I haven’t seen much about the new Spike Lee project, a remake of the Korean classic Oldboy, but after watching the trailer (embedded below) I’m terrified something awful has happened to one of my favorite movies.
I haven’t seen much about the new Spike Lee project, a remake of the Korean classic Oldboy, but after watching the trailer (embedded below) I’m terrified something awful has happened to one of my favorite movies.
For the uniformed, 2003’s Oldboy, directed by Chan-wook Park and staring (the amazing) Choi Min-shik, is a masterpiece of brutal Asian cinema, both visually and thematically. It tells the story of Dae-su Oh, imprisoned for many years, seemingly without reason. He is just as mysteriously released and proceeds to go on a brutal rampage to discover why his life was ruined, and who was responsible.
(The original Oldboy is on Netflix right now by the way)
What follows is one of the best single-shot fight scenes ever put to film:
As if that scene wasn’t enough, the ending to the original Oldboy is, well, beyond epic. There are few revenge stories unafraid to take it as far as Park did (which might not be a bad thing) and of course the rest of Park’s work is similarly brutal.
Now, we return to 2013 and we are about a week out from the release of Spike Lee’s Oldboy. While I have good reason to think Lee will do a good job making a new movie, the trailer for Oldboy shows at least one of the original epic plot twists (and really one of the defining moments of the 2003 version) will not be retuning for this remake. Have a look for yourself, and I’ll point out the difference below the video (SPOILER ALERT)
-SPOILER TIME-
Why the hell is Josh Brolin’s character shown his daughter?!@
WHAT IN THE LIVING LIGHT OF JESUS CHRIST IS SPIKE LEE DOING TO OLDBOY?
alright, sorry, I had to get that out of my system. I’m not sure if you understand the heartbreak I felt when that angle was revealed. If Brolin comes out of captivity only to spend the rest of the movie hunting down his daughter, then what’s going to make this movie any different from Taken, or True Lies (both awesome movies in their own right, but no need to muck up an Asian classic because you were too much of a puss to have Brolin nail his daughter.)
It looks like the movie’s writer, Mark Protosevich, has already acknowledged there will be some kind of change to the ending. The New York Daily News has Protosevich defending the change at a recent Comicon appearance:
“There was an expectation we were going to wimp out … all of us involved were very much inclined to treat the material with as much honor as we can…
‘I Am Legend’ writer Protosevich compared the movie to a cover version of a song, citing Roxy Music’s version of Neil Young’s ‘Like a Hurricane’ as a particularly strong example.
“Some covers are just duplications; you don’t want to be too slavish to the original. Or there are others that are just extreme versions, where it’s completely changed. What you want is create something where you can identify the original but bring something of yourself to it.”
Personally, I feel there was no reason to bring Oldboy back in any form anyway. Between the original manga, and the 2003 movie, we don’t need American hands turning another Asian classic into a modern turd sandwich (see 1998’s Godzilla)
We’ll watch Oldboy when it comes out Nov. 27th and let you know what we thought then.
