I’ve never hated the idea of remakes in general, but I hate
the way that Hollywood has flooded the market with them these past few
years. Some remakes work very well and
seem to be a good idea for one reason or another. On the other hand, the majority of modern
remakes seem to be done for no reason at all except to make money without
having to use any creativity.
Poltergeist was definitely one of those movies. The gripe that most people, myself included,
had with this going in was that there seemed to be no reason to remake this
film in the first place. That being
said, it’s still fair to judge this movie on its own merit.
This
premise is pretty much exactly the same as the original. A down on their luck family moves into a new
house in a mediocre subdivision. Pretty
soon they discover that their house is occupied by an evil force known as a
poltergeist, which takes a special interest in the family’s youngest daughter,
Madison.
This
movie is directed by Gil Kenan (Monster House) and is, for the most part, a
well- constructed film. The first
extended scare sequence is particularly well-shot. The movie is paced well. It stays interesting all the way through and
starts fast, which is a good thing since most people already know the story
anyway.
In my
opinion, the strength of the film is not the scares but the characters. There was real effort put into making these
characters feel like real people, and for the most part, they do. Sam
Rockwell is really good in this movie, as he is in most everything he is
in. Rosemarie DeWitt, who plays the mom,
is also very good. It bothered me that
there was no Carol Anne in this movie.
The character is the same, but they changed her name to Madison for some
reason. How can you have Poltergeist
without Carol Anne? On a positive note,
the kid that played Madison (Kennedi Clements) did a very good job. My favorite character in the film was the
son. He has a slightly expanded role in
this film, and his character arc is written very well, complete with an enormous
payoff in the film’s final act. This was
my favorite thing about the movie.
Unfortunately, the actor who played this role (Kyle Catlett) was the
weakest actor in the film and nowhere near good enough to pull off what they
were asking of him. His constant, and
obviously phony, loud breathing whenever something scary happened was very
annoying. What they did with the Jared
Harris character was borderline brilliant.
There is no way they could have recaptured the magic created by Zelda
Rubinstein in the original film, so it was smart to go in a completely different
direction. I only wish they had done
more with this character, as I feel there was a lot of untapped potential
there.
One of the
things I was concerned about with this film was how they were going to
integrate more modern technology into it.
Electronics was such a big aspect of the first movie, I was interested
to see how that was going to translate. I
thought they did a good job with that aspect.
Unfortunately, the climax of the film falls into the bad CGI trap a
little bit. Most of this film was built
on atmosphere, successfully I might add, so I was disappointed to see that they
decided to go with all the CGI effects at the end.
The
ending of the film is a little bit of a mess.
Aside from the CGI problem, there is a very questionable decision that
is made concerning Jared Harris’s character that I didn’t really like. Also, the film ends way too abruptly for
me. It doesn’t have anywhere near the
impact that it should have.
This
movie was a nice surprise for me. The
thing I liked about it was that I felt like there was genuine effort put into
it from a filmmaking perspective. They
deviated from the original just enough, and actually improved upon it in at
least one area. The original is obviously
the better film, but this one is a perfectly adequate remake and generally a
well-made, enjoyable horror film. The
Movie Man gives it 3 out of 5 stars.
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