The original film Oldboy is superb, and gives you a real kick in the pants near the end, a surprise that Hollywood can barely bring themselves to consider never mind write, or so I thought.
The Director of the remake Justin Lin has talked about his thoughts on the movie and what he wants to do with it, and there’s not going to be any “watering down” of the story. That might be good you think, well check out what else he says over at Dark Horizons…
“Right now we’re so far away from it being a reality. I love that film and the only reason I wanted to explore that avenue is because it really spoke to me. I didn’t sign on to make a Xerox copy of the original because it’s a masterpiece. I wanted to explore other themes within it. If I was going to come close to making a Xerox I hope I have enough sense to stop that process. Oldboy is one of those projects where structurally it’s so solid and it brings up so many great themes that you could give it to ten different filmmakers and it would be interesting to see what comes out of each of them”.
He continued, “So far Universal has been very open to anything. I told them that I’m not signing on unless we’re not going to water down the ending.
It’s great that they don’t want to change the ending (please don’t talk about it and spoil it for anyone else. Rest assured that if I see a spoiler comment I will delete it as soon as possible, on my timezone anyway!), but explore different themes? With one hand you give, and the other you take away…
Different themes for Oldboy? Well it could mean he won’t harm the original…or it could mean he’s coping out and going a much easier route. Or it could even mean he’s going to make a complimentary film to this one, something that you could almost watch straight after the original to get another view of the story, now that would be cool…
At least it’s got the Director of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Annapolis on it? What do the Oldboy fans think?
