draft
About
half way through the Warner Bros film “Man from UNCLE”, Illya
Kuryakin tries to make the case for a Russian architect having
designed and built the Spanish Steps in Rome. It seemed out of
place somehow in the movie I was watching, but when the movie was
over I realized where this anomaly had come from.
It
would seem that the one character trait unique to any of the
characters in this film that actually had its origins in the original
TV series was this particular running gag. Whenever some invention,
or creative work, was part of the story, Illya would always explain
how it had actually been composed, or invented, in Russia. This
running gag, used once, the names of some of the characters and the
title of the movie itself were the only references to the original
show to be found in the movie.
You
might think that if you were going to bother to do a reboot of a
1960s TV series, that you would want to carefully review and select
elements from the original and use them in a reboot, doing a best of,
as it were, and make a contemporary entertainment product that
properly also captured and moved forward what it was that made the
original show notable.
Furthermore,
you might choose to do this and do it well not for the sake of
creative integrity but for hard core business reasons. The success
of your roughly 100M $US investment depends on creating a powerful
version of this property, to both get the original viewers, the
teenage viewers, and as many of the inbetween that you can. There
are models for this sort of thing, where it has been done
successfully, and where it has not. And what we learn is that where
it has not been done well, the movie has flopped. But when it has
been done well, the marketing has been straightforward and the movie
has been successful.
The
lesson is, do it well or not at all.
The
good news is that a certain amount of this can be checked before
production begins. You can make use of a time honored but now sadly
neglected feature of the traditional cinema which is called “the
script”. Yes, you can write a script and have it reviewed by
people who know the original, as well as by people who know modern
action movies.
Having
done this, it is also useful to cast actors who bring the script to
life, and for that matter, a director who has a feel for the
property. This is your job, I emphasize, your means of making a
livelihood, and it is always good to remind the studio executive of
their supposed expertise.
So
what do we get instead? What we get is a script that ignores UNCLE,
has the conceit of being a backstory to the TV show which if that is
the plan, they badly fucked it up. It uses none of the anticipation
and recognition, setup and payoff, available to them. The actors
cast are boring, unlikeable, uninteresting. It is in places
beautiful, yes it looks like a yacht advertisement from 1960s Italy,
but who the fuck cares? Thats nice and all, and it would be a
wonderful touch if they had a script and some actors with passion,
but without them it is just a bunch of pretty pictures.
But
if every silver lining has a cloud, the reverse is also true, and
there is some silver lining here. Because the lead actors are so
fucking boring, the women of this piece completely capture the movie.
We have exactly two of them, one is a 20 year old who is completely
hilarious in a scene where she tries to get Illya drunk, to dance, and
to sleep with her. The other is 40 something Italian billionaire and
femme fatale who jumps Napoleon Solo and then drugs and tortures him.
Yes,
the parody of effete Italian manhood is entertaining, but whats the
point?
Almost
none of the elements that were notable about UNCLE were in this
movie. No NYC tailor shop with a secret door, no THRUSH bad guys,
nothing.
Its
not enough to say that you are going to reboot a property, you have
to actually do it well or you should save your money and make another
Die Hard movie or something. As it is, it is all a giant waste of
effort, of money and of an opportunity.
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1.
You may wonder, as I have wondered, what the word THRUSH stands for.
If UNCLE stands for United Network Command Law Enforcement, then
surely THRUSH stands for something as well. At a Westercon years
ago I came across a “bible” for the original UNCLE. A bible is
the guide issued to all the writers of a TV series to give them
enough background to write, or propose, a story for the series. In
it we learn that THRUSH stands for Technical Hierarchy for the
Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity. Well it
sounds a little forced to me, but its ok.
