blindthrall said:
I'm not even an anime fan, but this pisses me off. I don't care about where it came from or how groundbreaking it was, for me Akira is just an awesome story that they aren't treating with the respect it deserves.
j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
It remains as the single most devastating act of war ever committed against another country. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it here: it was an incident which resulted in over 200,000 people dying during the blast, two cities being totally levelled, and thousands upon thousands more people dying in the following months and years due to radiation poisoning.
Stalingrad killed way over a million Russians, but everything about their culture doesn't relate back to that.
It isn't so much the number killed (after all, Stalin himself killed more Russians than Hitler managed to kill in the Holocaust) but from an academic perspective, it was
how it was done.
The atomic bomb represented a power that at the time we probably would never fathom having. The only comprabale example I could think of, would be if Napoleon was magically gifted with a whole divison of Main Battle Tanks to fight Waterloo. It shifted perceptions, because this new weapon, carried by a single plane, was able to cause more damage in fifteen minutes than some whole campaigns that lasted weeks could chalk up.
BonGookKumBop said:
Thanks for the lesson, but let's expand it. The original "Yojimbo" movies were based on a book named "Red Harvest." In the copyright trial, Leone tried to argue that "Red Harvest" was a book with Italian roots, so his remake was just returning the story to its roots and wasn't copyright infringement. This argument didn't fly in court. The court held that it was still an unauthorized remake.
The point of my argument was that I saw a complaint along the lines of "All remakes sux!" and I wanted to point out that although this sentiment may hold true 99.9% of the time, it is occasionally false. You and Treblaine make valid points in showing that the best remakes are usually when a story idea is reworked with a different title and approach, but this isn't necessarily true either.
Alfred Hitchcock was under contract with Paramount to remake one of his earlier films. Though he was loath to do it, he remade "The Man Who Knew Too Much." It has been said of the two films that both the movie and the director grew together and I tend to agree. On the other hand, "Last Man Standing" is another take at the "Red Harvest" story that was much closer to the original story than either of the previous movies and starred Bruce Willis. It didn't do well.
I personally don't believe the movie will be good; I just wanted to point out that the all remakes suck argument has some holes. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if this movie ends up going the way of the "Ender's Game" live action movie, but that one was due more to the fact that Orson Scott Card has artistic integrity and refuses to let movie executives cast Ender any older than 12.
That was really interesting, thanks
It is entirely true that not all remakes suck, see my comment on The Magnificent Seven, but since Akira seems something so deeply rooted in Japanese culture, mindset and perception of the world....it just seems a mind boggling choice. I suppose the big thing to take away from this is that despite the pissing and moaning, there are still some movers and shakers in Hollywood who honestly want more people to know about Akira.
However I still think a better investment would be a movie of Bubblegum Crisis. On the surface, its Iron Man with four women instead of Tony Stark, but its a little deeper than that: plus it has the good sense to wear its influences (Terminator, Blade Runner, Streets of Fire etc) on its sleeve as a respectful tip of the hat instead of trying to hide them and claim originality, a sin ANY writer should be ashamed of.
