Tired of remakes and reinventions? Tired of every damn movie franchise "rebooting" and going “gritty” and “dark” and “real” after the success of The Dark Knight, Casino Royale and the Bourne movies? If so, click “Back” now, as another cult classic is coming in to the sights of a lazy studio. It's starting to feel depressingly like the execs have no confidence that you, the modern audience, are capable of watching movies more than five years old without needing an all new jazzed up version to fit with whatever is trendy at the time.
According to Variety, Stephen Norrington is planning to return to the directors chair with a remake of Alex Proyas' infamous debut movie from 1994, The Crow. Norrington has successfully pitched to Relativity Media who are now negotiating to acquire the franchise and fund the movie. If you can't remember who Mr Norrington is, he's the director who allegedly found himself on the receiving end of Sean Connery's fist during the making of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a project so spectacularly awful in the making (and the viewing!) that both men announced their retirement shortly after. While people lamented Connery's departure (one that cost Indy IV dearly) for the most part nobody cared much about Norrington, whose only other movie of note was Blade. Well now Norrington has blinked and his choice of return project is hardly the stuff to generate giddy excitement.
The director says of his new take; “Whereas Proyas’ original was gloriously gothic and stylized, the new movie will be realistic, hard-edged and mysterious, almost documentary-style."
It's one thing trying to squeeze realism out of a man dressing up in a bat costume while kicking the ass of crime. Trying to be more “realistic” in your approach to a movie about a man who is resurrected from the afterlife by a bird to take revenge is just another tiresome example of cheap TDK cash-in and citing “documentary-style” is hack director code for “inserting lots of shaky-cam just because it worked it the Bourne movies and they made money.”
Proyas' version still holds up today and its original stylized look and feel are what keeps it that way. It was the product of a director with unique vision as he went on to demonstrate with the criminally underrated Dark City. Norrington is making it very clear his vision is just a mish-mash of whatever gimmicks worked in the most recent blockbusters and this needless rehash will probably suffer for it.
