Steven Spielberg and Will Smith, planning to make the Oldboy movie, want to assure us in no uncertain terms that this is not a remake.

To which I respond: buh?

Despite the fact that the Oldboy movie already exists, and has existed since 2003, the Oldboy that Spielberg and Smith will be working on will not be a remake.  How is this even vaguely possible, you ask?  Simple!  Via a simple trick called SEMANTICS.  What Spielberg and Smith will be doing is what Chan-Wook Park did to begin with, making an adaptation DIRECTLY FROM THE COMIC BOOK.

See, before Oldboy was a movie, it was a comic book series.  Chan-Wook Park, director of the first Oldboy, did his adaptation of the comic book.  This is a fairly standard practice and has given us movies like Iron Man and The Hulk and The Incredible Hulk (there IS a difference–one sucks and the other doesn’t) and more.  So now, Spielberg and Smith are going to do exactly what Chan-Wook Park did and make an adaptation of the comic book, as if Chan-Wook’s edition never existed.

To me, this is a monumental slap in the face both to fans and to the original director.  Basically, Spielberg and Smith are claiming that they can do better than Chan-Wook and are setting out to prove it.  Asian cinema enthusiasts know that Oldboy is fairly close to top of the heap–an excellent representation of the art–and that Spielberg and Smith have sufficient hubris to think they can do better is downright insulting.

Maybe they can.  Maybe they can actually manage to beat the greats at their own game.  I have to admit it’s kind of an intriguing thought–can the American film industry compete abroad on the host country’s own turf?  Sure, we make a good movie–the whole world looks to America for top-notch cinematic entertainment–but the world has its share of choice filmmakers too.

Is this just raging hubris?  Or is this a shot heard round the world, that we can compete…anywhere?

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