What is the point of doing a remake? This is the question I found myself asking as
I watched the 2015 version of Poltergeist. Sometimes a film can use an update to better
communicate with a modern audience, but Poltergeist
doesn’t really need that, as the terrifying appeal of a bunch of spirits
haunting a family home is timeless as portrayed in the original film. So
why remake it other than to update the daily technology to more modern relatable appliances (and make a quick buck
off name recognition)? There sadly isn’t
much of an answer to that.
The names are different, but the basic premise and plot
points are still the same. A family of
five moves into a suburban home and the children begin to detect otherworldly
presences with them in the house.
Strange things start occurring, such as televisions reverting to static,
dolls moving on their own, and balls bouncing into frame. One night, the haunting becomes so severe
that the youngest daughter is pulled into the spirits’ realm, and the family
must call upon the help of paranormal investigators to get her back. Some details have been changed for
modernity’s sake, such as a medium character being changed to a reality show
ghost hunter and the use of a drone camera to take a look into the spirit
realm, but more or less the nuts and bolts of the plot remain identical.
What I found most appreciated were the lighthearted touches
that director Gil Kenan managed to slip into the first half of the film. The slow build-up can sometimes be pretty
dull in horror flicks, so it’s nice to see a director recognize that it’s fine
to have fun with the premise. Sam
Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt have wonderful chemistry as the haunted family’s
parents, with witty banter that never becomes so ever-present as to pull away
the building tension, but still gives them personality where they otherwise
would have been stock archetypes.
That said, though, the film can’t help but be compared to
its predecessor, and this is clearly the inferior film. Many of the classic moments of the original
film have been recreated to shrug-worthy effect, and other effects feel
derivative of other recent haunted house flicks. There’s nothing new here, right down to the
obviously CGI ghosts that later appear, completely breaking the tension as the
clean polygonal figures never escape the uncanny valley.
Overall, this new Poltergeist
is technically proficient and effective, but utterly pointless. With the recent renaissance of better
crafted, low budget horror films, this not only feels like just another in a
wave of lackluster studio horror projects, but it also doesn’t even serve as an
adequate modern surrogate for the original.
It at least doesn’t often resort to jump scares, but that minor point
cannot save this film from its utter lack of raison d’etre. Give this one
a pass and pick up the original.
No comments:
Post a Comment