The Demise of Originality

In current cinema, Hollywood has been releasing numerous remakes, many still in development and production, this approach is also sometimes taken towards classic films as well. Regardless of extravagant new technology, the idea is recycled nonetheless. It now seems Hollywood's originality is ceasing to function.

An example of a classic being remade when absolutely not neccessary would be Federico Fellini's 8½ (Eight and a Half, 1963), this film is often regarded as an important work of filmmaking, bonafide classic and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was remade as the musical Nine (2009), it got mixed to negative critical reaction and did not win any awards. What you are left with is a dull musical interpretation that lacks the visionary direction of Federico Fellini, someone idolized by other great auteur directors such as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Pedro Almodovar etc.

Unnecessary sequels is the most common phenomenon, whereby a sequel is forced by the studio when the storyline is way past it's expiration. This is something that goes back to 80's Horror series such as Nightmare on Elm Street.

The best example of this would be the Terminator series, with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron brought the storyline to an ending resolve. The studio was so eager to squeeze profit out of it, that they went ahead and made Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines without James Cameron, the film had 17% less profit than its predecessor. That didn't even stop them from making, Terminator: Salvation, this installment left numerous new loose-ends to the story and plot-holes. It was a box-office and critical failure, not surprising as the third film lowered viewers expectations and alienated them.

Hollywood spends copious amount of time on remakes and unnecessary sequels, when they need to focus more on coming up with original story ideas instead.

Nonlinear Narrative In Cinema

Nonlinear narrative in filmmaking, challenges the conventions of continuity editing techniques. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) told the story of Charles Foster Kane through varying perspectives of people that knew him and flashbacks, yet he remains an enigma to other characters and the spectator (the audience). In the Classical Hollywood Cinema era, a flashback was the primary nonlinear narrative technique. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), explores an incident of rape and murder from each witnesses perspective and flashbacks of it, each recollection of the witness has an entirely different interpretation. Rashomon employs the narrative mode of omniscient narration, the narrative point-of-view jumps from one character to another. However, unlike other films in this omniscient narrative mode, the spectator does not know more than the characters. In Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), the film’s narrative is interwoven with the dreams, reality, memories and flashbacks protagonist Guido Anselmo. In the 1990’s, Quentin Tarantino employed non-linear narrative in his debut film Reservoir Dogs (1992), where he used flashbacks to tell the story of a failed heist. Tarantino challenged narrative convention even furth with Pulp Fiction (1994), the narrative chronology is disjointed into segments and the spectator has to connect the pieces of the puzzle together as the whole, coherent story. Following the wake of Pulp Fiction, there was a nonlinear narrative resurgence. In Bryan Singers’ The Usual Suspects (1995), the film is in the restricted narrative mode, the story is primarily told through flashbacks by narrator Verbal Kint, his told to the spectator and agent Dave Kujan but the twist is that the story is twisted with lies by the unreliable narrator. In Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001), the narrative structure mimics Lenny’s amnesia, therefore the spectator is as confused and amnesiac as Lenny, challenging the conventions of restricted narration.