- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Having counted 'TDTESS' as an all time favorite movie since first seen in the 1960's on TV as a midwestern farmboy on my parents old Admirial BW TV learning of this "remake" was not good news.
This remake of 'TDTESS' had to be very very good to equal or to better the 1951 cult classic. From the high traffic this remake is getting in promotion over past few weeks it was already not hard to see it was going to fall short. To succeed in anyway over or above carefully cherished boyhood memories of the eerie opening scenes and music of the original would be a very steep ascent to achieve.
This fifties era sci-fi classic may have had deeper messages about atomic war or the evergreen Red Menace of the early 1950's but for this American midwest farmboy this movies portrayal of otherworldly spacecraft--a robot capable of melting tanks and artillery and those fantastic scenes of the spaceman(incomparably played by Michael Rennie) walking up into a mysterious spacecraft with split opening/slide-out ramp and with a wave of his hand powering up those superb Hollywood sci-fi sets of the spacecraft's interiors were and are the best.
Who needed Technicolor or CinemaScope when the soundtrack was so otherworldly theramin eerie and Gort could do what no robot has done as well since?--namely scare the beegeesus out of the USA and a young impressionable American farmboy.
This was a dangerous remake to attempt based on this midwestern farmboy's cherished memories of the original.
If this one could not be absolutely done with excellence it was better to not have done it at all.
Gort would know what to do. Gort's visor would raise up and that revealed flickering light would power up within Gort's head.Some healthy imagination will take you the rest of the way to what befalls this failing and failure of a remake of this all time sci-fi classic...be sure to include the original sound fx in and around just this one scene while doing so.
