I can’t believe I’m the first person to notice this and actually articulate it in some way, but: a lot of remakes about, aren’t there? Now I’ve said it, it seems so obvious, doesn’t it? And yet, I am the only person who has detected this trend in TV and film. What have you all been doing? Am I the only one paying attention? Buck up! Get your head out of the sand!
For what it’s worth, remake culture doesn’t bother me that much: there are only really seven stories anyway, and making up a new character is hard, and writers are very stupid. (See: when given the infinity of decision to pull a complete new person out of the ether, they end up giving their character the job of “writer”. Good one mate.) Also, most people forget 60% of everything they see anyway so you can just make it again and show it to them and they won’t even notice. But Fatal Attraction – the new Paramount+ remake of Fatal Attraction (from Monday 1 May) – is a particularly interesting example of remakemania, and, listen, while we’re both here, we might as well talk about that.
Normally, I have to sketch out what the show is and the vague concept, but, come on, it’s Fatal Attraction: a film so integral to culture that I haven’t even seen it and I still know exactly what happens, who is in it and how often they scream, and the fact that the bunny ends up being soup. Weirdly, in the new series, that knowing feeling adds to the dread. Joshua Jackson is in the Michael Douglas role, doing a pitch-perfect “nice guy with a great job and wife and perfect moral compass and great head of hair and everyone loves him and he’s only a tiny, tiny bit smug about it”, and Lizzy Caplan plays opposite him as Glenn Close – doe-eyed and irresistible and a world-class flirt until she starts, by very carefully cranked degrees, to get a little bit spicier than necessary. There’s a very nice labrador called Quincy who I am really rooting for in all this. There are a lot of lingering glances through the just-closing doors of a lift. There’s a wife who they’ve written perfectly – not just another Hollywood “Hey honey – tough day?” type, but smart and funny and unnagging and human in her own right, and her only visible personality flaw is that she’s not Lizzy Caplan in a top-floor apartment taking her top and pants off in a really intense way. You know what’s coming! You know what’s coming! But somehow it all just adds to the anticipation!
The problem Paramount+ is finding when it remakes classics from its archive in a desperate attempt to make you watch anything that isn’t Yellowstone is: there’s a reason movies are only a couple of hours long. It tells a story in a concentrated way and all the big dramatic beats have to be crammed into one place. When you drag that out to an eight- or 10-hour series, you have to keep inventing new lines of plot, new over-important characters, open with a really dramatic monologue; time-wasting fluff like that.
In the new retelling, that comes out in some good ways – every time Jackson and Caplan circle each other before the inevitable happens, for instance. Their flirting-in-a-bar scenes are given a reverent amount of screen time and good, actually smart dialogue, and as a result the attraction the title keeps going on about makes complete and utter sense. And some fairly bad ones, which means we have to keep watching tedious scenes where Dan Gallagher’s grown-up daughter, who is just a collage of fits-into-Hollywood “young person” tropes (never takes her Airpods out; is in therapy; that’s about it) wrestles with her father’s recent release from prison. I don’t want to see the boring, domestic aftermath of an 80s classic movie, you know? It’s like making a series of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off then dedicating half the runtime to him catching up on homework in detention then getting a weekend job to try to pay for those Ferrari repairs.
Still, Fatal Attraction surprised me with how gripping it was: the chemistry between the leads is convincing, it’s shot like one of those very serious American law procedurals that are always good aren’t they, and Joshua Jackson never once has a meal in his house, he is just constantly eating bacon with his hands in diners or munching a sandwich at his desk. This “remaking stuff” idea of theirs … I think we might end up seeing a lot more of it, you know.
