Arnold Schwarzenegger Movies Should Never Be Remade
August 18, 2011
http://www.ugo.com/movies/arnold-schwarzenegger-remakes
I haven’t seen the new version of Conan The Barbarian and I’m a firm believer in giving every movie a fair shot. But there’s a special kind of remake fatigue we may as well get used to: Arnold remake fatigue. Because an Arnold movie is a special kind of movie.
Some of you may be too young to have firsthand knowledge of Arnold Schwarzenegger as anything other than a guy on Meet the Press rambling about automobile emissions. I don’t live in California so I can’t vouch for his leadership (as a New Yorker, we like our governors as either prostitute-schtuppers or blind) but I can say this: there was a time when the man was his own genre.
If you were there, you know: Arnold didn’t make science fiction films, he didn’t make action-adventure films, he didn’t make comedies. He made Arnold films. Or, to be accurate, he made Ahhhhhnuld films.
The first time I became aware of the hulking Austrian force of cinematic nature known as Arnold Schwarzenegger I was playing Intellivision with Lyle Goodman. When we were done pretending the games were fun, we slid the black box at the back of the TV away from “computer” mode and a commercial came on. It was for a bloody, bestial sword and sorcery picture that our parents would never take us to: Conan the Barbarian. Lyle and I thought it was the coolest thing we ever saw...and then they announced the cast.
Schwarzenegger was the most shocking name in the world. To many of you, it sounded like a word you were raised to never, ever say – but to Jewish kids it sounded like two words you were never supposed to say. We were dumbstruck until one of us (lets blame Lyle) started making fun of it.
Friends, it may sound surprising, but know this: punk-ass twerps in New Jersey were mocking Ahhhhhnuld.
The first Ahhhhhnuld film I saw in the theater was The Running Man. It was Rated R and I was twelve. (Yeah, I don’t know what the scene is like now, but back then you could get into anything.) I went with a bunch of friends and we spent most of the time before the movie simply shouting “Ahhhhhhnuld” and quoting lines from Commando. (The Terminator had come out, but for some reason it was Commando that got the most attention from my group. Maybe cable TV experts can confirm that it played more regularly back then.) Throughout much of the movie, we yelled at the screen in fake Austrian accents that sounded no less ridiculous than the leading man’s.
When Ahhhhhnuld made Twins it got him accepted in every family’s living room. Gone was the brute of Conan or (Lord help us) Raw Deal, and here was the darling of the Johnny Carson show. Twins may be the greatest high concept pitch of all time. (In the Producing 1 class I took at film school we often referred to the Twins poster: one word, one image, you know exactly what this movie is all about.) Still, despite the shift in genre and the visible co-star (Danny De Vito) this movie traded heavily on Arnold’s “Ahhhhhnuld”ness. Audiences still didn’t respond to him as a regular movie star – he was something wholly unique.
With Total Recall came a revelation. I recall (ahem) with great clarity what the scene was like on opening weekend. I’m still technically too young to be at an R movie by myself, but my pals and I are shouting “Ahhhhhnuld” as the lights dim. At what I now realize was the start of the second act (when Quaid cracks the bones of his construction worker buddies and turns them into smears of blood on the concrete wall) I overheard something. Two knuckleheads were sitting behind me. These were not kids from the AP class – these were salt of the earth guys – and one turns to the other and says, “hey – this is really good!”
What’s key here is that there was an expectation for Ahhhhhnuld movies to be awesome. But no one expected them to be good. The brutality of Paul Verhoeven and Philip K. Dick’s story brought a level of genuine intellectual quality that, quite frankly, was icing.
This level of acceptance and expectation was, at least in my moviegoing lifetime, unique to Ahhhhhnuld films. And now that we’re at a point in time when these well-remembered titles are up for their inevitable remakes (Total Recall is currently in production) I feel quite confident that, regardless of their quality, they will feel inadequate in a way quite unique from other remakes.
Unless kids in the suburbs are gonna’ start shouting Mommmmmmmoa.
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