![\"godzilla2014\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/godzilla2014.jpg\")
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I saw the new Godzilla<\/a> yesterday. I enjoyed it a lot, but I\u2019ve been weirded out for months over the fact that I\u2019ve had to call it something I\u2019ve never had to call a Godzilla film. Just like how I recently had to call a Bond film<\/a> something that, in 50 years of recasting and returning to ground zero, I\u2019ve never had to call a Bond film.<\/p>\n I\u2019m all for specialized vocabulary. Film needs its own exclusive words to describe its own processes, but \u2018reboot\u2019 is not such a word. I\u2019ve asked people time and again to define it, and I\u2019ve read about it online\u2014god help me, I\u2019ve even read the Wikipedia page <\/i>for it<\/a>. It\u2019s just not a real and distinct concept. It\u2019s a cheap marketing buzzword, that\u2019s all it is. And more than that, the very existence of the term is symptomatic of a rot at the core of contemporary filmmaking.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is a reboot? Well first of all, let\u2019s look at what a remake is. A remake is a retelling of a story already filmed<\/i>. That\u2019s it. A remake can follow closely to its predecessor’s footsteps, such as John Huston\u2019s The Maltese Falcon<\/a>, which is almost line-for-line the same film as the 1931 version<\/a>\u00a0but with the added value of world-class actors like Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. Or a remake can jackknife wildly in a new direction, like Herzog\u2019s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans<\/a>, which relocated Ferrara\u2019s original<\/a> and injected it with an acerbic ridiculousness. A remake can sometimes even restore a film to the roots of its original source material, like John Carpenter\u2019s The Thing<\/a>, which brought back the shapeshifting aspect of the original story<\/a>, something the 1951 version<\/a> wasn\u2019t capable of doing.<\/span><\/p>\n These are all remakes. We call them that. We\u2019ve been <\/i>calling them that for longer than I or most people reading this article have been alive. The term \u2018reboot\u2019, on the other hand, seems to have snuck into our lexicon around 2003, with the releases of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre<\/a> and Battlestar Galactica<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n 2003\u2018s Texas Chainsaw Massacre was surprisingly not terrible, a glossy retread of the original masterpiece. It was called a \u2018reboot\u2019 because it stripped away all the characters and events of the previous films, the idea being that it was \u2018returning\u2019 the series to its ground floor. That\u2019s all well and good\u2014except for the fact that the characters and events of the previous films ignore each other too.<\/span><\/p>\n The Texas Chainsaw movie that immediately preceded the 2003 remake was Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation<\/a>, a terrible, no-budget remake which ignored all of the prior films (and starred a pre-fame Matthew McConaughey and Ren\u00e9e Zellweger). Before that, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III<\/a> was a kinda-sorta sequel and kinda-sorta remake of the second film, lumping in characters introduced in that film who even died <\/i>in that film. And Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2<\/a> is infamously different in tone from the first film.<\/span><\/p>\n In short, 2003\u2019s Texas Chainsaw Massacre was saddled with a new word describing a \u2018new concept\u2019 that had already been done, as a rule, throughout the entire series, and for that matter, throughout most other slasher franchises\u2014the Friday the 13th films never even pretended to have what we now call \u2018continuity\u2019 until the fourth one. The term \u2018reboot\u2019 for Texas Chainsaw 2003 seems only to exist to make clear, from a marketing standpoint, that the film has a different spirit <\/i>that its immediate predecessors, and is a return to the uncompromising meanness of the original. In truth, it\u2019s just a dressed-up word for a remake.<\/span><\/p>\n Around the same time, the Edward James Olmos-led Battlestar Galactica aired, pitched in magazines and press pieces as a \u201cre-imagining\u201d and a \u201creboot\u201d of the original series. This was a major signal here, assuring us that it wasn\u2019t campy and clunky like the \u201870s show. And it wasn\u2019t. I love Battlestar\u2014it took a great premise that was squandered in the 1970s and explored it to its limits. But isn\u2019t that what a remake is expected to do in the first place? Isn\u2019t that what The Maltese Falcon does? Isn\u2019t that what the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/a> does? The original version of Body Snatchers is a masterpiece, but the \u201870s version is able to openly explore sexual and political undercurrents that, in the 1950s, had to stay buried.<\/span><\/p>\n A frustrating aspect of \u2018reboot\u2019 is that it converts the word \u2018remake\u2019 into a pejorative, meaning something akin to \u2018a film that retreads the same ground as its predecessor\u2019. Are we then to accept that what J. J. Abrams did to Star Trek<\/a> is more radical than what Yasujiro Ozu did when he merely remade <\/i>his silent film The Story of Floating Weeds<\/a> in color, with sound? Previous Star Trek films may not have had as exceptional special effects budgets, but they damn sure all had audible dialogue.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Star Trek is a great reminder that the word reboot only concerns itself with the remaking of a franchise rather than an individual story. And that\u2019s your first clue that something is amiss\u2014the concept of a \u2018franchise\u2019 as a bare root of storytelling is at an insidious high now, and it\u2019s a problem. Filmmakers shouldn\u2019t think in those terms, because once you start considering your film as the beginning of an assumed trilogy or saga, you start to hold things back from the audience. This leads to \u2018worldbuilding\u2019 instead of filmmaking.<\/span><\/p>\n Worldbuilding is what stretched a 300-page kid\u2019s book called The Hobbit<\/a> into a bloated carcass dutifully drifting into theaters every few years, longer now to watch than to read. Worldbuilding is why the Spider-Man<\/a>\u00a0movies can\u2019t get off the ground, why they keep insisting on telling the same story over and over. Hell, worldbuilding is probably what caused Marvel to kick Edgar Wright off his dream project Ant-Man<\/a>.\u00a0If the generation that learned filmmaking from Star Wars had made<\/i> Star Wars, they\u2019d have saved the Death Star for the third movie.<\/span><\/p>\n By drawing a line between \u2018reboots\u2019 and \u2018remakes\u2019, we as film viewers are perpetuating the idea of a franchise as a matter of course rather than an audience\u2019s reward for stellar filmmaking. \u2018Reboot\u2019 is nothing more than a sneaky way for a movie to give itself a bit of grandeur it hasn\u2019t necessarily earned, and we shouldn\u2019t allow marketing departments to win this one. By adding \u2018reboot\u2019 to our lexicon, we accept a sneaky little subjective term in as an objective descriptor. We saddle films with weird obligations, and we are hardly conscious of it as we do so. We are not expanding the boundaries of how we talk about movies by throwing around the word \u2018reboot\u2019\u2014we are shrinking them.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I saw the new Godzilla<\/a> yesterday. I enjoyed it a lot, but I\u2019ve been weirded out for months over the fact that I\u2019ve had to call it something I\u2019ve never had to call a Godzilla film. Just like how I recently had to call a Bond film<\/a> something that, in 50 years of recasting and returns to ground zero, I\u2019ve never had to call a Bond film.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n