This contains spoilers right from the start so please don't read if that is a problem to you.
I loved the Swedish original and didn't understand why anyone would want to remake something that was already perfect. However, I had read so many good and positive reviews of this version that I began to believe there was some truth in them. However, watching the film surpassed my worst fears of how bad it could be and here's why:
1 Immediate alienation of viewer by starting with artificial pumped up action sequence followed by "Two weeks earlier." I swear this formulation of "X weeks, months or years earlier" appears in every other drama I watch these days and it is overused and annoying. It's bad enough on TV but it's spreading to movies now.
2 Awful music - either vague angelic voices swelling to indicate a scary/portentious moment or tinkly piano music to tell us this is an emotionally significant scene.
3 No doubt someone will tell me I am wrong but the snow throughout looked completely fake. It reminded me of one my cooking experiments gone wrong then smeared over everything in sight. Difficult to believe in the veracity of the film when the snow, which is significant to the story, looks fake.
4 The CGI. This has to be some of the worst CGI work I have ever ever seen and that's saying something. In the original there is one significant CGI scene involving cats which is so grotesquely exaggerated that it works by drawing your attention to it. Here the CGI made me groan aloud every time it appeared.
5 What was the point of the hospital scene with the woman catching fire except to stick a bit more action in? In the original you know who these characters are and you have an emotional investment in them. Here, they appear, you don't know or care about them, she dies.
6 The director bottles it when it comes to the ambiguity of Abby's gender. It was pretty obscure in the original film but you get enough to intrigue you and make you go and read the book.
The two young leads did well given how badly everything else around them was so poorly realised but I have to say that they come a pretty poor second to the actors in the original. The fact that Chloe Moretz played Abby was one of the reasons I decided to watch this as I think she is an enormously talented actress but I can only think she was poorly directed given her interpretation here.
I really wanted to like this given the fact it was well reviewed, I liked Cloverfield, I liked Chloe M but the truth is that it's just awful. Maybe if we didn't have the first version to compare it to, Let Me In might have become a minor cult film in years to come but we do have the original and it is so much better than this in every respect that it eclipses the remake.
I loved the Swedish original and didn't understand why anyone would want to remake something that was already perfect. However, I had read so many good and positive reviews of this version that I began to believe there was some truth in them. However, watching the film surpassed my worst fears of how bad it could be and here's why:
1 Immediate alienation of viewer by starting with artificial pumped up action sequence followed by "Two weeks earlier." I swear this formulation of "X weeks, months or years earlier" appears in every other drama I watch these days and it is overused and annoying. It's bad enough on TV but it's spreading to movies now.
2 Awful music - either vague angelic voices swelling to indicate a scary/portentious moment or tinkly piano music to tell us this is an emotionally significant scene.
3 No doubt someone will tell me I am wrong but the snow throughout looked completely fake. It reminded me of one my cooking experiments gone wrong then smeared over everything in sight. Difficult to believe in the veracity of the film when the snow, which is significant to the story, looks fake.
4 The CGI. This has to be some of the worst CGI work I have ever ever seen and that's saying something. In the original there is one significant CGI scene involving cats which is so grotesquely exaggerated that it works by drawing your attention to it. Here the CGI made me groan aloud every time it appeared.
5 What was the point of the hospital scene with the woman catching fire except to stick a bit more action in? In the original you know who these characters are and you have an emotional investment in them. Here, they appear, you don't know or care about them, she dies.
6 The director bottles it when it comes to the ambiguity of Abby's gender. It was pretty obscure in the original film but you get enough to intrigue you and make you go and read the book.
The two young leads did well given how badly everything else around them was so poorly realised but I have to say that they come a pretty poor second to the actors in the original. The fact that Chloe Moretz played Abby was one of the reasons I decided to watch this as I think she is an enormously talented actress but I can only think she was poorly directed given her interpretation here.
I really wanted to like this given the fact it was well reviewed, I liked Cloverfield, I liked Chloe M but the truth is that it's just awful. Maybe if we didn't have the first version to compare it to, Let Me In might have become a minor cult film in years to come but we do have the original and it is so much better than this in every respect that it eclipses the remake.