I recently watched and reviewed Jamie Blanks’ Long Weekend. If you haven’t seen it (or the original), you can check out my spoiler-free review here. But I also felt a need to delve a little into how it compares to its predecessor, directed by Colin Eggleston in 1978. This will contain spoilers for both movies. Here are just a few thoughts I had on them.
The remake is not completely shot for shot, but it might as well be. To be honest, as I mentioned in my review, had I watched these in the opposite order, I’d feel differently about each of them. But as it is, I saw the remake first, decided I liked it already, and really I think it’s quite hard to unlike something. But it did make my heart sink a little when something that impressed me in the remake turned out to have already been done in the original (in particular, the white foam of breaking waves silently turning red with blood). As you’d expect, the special effects look better in the remake, especially the very last scene, a glorious explosion of gore, which the rest of the movie held back on.
One difference between the two is that our central male character, Peter, is Australian in the original and American in the remake (played by Jim “Jesus Christ” Caviezel). Initially I thought the choice to have an American as the central character bore some significance to his attitude, and wondered what the filmmakers were trying to say about the United States’ position on the health of our planet. But it is not once mentioned, and I can find little mention of it online, so one can only assume it was a casting issue.
Another omission from the remake was a scene from the 1978 version in which Peter gets stoned. I didn’t find it all that queer that this was left out of the remake, but found a lot to speculate on as to why it was in the original in the first place. Was it a tool to enhance Peter’s paranoia towards the creatures around him? A sign of his secret appreciation for what nature has to offer? The manifestation of his inclination to use Mother Earth solely for his own gratification? Or merely a sign of the times?
Outside of the nature message, a main theme of the film is abortion. But you can see how these two issues become one and the same. The couple have gone through an abortion, either as a result of, or maybe resulting in, the breakdown of their marriage, and the wife (Marcia in 1978, Carla in 2008) is constantly reminded of this. There is a moment that we become momentarily sympathetic to Peter, where he witnesses his wife smashing an eagle’s egg against a tree, and declaring, “You didn’t have to kill it.” It’s not all that subtle, especially in the original, but I thought it added a nice extra layer. Another symbol displayed here is the dugong (Aussie seacow) crying out for its lost cub, a sound that haunts our characters throughout, right up to the last seconds of the movie. We take this to mean that Marcia/Carla is doing the same for her own lost child, or maybe she is disgusted with herself for not doing so.
Overall, you could argue that this was a movie that did not need to be remade, especially when you consider the fact that there were no “updates” to the story, aside from maps being replaced with GPS. But Jamie Blanks dedicated his movie to the late Colin Eggleston, so it’s easy to see why he wanted to make it but didn’t want to change anything. I feel that there were a few things done better in the remake (the last 5-10 minutes), but this of course can be just a few tweaks of the original material (couple with the fact that I watched it first). At least it was nice to see a remake that did not lose the message or impact of the original. I recommend both movies highly.
Long Weekend is released on 8 Feb 2010 by Showbox Home Entertainment
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I didn’t see as much stuff as I wanted to this month. Bioshock 2 came out and the Splatcademy Awards work started. And I had the T-Virus for over a week, in which I would just randomly fall asleep all the time. What I lacked in time to watch feature lengths, I probably made up for with The Office and Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Easier to digest shorter TV entertainment than 2 hour movies sometimes.
A while back, Jackie 
