Let The Right One In (2008)
tl;dr 4/10 I think the remake is much, much better and wouldn't recommend this one to anyone.
So the remake is actually very close, in the sense that a lot of the scenes are ostensibly the same and even a lot of the dialogue is identical. Nonetheless, I think the remake is going for something completely different. First of all, while Wikipedia calls the original a horror movie, I don't really agree. It's more of a drama. You're meant to take it seriously -- the boy is a real character (and kind of a sadist), the vampire girl genuinely wants his help, and she's humanized; she's shown feeling guilt about what she's done. So ultimately, I think that's a pretty easy to interpret story, as Awaclus said, and I don't find the story that interesting.
Also, I feel like some of the shots are actively gross, like showing the severed limb or the half burnt face in detail, and I feel like that's cheap. It's very easy to make me feel uncomfortable that way; you can just show me a normal operation and I'll be extremely uncomfortable. I really don't respect it. So imo the horror elements are actively bad.
In the remake, the dynamic is completely different. The boy is just a normal boy, he has no sadistic part. And yeah I guess that makes him a less interesting character, but he's not supposed to be interesting bc the remake isn't going for a drama. The point is that you sort of expect the script to adjust to him being a boy -- like you know, how the universe works differently when the main character is a child -- and also there's an obvious parallel to Twilight. And then instead the boy ends up having zero agency as the girl goes around murdering people.
I'm much more confident in that reading bc if you view them side by side, the changes are clearly deliberate. E.g.,
- In the original, her caretaker intentionally plugs out his oxygen thing, committing himself to death (unless I was wrong about what that does). In the remake, he does offer her his neck, but then she says "I'm sorry" and kills him, so I think he didn't want to die there
- In the original, the boy taunts the girl to go in uninvited. In the remake, she goes in willingly, which makes the scene completely different. It's a power move. She does it bc she knows what'll happen and presumably she gets enjoyment out of scaring him.
- In the original, in the scene where a man goes into her house, it's because he's already seen her and he intends to murder her. Than the boy pulls out a knife, clearly intending to kill the guy -- this then doesn't end up happening, but he still saves her, and she thanks him for it. In the remake, the man is a police guy investigating, she arguably didn't need to kill him, and after she does, she doesn't say thanks and instead hugs the boy from behind, which -- again, I think it's a power play. She knows she can murder someone in front of him and he'll still like her.
- In the original, when she tells him to defend himself against the bullies, she's not appealing to some sadistic part of him; she's just toying with him because well he likes her and he doesn't want to get bullied. And -- unlike in the original -- he almost kills the bully by following her advice.
On net, she never shows any weakness, humanity, or regret in the remake. And imo that makes it a much better story. It's kinda genius how you could keep so much and yet change the overall product so drastically. And again, look at the name. "Let Me In" is from the perspective of the vampire; that's not a coincidence. And look at the ending, the "eat some now, safe some for later" thing the movie ends on is not in the original, and it suggests that she could choose to just kill the boy whenever she gets bored of him.
I still don't entirely understand the purpose of the girl being trans in the original. (And it's confirmed; we get a shot of her genitals.) In the remake, we don't get that (which is also more tasteful btw, I mean cmon) and when he asks her whether she'll be his girlfriend, she says "I'm not a girl", when he asks "what are you" she says "I'm nothing". I think it's more that she's a vampire and hence not a human. But idk. I feel like that doesn't have a place in the remake, but they had to keep it because it'd be too big of a change, so they made it ambiguous.
Anyways the take that the remake just butchered the original by removing all subtlety is uh a really terrible take. Mb YMS just viewed it as trying to do the same thing as the original, and yeah it does a much worse job at doing the same thing. But what it does is so much better.
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Topic: The Necro Wars (Read 346266 times)