Shani Hilton is guest-blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates this week, and she has an interesting post up about reboots, citing James Bond, Batman, and a dreaded Buffy reboot that will excise many of the elements beloved by fans of Joss Whedon‘s original TV series.
One thing I’ll say though, is that I think Hilton is blurring the distinction between a property that originated on television (Buffy) and reboots that attempt to be more faithful to external source material, (James Bond, Batman). Chris Nolan‘s Batman Begins is “newly imagined” to a film audience unfamiliar with the relevant influences, but it’s actually more like what Batman fans in 1989 loved about Batman comics than Tim Burton‘s 1989 film Batman.
Hussein Ibish wrote a wonderful meditation on James Bond as the ultimate “company man” a while ago:
As a company man, Bond is, to all appearances, faithful and loyal to his employers not only to a fault but in an ultimately inexplicable manner. He seems patriotic, but his patriotism is absolutely devoid of any ideas, or even conscious affiliations, whatsoever. He a ruthless agent of the government, particularly of his handler, the noxious M, but, in the films at least, why is entirely unclear. Yet his loyalty to what he frequently calls “the company” is ostentatiously demonstrated on numerous occasions, and not only in terms of the personal risks he is taking for missions he is often not fully briefed about and in pursuit of policies in which he takes no interest whatsoever. When M asks him, in their first ever film conversation in Dr. No, when he ever sleeps, Bond assures him, “never on the firm’s time.” Similarly, he is scrupulous about money and other assets belonging to what he describes as “the company” or other elements of “government property” that have to be “fully accounted for.” In other words, however mischievous and defiant he sometimes pretends to be, at heart he’s an exemplary employee and, above all else, a fully interpolated company man, and proud of it.
Ibish argues that the problem with the recent Bond reboot is that the 2007 film Casino Royale actually departs from the book in that it completely avoids how the loss of his first love erases all traces of politics and ideology from his personality, leaving only the perfect “company man.” It deploys an empty grittiness as a strategic rejection of the prior Bond films, which Ibish sees as conscious self-parody, while leaving out the kind of character development that would give it meaning.
Attempts to be “more faithful” the source material can work well or they can be disastrous, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate to call them reboots exactly, because they aren’t really whole reimaginings of the property in question. A new Buffy series or movie can’t be “more faithful” than the original–it is a true reboot. And there are times when a cinematic version of story can actually be superior to its source material, and while I can’t think of any examples offhand I’d say it’s certainly possible in the abstract.
