That’s kind of hyperbolic, but it’s complicated. And I will use the word “formative” way more often than I probably should.

My usual reaction to remakes I feel shouldn’t happen is a light “tut tut, you should know better”. Like, why would anyone bother making a new RoboCop if your major takeaway from the original is not the satire of corporatist society? If you just think it’s a cool movie about a cyborg, you might have missed the point. Or The Wicker Man? How would anyone think that would still work in the 2000s? Or Child’s Play? The original franchise is still going strong, but somehow you still try to make a new one.

On the other hand, the new Child’s Play is not that bad. It’s not great, but the chemistry between Aubrey Plaza and the kid is kind of endearing and if they hadn’t called it “Child’s Play”, it would probably have been received much better. The Wicker Man might have failed in 2006, but I loved Midsommar in 2019, so they might have had something interesting in their hands, but just didn’t get there. And RoboCop… well, honestly, I don’t know if there’s any redeeming qualities for that. I haven’t seen it and I don’t intend to.

So, the new Crow opens later this month. Next week to be more precise.

Part of me loves the original Crow. I’m not sure I can call it a formative movie as the kind of aesthetics it exemplifies were definitely a part of my life, but there’s a cover of a Joy Division song covered by Nine Inch Nails in it. Those were both formative bands for me. I still kind of remember seeing a Nine Inch Nails video back in ’89 or ’90. It just opened a whole new world of art for me. Joy Division was different, because for the longest time I thought of them as one hit wonder, because MTV would often play Love Will Tear Us Apart, but nothing else from them until they had New Order weekend and then they put all the old Joy Division videos into rotation for at least those two days. Joy Division is still in my top 10 most listened to artists on Last.fm despite only having ever released two albums.

And while the movie wasn’t necessarily formative for me, the comic was. Alongside Maus, it was my first discovery of comics outside of Marvel and Disney (the latter of which has always been weirdly popular in Finland). It was very helpful that the creator, James O’Barr, was obsessed with Joy Division, even going as far as to quote their lyrics in the comics and name chapters after their songs.

At the time, I was also very much into Vampire: the Masquerade and the World of Darkness as a whole. Again, one of those formative things. It also shared a lot of influences with The Crow, including Joy Division’s music. It was just a completely new approach to RPGs for me at the time and while I’ve since learned that there were better systems available, it felt like a huge step in what rules can do for you (even if those rules are now desperately outdated).

So, even if The Crow itself was not formative for me, it was like a distillation of everything I was into at the time (and largely still am, although my tastes have expanded wildly in the last 30 years). While it isn’t on my list of favorite movies anymore, it still holds a special place in my heart.

So, when it came out that they were remaking the movie, my heart kind of sank, which is a reaction I don’t usually get regarding remakes. I wasn’t angry. I just felt defeated even though I hadn’t even been in a fight.

Part of me would like to defend the movie. I kind of trust Bill Skarsgård’s instincts, I could believe FKA twigs could be someone you would rise from the dead to avenge and the source material is kind of hard to mess up, because it’s not that complicated.

Another part of me opposes this. It’s being distributed by Lionsgate, who just failed spectacularly with Borderlands. It was directed by someone who hasn’t really worked in movies since 2017, when he made the boring as hell live action remake of Ghost in the Shell (which I’ve apparently seen, but I have basically no recollection of), and speaking of trusting Skarsgård’s instincts, he told Esquire that the ending of the movie was changed to facilitate a sequel, and he had reservations about that.

That last one for me is a very bad sign. The story is so clearly a one-off. Sure, they made a bunch of sequals to the original, but they all had a different lead. They were separate stories around the same concept. And they sucked. Apparently. I’ve only seen the first of the sequals and I did not like that.

I would also like to note that the trailer doesn’t seem to do the amount of world building it should. The trailer makes the movie look like an edgy superhero story with a revenge plot, when the original felt like so much more. It wasn’t only about a lost love. I always felt it was more about fighting for what’s worth fighting for. The world is burning in the movie, quite literally at times, but Erik still stops his rampage to help people, because he knew that was what Shelly would have wanted.

Danny Huston is a solid actor, but he is no Michael Wincott. Wincott just has this presence that adds to the original movie. Worse yet, where is the gang in the new trailer? I hope we at least get some of the weirdness of the original, but T-Bird, Skank, Tin-Tin and Fun Boy seem to be gone. The problem is that they are very important to the story. In a sense they are avatars of the world. They represent the depravity that has fallen on to the city. They weren’t just the minibosses on Erik’s way to Top Dollar. Also, the four men playing these roles were also just perfect.

I don’t want to be negative about movies, especially ones that haven’t even come out yet, but Lionsgate is making it hard for me lately. They just seem to miss on both this movie and Borderlands on so many levels. Even if I trust Skarsgård’s instincts, I would also trust Blanchett’s and where did that leave us?