Comparing Taking of Pelham 123

When I first watched the movie Taking of Pelham 123 a few days ago, I felt like there was something very familiar with it. So when I made my research later on, I saw that this was the remake of a movie from the 1970s which I happened to watch when I was a kid and adored actually.

So I found a copy of the original movie and watched it not long after I watched the latter one, and it gave me a great opportunity to compare them.

For most of the cases, the remake of a movie tells a very different story, merely inspired by the original one. For example, in the movie Planet of Apes, we see that the remake has actually nothing to do with the original story other than they both use the same idea: a movie about humans who land to a planet dominated by apes.

Or even in the case of Time Machine, the both movies are supposed to be based on the same novel written by H.C. Wells, but we see a great difference between the stories of the original and the remake movies. And I am not even getting to the diversion from the book they both claim that they are based on.

Movie making is a serious business.

Such derivations are totally understandable. Movie making is a serious business and a lot of money is invested in it. So, the producers want to make sure that the audience will get what they feel familiar with. I am not really talking about the expectations because this word is highly subjective, but I am talking about the social environment you are living in.

Technology is one of the most important factors. But what is more important is the social environment we live in which pretty much is bound to the technological advances, but of course, not limited to that. So if you give the audience a world which they don’t feel like they are familiar in, that movie is more likely to fail in the boxoffice, and that is what matters for the producers.

So when it is a remake movie, I expect to see a great derivation in the story line and in the story telling, and actually this is what makes it fun to compare, because this way we can see a lot about the differences in the social codes of different eras.

The remake of Pelham 123

To my surprise, the stories of both the original and the remake of the Taking Of Pelham 123 were pretty much the same. They were both the straight forward story about a group of criminals hijacking a subway train, asking a ransom, and running away and being pursued. How they hijack the train, their interaction with the city officials, how they find a way to run away don’t change, but of course there are some slight differences simply because the original movie is produced in 1974, and the remake is produced in 2009.

Even some of the key lines were the same, even if they were pronounced by different characters.

The hijackers give an absolute 1 hour for the money, starting from 2:13 PM to 3:13 PM, and this time line does not change in both movies. And for some reason I am not sure, I liked it this way. I don’t know, maybe it is because I felt that the second movie shows respect to the original one.

What are the differences then? First of all, I can say that the latter Pelham movie is a more condensed story which focuses on the action and the tension. It is like, they have trimmed all the aspects of the story which do not directly serve to the tense action. For example, the original movie opens with a group of Japanese officials visiting New York subway, and they exit the story as soon as the action begins, so they don’t have anything to do with the main plot, but yet we see them for about 5 minutes. You don’t see such sort of sub stories in the remake Pelham movie which don’t directly serve to the main plot.

So this is the kind of derivation I am talking about. Because in today’s world, the audience is used to see breathless action packs, and we don’t really have the patience to see a slow paced story. We want to dive into the action directly and experience it in the fast lane rather than some intriguing sub stories which have nothing to do with the main plot and slow down the action.

So even though this is supposed to be a tense movie, I can really say that the original one is actually a calm story, which does not take things in hurry. The remake movie is much more adrenalin packed, perhaps reflecting the supposedly tense atmosphere far better. The thing here is, the both movies are really great  masterpieces of their genres, only if you know when they were made. If you watch the original Pelham movie not caring when it was produced, you may feel rather disappointed, thinking that the movie does not give you what it is supposed to give you.

We are not innocent.

Another difference is of course in the characters. The original movie is actually far richer than the remake movie on this aspect. Just like the story itself, the director Tony Scott has trimmed the excessive characters too, in the remake Pelham movie, so that he can focus on the real action. But what is more important here is the backgrounds of the characters, or the characters themselves. In the original movie you see the bad guys and you see the good guys, and there is a distinctive line between them. But in the latter movie, this line is rather blurred. I don’t want to get into this too much to avoid spoiling the whole fun, but this new approach is a direct consequence of the new society we are living in. Today, we are much more familiar to the idea that nobody is innocent and even the best heroes might have done some blurry things in the past. Such a concept would be a very bold experiment in the 1970s and it would have been much harder to find a producer to invest money in such kind of a story, but today, we consider it pretty normal.