Academic

Rating the 2010 TV remakes (Nikita and Hawaii 5-0)

By Tung Yin

Does Hollywood have any imagination?  It seems like many movies are sequels or remakes, and television is hardly immune to that syndrome either.

This fall, CW's "Nikita" is a re-imagining (the new term for remake that hopes to be different from the inspiration) of the excellent 1997-2001 USA Network series "La Femme Nikita," and CBS's "Hawaii 5-0" is a re-imagining of that same network's 1968-1980 series.  How do these rate?

To start off, let's look at what I consider to be examples of really bad and really good remakes.  "La Femme Nikita" started as a 1990 French movie directed by Luc Besson and starred a feral Anne Parillaud in the title role.  Although it was released here in the U.S., Hollywood decided to remake it just three years later, with Bridget Fonda as Nikita.  This was a really bad remake, mostly because it was essentially a copy of the original version with different actors.  Many scenes were shot identically.  I think the ending veered off a little but there was far too little imagination put into the remake.  Lesson: if you're going to do a remake, you have to have your own vision.

At the other extreme, the SciFi Channel remake of "Battlestar Galactica" turned a cheesy 1970s "Star Wars" rip-off into a dark, gritty, philosophical military thriller.  The end of the series got out of hand but was still way better than, say, "Lost"'s ending.  What made the new "BSG" so good is that the series creators took the starting premise of the original show and adapted it to the post-9/11 context in which the new series would be airing.  Characters were altered, radically in some instances, to suit the new storyline, even though some of these changes were controversial.

Hawaii 5-0

Since this debuted in 1968, I didn't really watch it first-run, though I may have caught some of the later seasons live.  It's known for (1) the opening theme music; (2) the Honolulu setting; and (3) the square jaw of lead actor Jack Lord.  Otherwise, it was a fairly standard police procedural.

The new version keeps the theme music and the Honolulu setting.  Lord has been replaced by CBS's favorite actor, Alex O'Loughlin, who previously headed two doomed CBS series ("Moonlight" and "Three Rivers").  The biggest change is that the previously all-male Five-O unit now has Grace Park as a fresh out of the police academy member of the team.  (Interestingly, Park is 36 but playing someone at least ten years younger.)

This "Hawaii 5-0" feels modern, but it's mostly in the production values.  The pilot episode introduced the four main characters and showed how they got together, but what might have been a long-running character motivation arc (the bad guy who killed O'Loughlin's dad) is resolved quickly.  Thus, it appears that the episodes will be mostly self-contained, with occasional reference to family matters (Scott Caan's daughter, etc.).

Thus far, I've enjoyed "Hawaii 5-0" and have kept the Season Pass on my TiVo.  It's not what I would consider great TV, or even thought-provoking, but sometimes comfort food is just what you have a taste for.

Nikita

More ambitious is CW's "Nikita," starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Q (who had a minor role in "Mission Impossible 3").  In the USA Network version, Nikita was a street loser who was convicted of murdering a police officer (but perhaps she was framed?) and sentenced to die.  But instead of being executed, she was taken to a top secret supra-national antiterrorism organization called Section One.  There, she was trained as an elite counterterrorism operative and sent on deadly missions around the world.  What made Section One stand out compared to earlier incarnations of this sort of idea (like "Mission Impossible") was that Section One was ruthless in its missions.  Torture was routinely inflicted on captured bad guys to get information, innocent people were occasionally sacrificed for the greater good, and weak operatives were "cancelled" (i.e., killed) or put in "abeyance" (i.e., sent on suicide missions).  Nikita wanted to keep her humanity, but Section One took its toll on her.

(In case it isn't already obvious, the people behind the original "La Femme Nikita" TV series were the same ones who created "24" -- and those two series shared many of the same actors.)

The CW "Nikita" is definitely not a copy or continuation.  Here, Maggie Q's Nikita has escaped Division (not Section One) and is now intent on destroying it.  Most of the same characters are in place, at least under the same name -- Nikita's trainer and romantic interest, Michael; tech nerd Birkoff -- but they too have been changed in personality.  Birkoff is smarmier and has a nasty streak; Michael is even more amoral and decidedly less competent; and so on.  There's a new Division recruit named Alex (female) who serves the purpose that Nikita did in the original series, as the entryway into the world of Division.

All this is to say that the new version is quite different from the old version.  But is it good?

Well, it's still on my TiVo list, but it's definitely lacking something.  In the USA Network version, Section One posed an interesting question that's since been given more prominence by "24": should mega-terrorism be stopped by any means necessary?  The leaders of Section One ordered the operatives to do horrible things, but it was never out of a sense of personal corruption.  In the CW version, however, Division does not seem to serve any benevolent purpose.  That makes it easier to root wholeheartedly for Nikita to succeed without stopping to ask whether the world would be better off with Division.  I like my TV shows to have murky ambiguity, not to resolve into clearly good or bad sides.

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on October 01, 2010 (boomark / email).