Okay, listen: There are three markets, one market who would sit through Battle Royale (Japanese version), a market who would only sit through the new English version, and don't have any interest in seeing the Japanese version, and then there is the middle section think of it as two circles overlapping, that part in the middle represents the people who saw the original and want to see how well the remake follows the original.
I'll ask you how in the world a remake can ruin an original movie, and whom is it ruining it for?
...The people who would never watch the Japanese version & whom will just be getting a re-contextualized version of a different script? The people who won't bother watching it because they saw the original and have no interest in the remake...? The people who are curious about the remake?
All of these posts make it seem as if a little part of Japan is dying when someone makes a remake of a Japanese movie, it screams zealotry in the worst way.
And do you know what? It happens everywhere. Battle Royalle 1 was
only an original concept because it concerned children killing children, oh well, lets at least say adolescents, but the opening montage very much more so focuses on the shock value of a little girl, though none of the rest of the cast are that young. It's a very typical, (and you have to be very very creative to be non-typical in writing literature OR film....), last-man-standing affair, very much the likes of oh say "The Running Man", a film that was loosely adapted from the novel by Steven King.
Even Battle Royale II, directed by the original director's son, was a sloppy, derivative movie that stole heavily (both in camera style and actual scene-for-scene copying) from Saving Private Ryan.... further, including the tacked on "maybe the terrorists aren't the enemy" offensive what the heck are you talking about point of view.
Japan even has a rampant problem of people stealing ideas from each other in their own country, it's a term called
pakkuri, or use of content without crediting the original work... This happens so much in the music business it's ludicrous, and of course some of the content stolen is from that of American and other non-Japanese artists--- sometimes I thought, that it was done out of laziness, and because perhaps the people buying the music wouldn't know any better, but when your band is named "Rude Brains", and there is an American hardcore band named "Bad Brains"... maybe you should have taken a few more minutes to choose your band name.
Personally I find it interesting how these movies are made, the plots are interesting, if you have some sort of interest in the nature of plots, I would suggest you read Margaret Atwood's
Happy Endings, as well, her book, Negotiating with the Dead elucidates that there are a number of very particular very common themes to literature which are often difficult to avoid...
Those of you who say oh say, Fight Club, should recognize that it's a simple remaking of a Jeckyl & Hyde theme.
But these original movies are made and contextualized for a Japanese audience, the language and actions of the characters are specifically written for a Japanese audience. I'm always curious to see how the bare elements of the plot are stripped out... There is absolutely no way to remake the movie in Engish and have the same overtones as the original, but it could very well be a good movie, though given it's director, I'm not sure of that.
There are a good portion of movies that are made from novels, and oddly noone decries, OMG! They are liek ruining Traum Novel!... It's just when we feel something we thought was ours is taken from us, and given to the public in perhaps a bastardized way, we feel we're losing a little bit of our own originality... You'll grow out of it, and when the movie comes out, have a few friends over, pop some popcorn, and and put in BRI... You may find people aren't as keen as you on Japanese film... but at least you can show them the original.
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