download torrent the manchurian candidate

The wonderful trigger line: 'Why don't you pass the time by playing a nice game of solitare?' has been replaced with a banal 'Sergeant Shaw. The wonderfully symbolic playing cards/Queen of Diamonds theme has been replaced by the old microchips-planted-in-my-brain canard (we saw just last month in 'The Stepford Wives.') There is no longer a visual linkage between the Queen of Diamonds and Raymond's mother. The simply magnificent 'garden party' dream sequences of the original have been removed and replaced with generic herky-jerky mind-bend sequences (we saw just last week in 'The Bourne Supremacy.') The new Marco and Raymond prove, near the end, essentially interchangeable. The contrast of tough Marco and sneering, weak Raymond, and their bonding as fellow brainwashees, was emotional and meaningful. Marco was tough his brainwashing didn't take. Marco sees the same 'houseboy,' recognizes him on sight, and launches his furious payback attack.

In the original, Raymond sees his 'houseboy,' and doesn't recognize him as the man who betrayed and tortured him. The karate fight is gone, which means the new film is action-free, but something else important is missing: His killing her is of little emotional pain. The Senator's daughter (who looks oddly like Marilyn Manson) barely cares about Raymond anymore. Raymond's killing of those two people was the turning point of the entire film and filmed by John Frankenheimer as a dazzling Wellesian cinema sequence with the symbolic wit of the film's dark comedy (the milquetoast liberal Senator dies shot through a carton of milk, his bleeding heart bleeding the milk of human kindness.)Īll gone now in the remake's bizarre attempt to merge the murder scene with Raymond's great 'jump in the lake' scene from the original. In the original, when Raymond killed the Senator and his daughter, the daughter was Raymond's new wife, the woman he deeply loved, the only person in the world who might possibly save Raymond from the pre-programmed horror of his life. The biggest shock is how the emotion has been sucked out of the story, entirely. From the start, the new movie has no emotional resonance at all. It's 2004, kids, enough of that quiet emotional crap.įrom the start, the original had emotional resonance via its music and credit portraits of the pensive lead players alone. So instead of beginning (after a brief prologue) with a brilliant credit-sequence and David Amram's deeply sad and aching score, the new one begins with a herky-jerky burst of loud rock music and a helter-skelter barrage of images of war. We're way in the future now, and the quiet, rather straightforward simplicity of the original could not be put on the screen today (Van Sant tried it with his shot-by-shot 'Psycho' and it didn't work.) Part of the problem, indeed, is that we can't make a 1962 movie today. Good cast, stylish direction by Jonathan Demme (though now in his trademark style: huge close-ups of people looking right at the camera), some nice suspense.īut everything and I mean everything that made the original 'Manchurian Candidate' an unforgettable classic has been forcibly removed or revamped into dumbed-down mediocrity for our sped-up, sound-bite-ridden, politicized times. This was not a bad movie on its own terms. (SPOILERS for both the original and the remake)

Reviewed by ecarle 2 /10 A Mediocre Remake for Our Mediocre Political Times (SPOILERS)

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