Ideally, remaking a film is an opportunity to 1) improve upon imperfect material, 2) recontextualize the source through a new perspective or 3) trap new audiences into falling for the same trick twice. This absolutely indefensible new take on Adrian Lyne’s 1990 film Jacob’s Ladder fails on all accounts, doing so in such an extravagant way as to imply an elaborate prank by someone in development. It is the single worst movie of 2019 thus far, and the idea that a worse film could be looming somewhere on the horizon should be cause to shut down every movie theater and bar the doors from the inside.
To keep it simple, the original Jacob’s Ladder was a unique psychological thriller that used PTSD and the Vietnam war as useful pretense to explore screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin’s narrative preoccupations with the nature of life and death, something he would later encapsulate in far friendlier fashion with the film Ghost. But between Rubin’s brilliant prose and Lyne’s clever staging, the story of Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) was a harrowing and effective one. The audience’s mind and heart are wrenched back and forth as this veteran experiences confusing flashbacks to combat, disturbing visions of monsters and inconsistencies in daily life that call him to question his own reality. Its conclusion works so well because until it comes, the film can be easily read as a metaphysical genre piece as it can as a docudrama about the lasting effects of trauma.
This new film purports to be less of a remake as much as it is a reimagining, which by now anyone can translate as Hollywood speak for “the same thing, but shittier.” Vietnam is swapped for Iraq, Robbins for dreamy-eyed Michael Ealy, and the complexity of the original’s film’s haunting dream logic for the blunt force style of video game cut scenes telegraphing at every turn that Something Isn’t Right. The original film was hugely influential on the “Silent Hill” games and other horror projects, but it wasn’t outright horror itself. It was more concerned with discomfiting and probing its audience than slapping its audience in the face with awkward jump scares.
It also had the benefit of looking and feeling real from the outset. Lyne spent plenty of time with Jacob in his everyday life as normal, vibrant and full of believable interactions, so that when the intrusions came in it would be as unsettling for the viewer as it was for Jacob. But director David M. Rosenthal and the three credited writers it took to replicate Rubin’s text detach the narrative from Jacob’s POV immediately, instead choosing to present it as a procedural about soldiers going missing. This means we’re treated to a highly stylized and overwrought tone that resembles a Fox pilot or a music video from the early ‘00s, where Jacob is solving a missing case about his dead brother (Jessie Williams).
Now, outside of casting Ealy and Williams as brothers (they look more related than any other two unrelated men in the industry), there is not a single diverging creative choice made here that makes for a stronger or appreciably more interesting film than its source. None of the characters are ever given room to be real people, so when they become erratic or see things that aren’t there or argue about what they know to be true, the audience isn’t tethered to their perspective enough to believe them or care if they’re wrong. It just presents a bunch of randomized spectacle, with heavy and ugly special effects that heavily suggest we’re watching a spin-off of The CW’s “Supernatural.”
By the time the third act mercifully arrives, the obvious twist unfolds so insultingly that the prospect of 20 more screen minutes feels like pouring salt in an open wound. The explanations for the “horrors” we’ve been subjected to would be disappointing at the end of a SyFy original movie, much less the remake of one of the most enduring and impressive films of the ‘90s. The approach to the intersection between war and science fiction has more in common with Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate than anything in Jacob’s Ladder, but lacks the depth and insight of even that experimental entry in the Hollywood IP Remix Canon.
The new Jacob’s Ladder is offensive garbage and wastes the talents of a handful of skilled actors who honestly might have arrived at a better film merely by free associating in front of a camcorder for two uncut hours. It’s truly a waste of money, time, resources and our attention.
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