So Deadline reported last week that Warner Bros. is moving forward with a sequel to the latest film adaptation of I Am Legend from a few years back.

I saw it the first weekend it was in theaters (it was my birthday) and never again. I’ve seen The Last Man On Earth with Vincent Price, which was okay. I have not seen The Omega Man.

But I Am Legend was awful – not necessarily as a story or film on its own, but definitely when you consider its source material. It’s one of the most influential and powerful vampire stories that’s ever been written, but you wouldn’t know that if you’ve never read the book. Because somebody thought having vague sort-of-zombie-vampire-creatures was a better idea.

It took all the humanism out of the “others” in the story, and that is what makes them so horrifying. Yes, they are now vampires, yes they want to kill him – but they are also living, breathing creatures. They think, and speak, and rationalize.

That approach really turned me off from the film more than anything. I can understand the thinking behind the decision, but man, how rich the story could have been. And if you change a fundamental aspect of the story so much that it alters the entire thematic atmosphere, especially of the ending, please – please change the title.

In the book the title is more of a revelation than anything, a sick and ironic ending to his life and years of loneliness. He realizes just before he dies that the world has changed, it’s inverted – vampires are no longer legend, they are fact. Humans are no longer fact. Humans are now the ones that come in the night (daytime for the vamps) and destroy you and your loved ones. Humans are now the ones the vampires tell stories about. Robert Neville is immortal in the folklore of the new vampire society because of how he has hunted them for years. Neville is legend. It’s so powerful and thought-provoking, especially in the way it makes you consider how you relate to the world around you, a world that is ever changing.

In the movie, he hates the monsters, wants to cure them, captures them to run tests, then they come after him when they find out where he lives. They get in. Two random people he’s come across are able to escape when he blows his lab up with himself and many creatures in it to give them time. Then…he is legend?

So no, I don’t want a sequel to that. Or a prequel. I want a redo.

I (among many others, I’m sure) would love to tackle another film adaptation of this story, but based on the financial success of this latest one, I doubt that will happen for a long time. Then again, the Hulk, Spiderman, reboots can be right away – so what if we did another I Am Legend remake within five or six years of this last one that’s more true to the source material and we keep Will Smith in the lead role? That could be crazy/awesome/crazy-awesome.

A while back I scribbled down an opening sequence for another take on it – I’ve done some tinkering but here it is, a humble attempt at an opening. Let me know what you think!

The first glimpse of the next chapter in the Bourne series is here, and it does its job well. It’s vague but titillating, picking up with pieces of where we left off and then making the leap to this continuation by letting us know that there was never just one Bourne.

I was skeptical at the first news of this fourth movie, because as I’ve said before, fourth entries usually suck, and it didn’t seem necessary. The third one really wasn’t necessary, but we showed up at the theater anyway to see what they came up with – and it was satisfying.

Now we have no Matt Damon, but the rest of the cast is there plus the new leading man in Jeremy Renner. The look, feel, the tone – I think everything about this teaser is promising. It’s a continuation of the series but a new direction in the story and based on the fleeting images we’re given, there is plenty more territory to explore than we (I) may have imagined previously.

Kudos to Universal for betting on Renner and another quality entry in the series. It’s too early to tell if it’s a bet that will pay off, but when the marketing starts from the very beginning on the right foot it’s definitely a positive sign.

Word on the street is that The Expendables 2 will carry a PG-13 rating when it comes to theaters. If you are thinking it’s an odd move to take an R rated movie’s sequel and water down the language (or excessive violence) to a PG-13, it’s really not that strange. (Remember Die Hard 4? Yeah, I tried to forget it too as soon as it was over. And every day ever since…) The issue here is the reasoning. Because it’s stupid.

But first, let’s remember that typically the reason to downgrade is something like “hey if we make this PG-13 it means more people can see it and that means more money!” Which is the same logic behind the latest 3D surge. It’s not very sound, not very artistic, but at least it’s not totally stupid. I’m sure there are instances too where the story just isn’t as brutal/sexy/whatever in tone as the first, so there really is no legitimate reason to throw in some extra dialogue in order to receive an R rating. (The exception to this rule is Snakes on a Plane. That movie, without Samuel L. Jackson’s signature line, would have been loathed upon release. Granted, it wasn’t a blockbuster, but without that line the entire audience that did go see it would have left the theater in a really bad mood).

But what’s behind the rating change for The Expendables 2? Chuck Norris. He agreed to be in the movie if they would take out the foul language. So they did. Cool. Why did he want it to be toned down in the words department? Because that way more kids can see it. For real.

“In Expendables 2, there was a lot of vulgar dialogue in the screenplay. For this reason, many young people wouldn’t be able to watch this. But I don’t play in movies like this. Due to that I said I won’t be a part of that if the hardcore language is not erased. Producers accepted my conditions and the movie will be classified in the category of PG-13.”

This is stupid because while Chuck Norris has a problem with kids hearing swearing, he apparently has no problem with them watching people violently beating other people to death.

I’m cool with the ratings downgrade if you want it to be less violent and have less foul language so more kids can see it and be inspired by an actual story or ideas or themes. But this is The Expendables, so there’s not a whole lot of substance going on. And no one should think a child hearing “shit” twenty times is worse than them seeing someone’s head get kicked so hard it splatters.

I wasn’t sure if I would even see the sequel, but with this news and Chuck Norris’s plans to turn the move into an extended episode of Walker Texas Ranger, you can definitely count me out.

If you’ve read about or seen The Dark Knight Rises trailer or prologue this past week, you’ve probably heard a lot of folks complaining about how impossible it is to hear/understand Bane. Now there are rumors running rampant online that WB execs are nervous and frantic to get Nolan to clear up the sound quality while he’s editing the movie, driven by fears that the audience will dwindle or disappear due to this single issue and the movie won’t perform well. This situation irks me, because it’s stupid.

First of all, I have seen the prologue but it was one of the short-lived bootlegs that made its way online. The mix was awful and muffled, the screen was dark (due to the camera being held so low and filming from the shadows), but man was I pumped after seeing it! I would head to the theater to get the full experience, but unfortunately there are no IMAX theaters projecting 70mm film prints in the entire states of Kansas and Missouri. So the bootleg was my only route until it’s officially released online or the full movie hits theaters next summer.

Even without the superior surround sound mix of an IMAX theater, I could make out at least 75% of what Bane was saying. He’s really not that hard to understand. You won’t pick up every single word, and there will definitely be lines that you miss, but the rest I inferred, and was then able to piece together with repeat views. And you know what? I loved that. I absolutely loved it.

Nolan’s been very vocal about the film he’s trying to make. It’s similar to what he did last time – he wants an event movie. A big, fun, engaging experience. The key word is experience – it’s not just a matter of you sitting in the theater seat, watching the screen and listening to big BOOMS around you for two hours. It’s something much, much more than that. A return to those mind-blowing trips to the theater, like your first time seeing a movie and being absolutely floored and at the same time utterly sucked in to the world before you. Those movies aren’t as common in these days when the scale has tipped again toward the commercial factor (don’t worry, the cycle will continue and the next content revolution is purely a matter of time).

A full blown movie-going experience isn’t just one that hypnotizes you (though those are nice sometimes), it’s one that engages you, that invites you to participate. I’s when you aren’t just listening, but actively listening, actively searching the frame and piecing the story together in your mind that you are participating in a movie-going experience that tops all others. You are looking at the film like you do your own life each day, you consider everything that’s happened up to the present moment, and then you try to predict the best move for moving forward. That’s often something you don’t see coming, some plot twist or kink that bewilders and thrills you, but that’s not really the point of participation. The point is that for all intents and purposes, in that moment you are experiencing the movie as if it’s real.

To be submerged in a film like that and to have that kind of rich, deep, connective experience is the highest achievement a movie can reach.

So yes. I want to hear most of what Bane says, but not all. I want to have to actively participate in The Dark Knight Rises. And I want to be able to go back later and put more pieces of the puzzle together to fill in the gaps.

I’m excited to see what’s in store for us as this story comes to a close next summer.

If you’ve got access to the channel, check out TCM on Friday nights this month – they’re having Hammer horror themed Friday nights the next few weeks!

Check out their October schedule here.

I tend to think Ridley Scott is awesome, and though this tidbit irritates me to no end, I still think he’s pretty awesome.

But he needs a talking to on this.

I have no problem with the tone he mentions, or the idea of “gods and engineers” – the idea of examining man’s arrogance and the resulting inevitable and deathly humbling is a very rich and complex theme that would do the film well, especially if it was done as a darker film closer in tone to his original Alien than the more recent sequels. Man tends to think he is capable of anything, and yet we have no ability to adequately imagine what is out there in space awaiting us. All the mysteries of life on Earth pale in comparison to how much they permeate the universe around us – an ever expanding cosm, like our recognition of it, filled mostly with empty space. An apt symbol for our knowledge of existence and exploration into space – the more we find out, the more the space is filled, but the further we go, the more that space grows. We think we will have all of the answers the further we travel, but what if there are forces out there more powerful than we can comprehend that will stall or end our exploration? How violently humbling would it be to come across such a thing or things? And how would that encounter affect our existence and what it means to be human thereafter?

That’s the movie he should make. It’s kind of the movie he made with the original Alien – maybe not as existential, but those ideas do run through it at some deep, “human experience” level.

So, how do you ruin that? Or perhaps more accurately, how do you prevent yourself from exploring those themes?

By giving an explanation to the aliens. And further, by making that explanation have something to do with humans. WTF? So your great idea to once again explore this concept is to explain it all away? And not only that, but to make it our own doing?

Prequel doesn’t mean explanation, dude, it just means it happens before the original. If you make it so that the entire alien series about coming up against this incomprehensible threat that never seems to go away is actually revealed to just be a big case of human error, where we created something and then covered it up so that others had to find out the hard way later on that it was something created by their predecessors, you’re doing a huge disservice to the story. Huge. Enormous. Crippling. Because you are stripping it of all the wonder and suspense that made it so captivating in the first place.

The further we go into space, the less we know and the less we are capable of doing. To explain it all away as human folly reduces the story to a limp earthly morality tale, the highest quality of which would still only be a cheap imitation of the ideas Mary Shelley explored so expertly all those years ago.

So, Sir Ridley, scrap that bull. No human origins for the aliens, and no explanations or origins for them at all. Make it a movie about space, about the wonder and awe that lies there waiting for us, and make it about how terrifying and existence-altering it would be to come across a force unlike anything we could ever imagine.