New Birds film may be better than Hitchcock’s!

Updated on October 19, 2007 By Ken Begg 27 Comments

Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) is in talks to direct a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  One problem about the old film is that you didn’t know why the birds were attacking.  What’s up with that?  Films should always spell out everything, right?  We don’t pay good money to watch a movie and then have to think about stuff.

Luckily, according to one description, this may be corrected in the new version:  “A few months back, it was reported that the early script draft, created by Stiles White and Juliet Snowden, delved into the world of a environment revenge story with the birds attacking as revenge for Global Warming related events.”

Although that script concept isn’t locked in yet, I hope they do that, because then we wouldn’t be left with an annoying mystery about why the birds were killing people, and also, because then the film would be educating us all on the dangers of Global Warming.  Yay, Hollywood! 

P.S. If you could put something about how bad the Iraq War is in there too, it would be even more awesome!

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  • Hasimir Fenring

    delved into the world of a environment revenge story

    Well hey, at least it’s original.

  • Ryan

    Just a heads up, even us card-carrying dyed-in-the-wool eco-hippy liberals think this is a terrible, grotesquely stupid idea. Solidarity, my brother!

  • Rob Uthe

    What would make it even more original would be if a) the birds were created by the millitary as a secret weapon b) a hot, single mom ornithologist butts heads with stupid male authority figures while trying to convince them of the ‘real danger’.

  • Ryan — Do not question Hollywood!

    Rob — Could we work in an estranged husband somewhere (maybe he’s a conflicted scientist working for the eeeevil capitalist who built the secret weapon for the military–hey, maybe the birds themselves would be the weapon, bred and trained to kill terrorists!), and then he and the single mom would get back together as they both come to realize what is really important?

  • rizzo

    Well, maybe they’ll finally do something reasonable with that stupid scene where she walks into the room full of birds and suddenly can’t remember how to work a doorknob when they attack her.

    Otherwise, what a horrible idea…

  • Well, at the risk of losing some of my geek cred, I have that if you’re going to remake a Hitchcock film, this is one of the better one. I don’t think the first one was terrifically well done, and certainly it makes more sense than trying to redo Psycho or Vertigo or Shadow of a Doubt. I think it’s actually possible to make a better version of this film. Naomi Watts, for example, is up to play the lead, and she’s a better actress than Tippi Hendren.

    Of course, ‘can’ do better is far, far different from ‘will’ do better. Possible pitfalls: 1) Stupid messagizing, as indicated here. 2) Bad, Michael Bay-esque direction (Campbell is a reassuring choice in this regard). 3) Overreliance on CGI effects.

    I know a lot of people have a problem with the room with the birds scene, but I don’t know, I think it’s possible to panic when you have zillions of murderous birds pecking at your head. It could be the scene just wasn’t shot as well as it could have been.

  • sardu

    Heck yeah! I hope those birds kill *all* the pesky humans and return to a world of peace and harmony for all avian kind. This will be a film we can all learn from. Power to the Pelicans!!

  • Rob Uthe

    I wonder if Naomi Watts would be willing to have birds attached by strings to her for a week while filming the “badly done room scene”…or maybe they will make the scene better by turning them into super-scary CGI birds.

  • Ericb

    Maybe this can all be the result of an eeeeevil militariguvmint plan to create super weapon against the Taliban by devolving birds back into veliciraptors but then one escapes and mates with regular birds creating a swarm of angry mesozoized birds bend on revenge against mammal-kind for taking over the planet after the Dinosaurs died out … or something like that.

  • roger h

    wow, I was going to write something equally sarcastic as everyone else but, you clever readers beat me to it.

    I’ll go in a slightly different direction. How about a re-make of “North By Northwest.” The UN official could be all set to give an important speech on global warming when he when he is murdered by deniers. . .oh, forget it, it annoys me just thinking about Hollywood preaching.

    Thanks a bunch Ken for giving my a sour taste in my mouth for the weekend

  • monoceros4

    What’s the source for the “environmental revenge” angle? Reuters doesn’t mention it:

    http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSN1940502420071019

    Nor does Variety:

    http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117974282.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

  • Rob Uthe

    OR…”Rear Window” remade by the Wayans Brothers, where uptight whitey L B Jefferies is trapped in his apartment in an all-black, jive-talkin’ apartment block. Naturally, while spying on his neighbors, he mistakenly believes that murders are happening all around him. Many quirky characters will intrude on his life, each representing and outlandish stereotype. Over the course of the movie, through a series of embarrasing comic set-ups, whitey will realize how stupid he has been and become more accepting. Comedy Ahoy!

  • JoshG

    How about having the leading lady’s estranged father be the one who was working for the evil big corporation, but he threatened to expose them so they had to off him. Now our star must fight off the evil mutant zombie birds(who thrive on the excess heat provided by global warming). At the same time she must piece together the clues left by her father on how to defeat them. But not to worry, she is assisted by a handsome former marine who has become disillusioned are his platoon was ordered to slaughter innocent Iraqi villagers.(We must remember that the heroine is perfectly capable of taking car of her self, a fact that she reminds of several times in the movie.)

  • Mania.com (formerly Cinescape): “A few months back, it was reported that the early script draft, created by Stiles White and Juliet Snowden, delved into the world of a environment revenge story with the birds attacking as revenge for Global Warming related events.”

    I will say that it’s not hard to believe they should take such a tact.

  • Ericb

    It sounds like when they remade The Blob and made the blob the result of some evil guvmintary bioweapons program. You know, when I go into a horror/monster movie I want to be frightened by a mysterious entity not be lectured on and/or annoyed by human stupidity.

  • hk6909

    All I got to say is whudduhfuxup with all these remakes? Is Hollywood about to give up?

  • To join in the fun…. we also need one scene that blatantly rips off a scene in Jurassic Park. Either the one where a cup of coffee is rippling because the downdraft of the birds is so intense it’s causing ripples in the air currents. Or someone opens a window, and there’s bird RIGHT THERE with its pupil dilating.

  • Eric — I hear you! I remember seeing The Blob in the theater, and thinking, “Wow, a bioweapon gone wrong? What a cliche!” I mean, really, how was that better than something from outer space? And seriously, what’s up with every monster movie now needing a human villain (pretty much always a military or business person)? This kind of script lard, adding an additional and highly unrequired 20 or 30 minutes, is exactly what kills genre movies today. Please, stick to the story and make ’em 70 minutes long like they used to!

    Back to The Blob remake, that is now 19 years and about 10,000 movies ago. So you can imagine how pleased I am when I still see the bioweapon bit rolled out today.

  • Sandy Petersen

    you’re a bitter, bitter man, ken.

  • It’s my cross. If those damn smoochers would stay out of my watermelon patch, I might be more even keeled.

  • someguy

    What if the bird DNA is altered by a genetically engineered virus and the stupid military scientists think that they’ve created an adequate failsafe because the virus can’t reproduce, but they don’t remember their Chaos Theory, and nature “finds a way”, only now the virus not only can reproduce, but is rapidly mutating and oh yeah the original virus was BIRD FLU and now they have to fight not only the bioweapon birds but race against time to stop the virus before it crosses the species barrier and the only way to create the cure is from the blood of the scientist’s daughter’s special pet bird who is super loveable (both, I mean) because it has a peculiar immunity/gene/protein sequence setting up tension and ultimate family reconciliation but this requires the bird die in the process only nobody realizes that the bird was PREGNANT and the daughter took its eggs and put them into the nest of another bird to preserve something of her pet and now the protein sequence or whatever that they hubristically thought was the cure has become the next source of all humanity’s destruction and oh God I smell sequel!!!

    I want 2% off the top and a share of the back-end and all licensing deals.

  • Maybe a bunch of cats will jump out and kill all the birds, filling your lawn with feathers and your doorstep with carcasses.

  • Matthew Fudge

    Can I just go on record as requesting that this gets dumped direct to the Sci-Fi Channel, with Shannon Doherty as a kind of ‘extreme’ bird watcher who tries to get them to close the beach, uh, playground but everyone ignores her? That would be awesome.

  • Dan Coyle

    One thing I didn’t get about the Blob remake: if the mysterious government scientists created it, why didn’t they know freezing would work on it?

  • I think the idea was the they didn’t know what the result would be.

  • Dan Coyle

    I suppose, but then you have to swallow that none of those geniuses thought, “hey, maybe we should freese it.”

  • The Rev. D.D.

    Ye gods, another remake…ugh. STOP IT HOLLYWOOD!!

    Frankly, this movie would be a lot more fun if they took all you guys’ ideas. More Jabootuesque.