John Carpenter was one of the most famous director in the 80s, after creating cult classics like Halloween (1978), The Thing (1982), Escape from New York (1981), The Mist (1980), Prince of Darkness (1987) and so on. In recent years, we saw that the remake wave of Hollywood reached most of Mr. Carpenter's movies, but none of those had the same success as the original ones.
Now Big Trouble in Little China, Carpenter's mystical action movie, gets its own remake with Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson playing the main lead, the iconic figure of Jack Burton.
Whether 'The Rock' could save this latest remake, is a big question.
Most of the remakes failed because they could not capture the essence that ruled the movies of the 80s. Big Trouble in Little China (1986) still has a special kind of retro feeling, and of course the mystery of Chinese mythology, that has since lost its magic in the movie industry. The remake not only has to pay tribute to the original movie, but it also has to recreate the same atmosphere, or at least create something similar to it. That's quite a big challenge.
The other one is 'The Rock' himself. He made his name through the wrestling TV show, WWE, where he still returns sometimes as the fan favourite Rock. Besides his wrestling career, he has starred in the Fast & Furious franchise, Hercules and Pain & Gain, to name a few.
He will also join the DC Cinematic universe as Shazam, the kid, who can morph into a mighty superhero after saying 'Shazam'. Mr. Johnson has recently been cast as the main lead of different movies, but Big Trouble in Little China's biggest charm is that 'Jack Burton' doesn't realize throughout the movie, that he is not the hero of the story.
Could The Rock's Burton repeat this feat?
Still, as we saw in the 2010 movie, The Other Guys, 'The Rock' doesn't shy away from secondary roles either, so there's definitely hope that he is able to successfully reimagine the character of Jack Burton in his own way.
The original Big Trouble in Little China also featured crazy martial arts fighting scenes, Chinese magic and awesome one-liners, all this without the help of CGI.
As the latest Mad Max movie showed, it is not necessary to make a successful remake/reboot fully dependant on computer images, only because it's the 21st century, and hopefully Carpenter's remake will follow the lead. A creative remake of Big Trouble in Little China could very well deliver big time among the fans of the movies of the 80s and casual movie viewers.
