We saw it tonight (with free tickets, otherwise, I would have rented it in the future).
There was a decent-size crowd, mostly teens.
Going in I wondered what the purpose of the remake was exactly. Who would want to see it? Anyone who has owned a VCR or DVD player would have seen NOES or any of its sequels, no matter what the age.
And NOES was made at a time when it's concept was rather novel. Now it's cliche. So making a remake is like making a cliche.
I did not go in expecting to see a film that would receive an Oscar nod. For me, this film was to be pure entertainment. Nothing really more than that.
I was entertained. Yes, the film was entertaining.
But it had lots of problems. (SPOILERS START HERE)
Jackie Earl Haley was not a good choice. I kept seeing Rorshach both in face and in voice. Haley is a short man. We want our horror villains to be tall and imposing. Haley was as short as any of the characters.
I kept seeing shadows of the original NOES, from what I could remember. Very similar scenes, very similar actions.
Wooden acting. The lead, Nancy, played by Rooney Mara, was too old for this role. When she was introduced, I thought she looked close to 30, yet she was soon revealed to be a high school (senior? junior?). She was so deadpan, so emotionless, so boring, I didn't want to see any more of her. But she survives until the end, so what do I know?
Freddy had a Reason this time (it escapes me what his crimes were in the past). This time, he worked at the grade school where the main characters had all attended as five year olds, but have all since forgotten about, who molested them (or something, the movie wasn't quite clear), and when their parents found out, they banded together, chased him to the steel mill, trapped him in a building, and burned it down with him inside. Since the children told their parents what happened, they were guilty and now as teenage adults, were being hunted and murdered in their dreams. Why Freddy waited this long and how he was able to actually do this was unexplained.
So that's the basic story. The kids are getting killed mysteriously one by one, until Nancy and other lead wooden robot Quentin figure things out, and Nancy must fall asleep, get hunted, then pull Freddy into their world so they can kill him at last. Does any of that sound familiar? It should. It's been done already, but much better.
Freddy isn't as much of a wise-ass as he is in the previous installments, plus the deaths aren't nearly as interesting or as many.
CGI-wise, the effects are better than the original, as you would expect.
If I had never seen any of the NOESes, nor had any clue of who Freddy was and had seen this movie, then I might have really enjoyed it. But then I would have wanted to see the original to find out what the fuss was all about. Then I would have been annoyed, and said, "God, the original was so much better. And it had Johnny Depp!"
