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The term “remake” has never been the most glamorous in the cinematic lexicon, but it hasn’t always been as dirty a word as it’s often treated now. A certain studio’s mania for recycling their most beloved titles and the rest of Hollywood’s overreliance on existing titles in recent years have soured the name. It’s easy for even the most well-versed of cinephiles to forget the circumstances under which capable filmmakers have produced remakes that were more than a supposedly safe bet. There are the many silent films retold gloriously with sound and (sometimes) color; there are the likes of A Fistful of Dollars and Throne of Blood, where famous tales are quite literally remade for another time and place; and then there are talented directors who love a certain movie so much, they just have to do their own take on it. Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong is among the most well-received of this latter type, the original Kong being his favorite film.

What Is a Tribute Remake?

And yet the prospect of what we might call a tribute remake seems a dubious one. The impulse is understandable – what kid doesn’t enjoy acting out scenes from their favorite movie? Jackson himself so indulged as a youngster. But those kids who have the chance to be professional filmmakers in adult life also have the chance to translate their love of certain films into projects of their own generation or acquisition. This has always seemed a more creative and satisfying way to pay tribute than direct imitation, and often yields more worthwhile work; the original Animaniacs is still better than any attempt to reboot the Looney Tunes. A straightforward remake can come to little more than an imitation, however slickly made, and that seems a disappointing way to acknowledge the spark of creativity the original inspired.

On the other hand, surely part of the appeal of a favorite movie is that it is just the way it is. A remake that is, in many key respects, radically divergent from the original – as Jackson’s Kong is – can be so different that any sense of tribute to the original’s merits is hard to detect. Yet, Jackson is not alone among noteworthy directors in creating a tribute remake that strays far from the source. There is also Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre). That film, and its filmmaker, are in many ways very different from Jackson and his Kong. Yet, they are connected by a core motive, and together they can illustrate the opportunities and dangers of the tribute remake.

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A Way to Honor the Movies That Made Them

Among famous directors, Peter Jackson and Werner Herzog seem a mismatched pair when put together. While Jackson has not operated in the mainstream his entire career, he has often gravitated toward popular genres and subjects, especially since The Lord of the Rings has held a strong position in relation to major studios. Herzog has been internationally acclaimed but rarely a great commercial success in his eclectic range of subjects. Jackson grew up making home movies with the support of his parents, while Herzog grew up in the shadow of World War II, not seeing a movie until well into his childhood, and stole a camera for his first professional film. Jackson is famous for the family atmosphere he fosters on his sets and maintains a friendly, cuddly public persona; Herzog has infamously clashed with some of his collaborators and presents a weighty image that sometimes crosses into the land of the pretentious.

Yet Herzog, like Jackson, had a film he treasured and ultimately chose to honor through his own work. He has proclaimed 1922’s Nosferatu the greatest work of German cinema. The attraction wasn’t quite of the same nature as Jackson’s to Kong. In that case, the sweep and adventure made Jackson want to be a filmmaker. Herzog saw Nosferatu as a prophetic look into the coming evil in German society. And in Herzog’s estimation, his generation had no artistic fathers thanks to the war; the best directors of the previous age were collaborators, victims, or refugees from Nazism. That left the “grandfathers,” the silent generation, exemplified for Herzog by Nosferatu director F. W. Murnau. Herzog’s way of building a connection with that generation was by remaking Nosferatu.

Jackson and Herzog Had Similar Instincts

Jackson’s Kong and Herzog’s Nosferatu were both passion projects made in cooperation with major Hollywood studios, Universal for Kong and Fox for Nosferatu. The filmmakers, while coming from different backgrounds and motives, shared key instincts in their approach to their tribute remakes. Both, for instance, kept to their respective source material in key ways, not least of them being time and place. Jackson in particular could have easily decided to leave 1933 behind and make his Kong a contemporary film. The original was contemporary, and later uses of the character opted to take place in whatever year their films were made, or in an undefined fantasyland. But Jackson’s Kong begins and ends, as the first did, in Depression-era New York City. Herzog, being the first man to remake Nosferatu, could have brought the story back to Dracula’s original late Victorian London, or restaged it in Murnau’s time, or done any number of things. But he retained the early 19th century time and the German locale, changing only the hometown of the main characters (Wismar rather than the fictional Wisborg).

The two directors were also inclined to honor the aesthetics of the original films. Neither went so far as shooting in black-and-white, but they did offer visual tribute. In select scenes, Herzog recreated shots from the original Nosferatu almost exactly, with the benefit of film stocks more capable of shooting in low light, and echoed the original in costume and set choices. Jackson used elements of the original Kong’s music and choreography in a new context for his film, threw in a sly reference to Fay Wray, and heeded the original in small details like the number of fingers on the “V. Rex” dinosaur.

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Jackson and Herzog Both Comment on the Original Sources

Jackson and Herzog were also of the same mind, broadly speaking, in how to approach the stories of their tribute remakes. Each kept the basic skeleton of their favorite while putting on new meat and flesh and injecting a different soul. 1933 and 2005 both saw a small ship carrying a film crew land on an island and come back with a giant gorilla who got loose to terrorize New York, and 1922 and 1979 both saw an abridged and Germanic take on Dracula that repositioned the heroine as a pivotal sacrifice. But the story is where Jackson and Herzog left their own stamp on the material. It’s where the idea of these remakes constituting a tribute or honor becomes iffy. And it’s where the perils and possibilities of reinterpreting such beloved classic material are most apparent.

The remakes seem to want to complicate the material, to offer more thoughtful and nuanced fare for audiences, while keeping to the framework of movies that were, by design, more straightforward. Kong in particular is an unapologetic old-fashioned adventure, a tale of brave men and beautiful women stumbling into a lost world, facing the dangers and the wonders therein, and emerging from it all with a little romance. Nosferatu, for all it represented to Herzog and all the aspirations of its producer, can be taken as a Gothic fairy tale, poetic and stylish but a much simpler narrative than Bram Stoker originally wrote in Dracula.

There are two dangers in injecting a measure of complexity into stories not originally designed for it: the result can become muddied or bloated, and the effort itself can appear a rebuke, however mild, of the material. It can’t be said that Kong and Nosferatu are above reproach but Jackson’s reuse of racially insensitive material from the original film as a source of scorn in the third act seems a valid critique, as does Herzog’s decision to cast better actors in the romantic parts of his Nosferatu and give them something to do besides mug and swoon.

The 2005 Kong’s reworking of Carl Denham (Jack Black) as a con artist who spoils all his passions with greed and self-deception sits less easy. The original Denham had no such traits, had sympathy for Kong and loyalty to his crew and his public, and was based on producer-creator Merian C. Cooper besides. Turning him cad if not villain offers no obvious comment or challenge to the original film and confuses the remake’s relationship with it. There’s no equivalent change in Herzog’s Nosferatu; he altered the fate of his Jonathan Harker (Hutter in the original), but that seems an expression of a core idea of his film – more on that later. But Jackson’s enthusiasm for Kong comes through even with his reworked Denham, and Herzog treats his material so seriously it borders on reverence. They both avoided the second danger.

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Stretching The Plot

As for the first – that changes would lead to confusion and engorgement – Jackson is unfortunately very guilty, and ultimately brings down his Kong despite the love and care put into it. The original Kong is just over an hour and a half long and was a story created for the screen to run at that length. It’s difficult to imagine it stretching comfortably to over three hours under any circumstances. I’ve no objection to lengthy pictures, but the stories have to be built for the length. The Lord of the Rings is; King Kong isn’t. And what Jackson and his writers filled the extra space with makes for a tonally and thematically awkward experience.

Adventure, romance, and a can-do attitude; these are the things that fuel the original Kong. It may be set during the Great Depression, but its plucky cast isn’t about to be put down by financial crises or dinosaurs. The cast of Jackson’s Kong, particularly Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) have all been badly damaged by life and the Depression and move forward with trepidation. The voyage marks a turning point in their lives, but if it's for better or worse is never clear. Meanwhile, the film goes through long stretches locked into intense brooding and uncertainty by all involved.

And when I say all involved, I mean all involved – the most minor of characters are given some moment to be overwrought in doubt, fear, or grief. The whole cast is marked by what I call superficial sympathy. They’re given just enough pathos on paper to seem compelling, but not much personality to go with it, and the cumulative effect of so much melodrama is to cancel itself out and leave a viewer exhausted and impatient. But this all goes on in the same film that tries to replicate the sense of adventure of the original film. That fun and Jackson’s new soap opera additions just aren’t compatible. And the action in 2005 suffers compared to 1933 for going on just too damn long.

Herzog’s Nosferatu doesn't overextend its plot. At 107 minutes, it’s not much longer than Murnau’s. He made an equally profound shift in tone, presenting vampirism as an ambiguous agent for change visited upon a society trapped in ennui, with Dracula himself suffering the same affliction. Everything, from Harker’s motives and fate to the characterization of Dr. Van Helsing, was reworked in support of that perspective. This led the remake astray from the original’s more hopeful ending, but there’s a tonal unity to it as it meditates carefully on its themes. Its sympathy for the vampire may not be to my personal taste, but it’s a masterfully executed approach. And in its firm purpose and focus, it does seem a more even and worthy tribute to its inspiration.