Checked out the newly released remake of the classic movie Jacob’s Ladder. The original flick starred Tim Robbins as a Vietnam vet who is loosing track of his mind, his sanity snapping back and forth between different realities. It’s a great suspenseful flick. So I was curious about this remake even if I didn’t have a lot of hope they’d nail it.
Jacob’s Ladder is about a military vet whose world is starting to unravel now that he’s back home in the states. He starts to have demonic visions and his reality keeps shifting around him. He has people who seem to be on his side and others who are not… and then there’s other vets who are suffering and sure there’s a grand conspiracy… something was done to them overseas….
So the new film stars Michael Ealy in the Tim Robbins role. He’s a vet of the war in Afghanistan and a doctor (the original character was a mail carrier). This change in job is due to the remake changing the focus of the story from the phantasmagoria that was the original film into something more focused on PTSD, lack of care from the veteran’s administration, and the overall conspiracy storyline. Instead of focusing on the horror, this film is more interested in being a conspiracy thriller (with disturbing imagery… though not at all on the horrific level of the original).
This means that this remake is probably doing the right thing. It follows some of the same themes but changes the focus. It’s updated the war to Afghanistan and modern worries over vet care. This is bad if you are a stickler for being slavish to the original but, then again, the original exists and is great. So changing the focus and remixing the story is a move in a potentially promising direction.
Unfortunately, while the first thirty minutes show promise, the rest of the movie is a slog. A confused and messy slog at that. Now, the story is always intended to be confusing and jarring but should make sense in the end. This movie… well… it’s ending really sucks. It betrays the essence of the original movie… which, ok fine, it has the right to do as a remake. But is sucks also because it makes very little of the nightmarish sequences throughout the movie make sense.
It’s clear the writers were borrowing too often from the original flick without any clear intention of honoring or even following its plot. Which, in this case, creates a mess of a movie since those various visual and storytelling references, divorced from the original plot, now no longer make any sense. And perhaps it would all make sense if I rewatched it but the movie just doesn’t earn that level of interest from me.
If this flick wasn’t called Jacob’s Ladder and hadn’t integrated the visual language of that movie, maybe it could have been better. If it was just its own story, maybe they could have dug themselves out from under both the devotion and disinterest in following the original. I’m not sure that would have saved it since the movie might still make little sense and had me not caring about the plight of the lead character still. Hard to say. We’ll never know.
Score: 62