A film professor in Austin told me remakes are never as good, then I watched the 1982 version of The Thing
My film professor said this to our class in 2015 and I nodded along for almost a decade, since I had only ever seen the remakes of classics like Psycho and The Fog and they were all pretty bad. Then my roommate sat me down and made me watch John Carpenter's The Thing, which is technically a remake of a 1951 movie, and I realized it is genuinely better than the original and one of my favorite films now. So how do you all decide when a remake is actually worth defending, or does it just come down to whether the new one has its own vision?
Your professor probably just watched the Psycho remake and swore off all of them forever. The Thing works because Carpenter didn't just copy the 1951 flick, he went back to the short story and made the alien a shape-shifting nightmare instead of a guy in a rubber suit. The 2011 prequel is the funny part, it tried so hard to be Carpenter's movie that it forgot to be its own thing.