With remakes of movies such as Footloose and The Lion King in 3D coming to our cinemas, Hollywood isn’t currently screaming creativity or originality. But is this unoriginality anything new? With differing views on the matter, Claudia and Roisin seek to establish whether it is a matter of using (and re-using, again and again) clichés, or the more specific re-use of previous material.

CLAUDIA: Even if they’re not prequels, sequels or remakes, most movies are genre films that give us exactly what we expect from their genre. Or, directors might have such a distinctive style that their movies end up blurring into one another – see Quentin Tarantino or Woody Allen’s New York-based neurotic comedies.
Hollywood is synonymous with show business – ‘business’ being the key word. It is oriented toward profit rather than toward artistic expression. It seems there are some safe buttons to push to create a moving, funny, scary or tense story that is highly likely - if not highly sure - to do well at the box office. As Sam sings in Casablanca, “it’s still the same old story: a fight for love and glory,” which is pretty much what 90 per cent of plots revolve around.

Let’s take Casablanca itself as an example: what’s not clichéd and archetypical in that film? There’s a thwarted relationship, an impossible and unsatisfied romance, the war, a fight between goodies and baddies, a brooding, self-destructive male protagonist, a hero, and a languid, beautiful female lead. Umberto Eco said of Casablanca, which he considered a mediocre movie, “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us,” and Hollywood producers seem to know this rule only too well. Clichés are not necessarily bad, though: they are what we’re familiar with, what we look for in books and films.

So what’s happening in Hollywood now? Why does it seem that nothing novel is being released? The present lack of originality is nothing new: with every summer release critics rave about the scarce quality and variety of movies.

Hopefully it is only a matter of waiting for the new batch of ‘original’ movies to come out, still vaguely similar to something seen before but innovatively packaged, which will charm us and will restore our faith in the originality of Hollywood.

ROISIN: As our generation will know more than any other, we have just come to the end of one of the biggest movie franchises ever:  Harry Potter.  We are currently, and regrettably, still in the middle of the Twilight franchise, and The Hobbit, a prequel to The Lord of The Rings, is under production at the moment. All of these, however, are based on novels, and are thus not ‘original’.

Different forms of story telling provide a way in for some films, as shown by the recent surge of comic book heroes in film. Others rely on more obscure sources; Pirates of the Caribbean is inspired by a rollercoaster, Transformers by toys. 

Films thus do not just use generic clichés that span across all forms, as Claudia argues, but also rely on existing material from other forms.  This is often just a ruse to exploit a fad or ready-made obsession in the market.

Yet there are always brilliant adaptations. The Lord of The Rings was likewise a "ready made obsession", and could easily have fallen victim to disappointed expectations – so why didn’t it?

The Lord of The Rings is one of the few films in Hollywood to pursue sincerity. These films aim to manipulate their new form towards meaning, rather than merely exploiting something loved by putting it into film. And so, while not original in message or story, a different and sincere point of view gave us one of the most treasured trilogies of the decade.

Whether it is by recycling old clichés, or re-using the same materials, what seems to make a good film is its ability to view things differently; to bring to light different perspectives and meaning.  It is arguable that lower budget films, because they are not as obsessed by profit, can often make better films in this respect.   

But, as long as for every No Strings Attached there is a 500 Days of Summer, we will continue to look forward to new releases,whether they are ‘original’ or not.