Jessica Alba stars in The Eye, a remake of a Hong Kong horror film (Lionsgate)The Eye (opened on February 2 throughout San Diego) follows films such as The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water in turning to Asian horror film successes as inspiration for a Hollywood remake. But unlike those Japanese or J-horror inspired films, The Eye draws on a Hong Kong film directed by the Thai-born Pang Brothers as source material. The story works on a very simple premise: what if you received someone else’s eyes in a transplant operation and suddenly began seeing from the organ donor’s perspective. Jessica Alba plays a blind violinist who hopes that a cornea transplant will change her life. It does but not in the way she or anyone could have expected. In recent years, films such as The Ring and The Grudge (each spawning sequels in their native Japan) challenged the dominance of Hollywood fare in the global market. That’s when Roy Lee, a Washington, D.C. lawyer turned Hollywood player, had a bright idea — take the most popular of these Asian films and remake them in the United States. The first film to catch his eye was the atmospheric Japanese thriller The Ring. When Lee showed the film to Dreamworks, they immediately wanted to buy it. Lee had similar luck with nearly a dozen other Asian titles. What makes these films so attractive to Hollywood is that they tend to be from familiar genres, they have proven popularity in an existing and as of yet unexploited market, and, as Lee pointed out when I spoke with him back in 2002, they offer studios a fully realized product.’By seeing a completed movie,’ Lee said, ‘they could see what works and doesn’t work. Because it could have easily been a writer submitting a script with the same premise but this just happens to work out better. It’s more easy to access. They are really surprised how well crafted these movies are and they’re up to the standards of U.S. films and the budgets are ridiculously low compared to U.S., most are under $1 million.’Alessandro Nivola and Jessica Alba as doctor and patient in The Eye (Lionsgate)The latest of Lee’s Asian remake projects to hit the screen is The Eye, based on the Pang Brothers’ atmospheric horror film of the same name. Tom Cruise’s C/W Productions initially picked up the title, and now it hits theaters with Jessica Alba taking on the role of blind violinist Sydney Wells, who regains her sight through a cornea transplant. But after the operation she begins to see strange things — shadowy figures leading people away, a bedroom morphing into a completely different locale, and people that seem able to pass right through her. When she tells her doctor, Paul Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola), he tries to convince her that it’s not unusual for someone seeing for essentially the first time to have trouble processing visual information. But Sydney is convinced it’s something else. Online she finds information about ‘cellular memory,’ and stories about people who have received donor organs and shown bizarre connections to their donors. Now she wants to find out whose eyes she has and what that person saw.Remaking a movie is always tough because it means that something already exists in the same format for comparison. Remaking horror films proves especially difficult because horror films depend heavily on being able to surprise the audience and deliver the unexpected in a manner that scares viewers, which is harder if people know what to expect from having seen the original. Add to that the problem of remaking a horror film that succeeded not so much on a clever plot or good scripting but rather on the stylish flourishes of its filmmakers. These are the considerable hurdles that the American version of The Eye must overcome.Possibly in a nod to the original filmmakers, this new The Eye boasts a pair of directors at the helm as well. David Moreau and Xavier Palud have partnered before on a French film called Ils/Them. If Cloverfield experimented
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