--Freddy Krueger, A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
One can still see the impact of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street on popular culture. The 2010 remake, though, received mostly lukewarm and negative reactions upon its release, having nowhere near the impact that the first one did. It's not that the remake is entirely awful. The biggest problems reduce down to a lack of energy on the part of some of the prominent characters, though the new Freddy has some splendid moments. I haven't yet seen the 1984 film, but I hear that the first Freddy was only a child murderer and not a pedophile. If so, then the 2010 rendition of Freddy is even darker than the initial character, his sadism expressed quite effectively by Jackie Earle Haley's show of calm malice.
Soon, I'll try to review another 2010 movie about dreams--Inception. It hopefully won't be long!
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Production Values
The film's premise allows for some unique environments in dream landscapes to be realized onscreen, and many of the effects for these are mostly effective and still hold up today fairly well. Moments like a recreation of the classic bathtub scene are right at home with the remake's aesthetic and tone. A key success with the aesthetics is the blending of practical and computer generated effects for Freddy's face, a combination that works quite well by 2010 standards.
It's a shame that the acting doesn't quite live up to the visuals, because many of the performances, though not terrible, are merely average. Rooney Mara, who plays Nancy, is an obvious example of this: while her acting isn't absolutely horrendous, it is, unfortunately, bland most of the time. The same goes for Kyle Gallner's character Quentin. The primary exception is Jackie Earle Haley's Freddy, who at least delivers some fittingly demented, well-placed lines during his scenes. Haley plays the character like an evil Rorshach (I loved Haley's role as Rorshach in Watchmen [1]). He has the strongest screen presence here by far, and many viewers will likely consider his scenes the most memorable.
Story
Spoilers are below!
In a town whose adult population concealed a scandal with a pedophile, multiple teenagers are plagued by nightmares in which they are pursued by a man called Freddy, his bladed gloves leaving marks that appear on their bodies even once they wake up. Freddy kills off many of the "friends" of a girl named Nancy. She soon discovers, alongside fellow schoolmate Quentin, that she, Quentin, and all of the other victims of these nightmares once attended a preschool where they played with a gardener named Fred Krueger.
After dismissing the dreams as the appearances of repressed memories, Quentin sees in a nightmare what actually happened to Krueger--he was chased into an abandoned building, which was set aflame by infuriated parents. He briefly considers the possibility that his parents mistakenly thought that Krueger molested them, though leftover evidence from their childhood confirms that the abuse did occur.
Nancy and Quentin manage to bring Freddy from their dreams into the external world, where they attack, (seemingly) kill, and burn him. However, once Nancy returns home, her mother is killed by Freddy, with viewers unable to deduce if Freddy is still alive in the external world, if Nancy is dreaming yet again, or if Nancy is merely hallucinating.
Intellectual Content
During the movie, some characters talk about how sleep-deprived people can begin having "micronaps," descending into dreams without even realizing it. One of them even mentions how difficult it has become to discern what is real. This brings to light an incomplete way that some people linguistically refer to dreams--dreams, though often separated from "reality," are a part of reality because one cannot dream without the experience itself being real, though it does not affect anything in the material world outside of one's mind. That is the distinction between a dream and a waking experience: the former occurs only within the dreamer's consciousness, while the latter occurs in an actual world of external matter. The seeming possibility that one might be dreaming at any given time is one that many people treat as unverifiable and unfalsifiable, yet, once one establishes a few basic facts, it is extremely easy to prove with absolute certainty that one is dreaming at a certain moment. If there is no matter beyond one's mind, then one cannot have experiences of physical sensations; thus, since a dream only occurs within one's mind, then one is not dreaming as long as one's sense of touch is active [2].
Conclusion
A Nightmare on Elm Street definitely lacks any significant emotional development of its characters, as well as energetic performances that could have elevated the impact of the story (with the exception of Freddy himself). The most successful aspects are Jackie Earle Haley's lines and the greater darkness that the remake brings out of the character of Freddy. There are reports that yet another remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is coming. If so, may it not share the same flaws as its 2010 predecessor.
Content:
1. Violence: Some of the deaths are fairly gruesome. For example, in one scene Freddy's blades penetrate a woman's skull and protrude from her eye sockets.
2. Profanity: Occasionally, some characters say "shit" or variations of "fuck."
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/08/movie-review-watchmen-directors-cut.html
[2]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/06/distinguishing-dreams-from-waking.html
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