(Yes, spoilers abound!) "Remake The Prisoner? Sure... and why not add a few brush strokes to the Mona Lisa while you're at it!"
(- cartoon I recall in an old "Starlog" magazine)
The idea of a "re visioning" of the 1960s cult classic "The Prisoner" has been tossed around for many years but the American network AMC has finally gone & done it! Between Nov 15 - 17, AMC returned us to "The Village", taking some baffling detours along the way.
The new mini-series consisted of six episodes, each named after an episode of the original series (often a misleading misnomer, as we'll discuss later). As with the original, the first episode is entitled "Arrival". We're presented with a man whom we know little about but learn that he has acrimoniously resigned from his job. (Why does he feel the need to spray paint "resign" on his office window? Why does he have a can of spray paint in his desk? But I digress...) In the "classic" series, our main character (as created and portrayed by Patrick McGoohan) was mostly an "unknown": we never knew what his job was, who he worked for, or why he resigned. In fact, we never knew his name -- lending credence to the idea that he is an "everyman". He could be anyone.. a stand-in for you or me. In the remake, we gradually learn our man (portrayed by Jim Caveizel) is named "Michael", he's a single guy living in an apartment in New York City, and he works for a company called Summakor where his job is monitoring surveillance footage from CCTs (closed circuit televisions), looking for patterns in human behaviour. Does that sound like he could be you? No, me neither. Let's continue.
Michael awakes in a desert. Not knowing where he is or how he got there, he finds "The Village", where the citizens have numbers not names and lead quietly contented lives, wallowing in blissful ignorance and seemingly lorded over by a mysterious control freak named "2" (played by a doddering Ian McKellan). Our man is christened "6" and learns that he is to remain a permanent resident there. 6 learns that anyone who believes there is anything beyond The Village is called a "Dreamer" (...because they usually have dreams about it at night. Duh!) Whereas The Village of the old series was rife with overt propaganda & brainwashing, the new Village feels like a caricature of suburbia where everyone just watches soap operas & eats nothing but wrap sandwiches and cake. The Villagers seem less sinister, and more like village idiots.
There's a defining moment in "Arrival" that effectively illustrates the difference between McGoohan's & Caveizel's "6". Upon arriving in the desert, the remake 6 witnesses a man being shot by some pursuers. Faced with this scenario, McGoohan's 6 would have seethed with outrage and then burst into action. Caveizel's character cries. In my opinion, this is NOT the same character and AMC would have been wise to give their new character a different number. To call him "6" suggests this is the same man. Clearly he is not. Even his Lotus 7 has been down-graded to a Subaru hatch-back. Seriously. They are not even playing in the same league!
The mystery continues in the 2nd episode, "Harmony". The title gave me false hope, as it alludes to one of my favourite episodes from the original series. "Living in Harmony" was a brilliant spaghetti Western story about a sheriff (6) who tries to bring justice to a corrupt town while refusing to carry a gun. In the remake "Harmony" is about how a fellow named 16 pretends to be 6's brother and the two of them drive a tour bus together. Hm. Next.
Things get back on track a bit in "Anvil". In the original series "Hammer Into Anvil", 6 plays a brilliant game of psychological "cat & mouse", playing on the paranoia of 2 and eventually bringing about his downfall. In the remake, 6 is recruited as part of the "Underground"; a covert network of spies. No one really seems to know who is spying on whom... and it doesn't really matter because in The Village children are trained in school how to spy on each other, so basically everyone watches everyone all the time. As it turns out, 909, who is 6's partner in the spy game, is (surprise surprise!) spying on him! Oh, and 909 is also having an affair with 2's son, 1112. Later, 1112 will murder 909. Why? Meh. Does it really matter? Ok... um... because death is the only way to escape The Village. And I should mention that along the way, 6 gets a couple of love interests himself: a mentally unstable doctor named 313 and a blind girl named 415 (whom he slept with back in NYC, but that was another life.)
Speaking of 1112, let's digress a bit & talk about the "2" family since this becomes the main crux of the whole series. 2's wife (whom I don't think actually has a number of her own) lives in a comatose state, presumably created by the 3 pills that her hubby shoves down her throat everyday. We're told one pill is a sedative, one pill is a hallucinogen and the third pill... well supposedly does something else. At this point, let's just throw the mother of all spoilers out there, shall we? 2's wife "dreams" the Village. It's her own psychological "utopia" that they're all living in. And yes, you guessed it... 2 (whose real name is Curtis) & wife run the Summakor corporation. So, Summakor watches people via CCT, and if you exhibit any unfavourable psychological traits, you're sent to "The Village" for rehabilitation. The problem is, Curtis/2's wife can't sustain the dream. When she wakes up, "holes" appear in the Village (literally, sink holes in the sand) and the holes lead to oblivion & death (honest). So Mrs. 2 needs a replacement. What a happy coincidence that Michael/6 turned up. And he also has a mentally unstable mate! Hmm...
It really is difficult to explain what goes on in most of the show. Taking a nod from "Lost", the plot doesn't advance in a linear way. Events are shown out of sequence. It's only when we learn more about Summakor that we see synchronicity between events in The Village and events in New York. The Prisoner always did raise more questions than it answered, but the remake gets very confusing at times. The end, however, ties everything up into a neat little package. I really don't need to tell you what happens as I'm sure your mind has already said "it must be... but that's too obvious & stupid". Well, yes that is what happens.
To me, the original The Prisoner could always be interpreted on 2 levels. On the one hand, it's a story of "man vs society". The individual against the collective. It represents a Kafka-esque struggle for the right of an individual to remain individual. On another level, the show was an allegory of the conflict of "man vs himself". A person who explored their own subconscious to understand why they've made certain choices in their life ("why did you resign?") and why they believe in their own convictions. This is why at the end of the original series, it's revealed that the mysterious "Number 1" who has been controlling things is in fact 6 himself (... albeit in a monkey mask!). In this context, the remake makes no sense. If I create constructs in my own mind, I can live in it. This makes sense on a metaphorical level and a common sense level. In the remake, The Village is a construct of 2's wife -- it takes a huge leap of faith and science fiction to accept that anyone else vacations in her head.
In conclusion: It's my opinion that if you're going to "reinvent the wheel" then completely reinvent it. Give us a completely new story with completely new characters. If you're going to just "re-do" something, then make it worth doing. Be faithful to the original but "value add" something to it. (eg. give us some "deleted" scenes, more back story, improve the f/x, build characterization.) To do any less is just a bastardization of the original.
As they say in The Village, "A still tongue makes a quiet life" so I'll end here. Be seeing you.
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