I just read in ComingSoon that the team who brought us the very good Saw are going to begin work on Saw 2.
This just rings alarm bells for me, it’s been seen so many times before. Independent film made on a tiny budget concentrating on a slick story and simple, but highly effective plot, does really well when released. Studio buy up rights for the team and get them to make a full budget Hollywood movie. Crash, bang, wallop. Failure, and the team are hounded out of Hollywood and begin to build up their career again without riding on the wave of their opening movie.
I guess there are a number of factors here, there’s the entirely different movie making process between Hollywood and an independent, not to mention the budget, pressure and the two hundred and fifty million other people who want to make your movie into something different.
In the traditional first movie what becomes stylish and cool onscreen are often after effects of having no money and having to fight within constraints to produce something good. When this is opened up to Hollywood budgets, backing and…and…baloney these cool factors often just get overdone and loose their edge.
However, this might be slightly different, if they don’t concentrate too much on the previous movie and perhaps concentrate on a new reign of terror by the Saw protagonist. The whole premise of Saw is the setting up of complex scenarios where characters have to make a life altering choice or die, and this can be applied to any situation. The key to Saw was not the story of the poor Doctor; it was the entire setup around him. We were given no backdrop or understanding of the Doctor and his family to gain a connection and feel for them because it wasn’t necessary; the winning formula is the setup and how anyone gets out of it. This kind of premise would easily move to another sequel, and another.
So I started off writing this thinking it would be a bad thing for what Saw was (see that!), however, I’ve talked myself round to thinking there’s a really good chance they could pull this off.
