Hey, I love Naomi Watts as much as anyone, but you couldn’t find an actress who looks more like Tippi Hedren (The Birds‘ original star) if you tried. Will she be playing Hedren’s character, spoiled socialite Melanie Daniels? If not, why cast someone who looks so much like her? Any attempt to simply duplicate the Hitchcock masterpiece is bound to end up a disaster – like the Gus Van Sant photocopy remake of Psycho.
On the other hand, some of the changes from the original that I’ve heard the filmmakers are contemplating sound equally disastrous. Where Hitchcock deliberately withheld any explanation of why the birds were attacking, I understand the present filmmakers are considering blaming it all on the degradation of the environment, climate change, and so on. While this might have the advantage of political correctness, I believe it would seriously diminish the power of the story. It would be like grafting a science fictional explanation onto Kafka’s Metamorphosis – “Because scientists had injected him with cockroach DNA, Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle …”
If Universal really wants to make more money off of their property, they should reissue the 1963 original in digitalized 3-D. Can you imagine seeing all those birds flying around you in the movie theater? Awesome.
