Given the high regard in which the movie is held it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to spend the money to try to remake it - at least until a new generation of people arrive who haven't seen the original.
You just don't get it, do you? They aren't remaking a movie. They're remaking
a stage play that was made into a movie once. One of the reasons why there's so little really good drama on television are people with no sense of appreciation for theater. I'm not saying that
A Few Good Men is in the same stratum as the works of Shakespeare, but it's still pretty good. Laurence Olivier starred in a movie production of Hamlet in 1948. It was excellent, and even won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Actor. If people were such philistines that they couldn't appreciate that other actors might have different interpretations worth watching, we'd never have had the other Hamlet movies, starring Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke, Christopher Plummer, Richard Chamberlain, Kevin Kline, and others.
People tend to forget that television isn't just smaller screen movies. Television has almost as much in common with theater as it does with cinema. The three-camera sitcom is much more like a stage play than like a movie. There is a certain kind of performance energy that comes with really good actors working together in ensemble acting out a play in real time. That's why people who haven't had their sense of appreciation for the performing arts destroyed by radio, television, and cinema still shell out good money to see concerts and plays.
In another thread, the discussion mentioned
The Hallelujah Chorus. I've heard that performed in many different settings, and was in choirs that sang it many, many times. If you've never experienced musical works like that performed live, you've missed out on some great music. Likewise, really good plays can stand up to repeated viewings, especially when there are different casts performing them.
