First Poster for ‘Straw Dogs’ Remake a Disappointment
by Nia Edward-Behi
Here’s the brand new shiny poster for Rod Lurie’s remake of Straw Dogs for Sony Screen Gems, which stars James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgård and Kate Boswell, and is due for release in the US in September and the UK a month later.
Clearly taking its inspiration from the iconic poster for the original Peckinpah film, it shows a black and white close up of David Sumner’s face, one lens of his spectacles broken. So far, so Seventies – but now in place of that lens is the fiery image of Charlie, David’s rival, who will be central to the film’s violent climax.
Terrible photoshopping aside, there’s something not quite right about this poster. The original was a powerful statement about David’s character and about the fundamentally difficult questions the film raises. Stark, monochrome and grainy, it effectively encapsulated the uneasy position of David as both hero and villain of the film. This new poster seems to be screaming ‘yeah, we’ve got Cyclops, but look! Erik from True Blood is in this film too!’…canny marketing to get bums on seats, perhaps, but not so much for instilling hope that the film might be anything more than a quick money-maker. I know, I should stop being so cynical about these remakes, but when the poster recalls the original in such a pointed and blatant way, I will make as many skeptical comparisons as I want.
I think updating Straw Dogs is potentially interesting – we’re currently in a very different climate to that of the Seventies, and themes prevalent in the original film, such as the role of women in society, would merit an interesting reappraisal. The poster declares writing credits to Lurie, the original Straw Dogs script by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman, and the original novel, ‘The Siege of Trencher’s Farm’ by Gordon Williams, so to what degree the film will simply be a retread of Peckinpah’s film will remain to be seen. The trailer that was released a few weeks ago doesn’t seem to imply it will be doing anything drastically different, and this poster gives me the same, sad impression. The film intrigues me, but mostly in a ‘how mediocre will this be’ sort of way…so I won’t even start on ‘everyone has a breaking point’ and that hideous red font.
