Murder on the Orient Express - Remake vs Original

Remakes have become a part of Hollywood's identity in the 21st century. Many of the movies that are getting remade are based on classic films. The point of this series is to look at the two films and try to decipher the differences and the purposes of these differences.

The first version of Murder on the Orient Express, as you likely know, is an Agatha Christie detective novel titled Murder on the Orient Express. It is one of the most famous stories featuring the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. An adaptation of the books was made in 1974 directed by Sidney Lumet who is known for his single room crime thrillers like 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon. The movie stars Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot which is just incredible. You've also got Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, and Martin Balsam. The basic plot is that Ratchett (Richard Widmark) is found dead on the Orient Express and Hercule Poirot has to find out who of the 12 people on the train is the killer before the snow that is blocking the tracks gets removed.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974) Dir. Sidney Lumet

The original movie is in its essence about extravagance. The setting, though it is only a couple of train cars, is extravagant because the Orient Express is in itself extravagant. It's route runs from London to places like Milan, Budapest, Istanbul, and Athens and the train cars are the height of luxury (I think the 2020 version of the Orient Express is those plane tickets on Emirates that Casey Neistat just gets for some reason). The score is extravagant and every character on the train are just normal people plus like 20% of whatever their thing is. This is all slightly contrasted by Albert Finney's Hercule Poirot who leads everyone to believe that he has no idea what he's doing until the final reveal which isn't what you expect when watching a mystery film.

The movie's overall tone is enjoyable. It's a bit of a comedy of manners where Poirot is the Marx brother type while everyone else is a refined upper-class individual. It's funny, fun, gripping, and gorgeous which is really all you need in a mystery movie. Albert Finney give's more than anyone else probably could to the character of Poirot. I also liked that the world is real but the characters are surreal.

I'm going to start talking about the end of the movie so go watch it... or don't, but there will be spoilers.

The real hint to the film comes from the way the Lumet contrasts the people on the refined patrons of the Orient Express with the aggressive mechanics of the train while Poirot is getting ready for bed and Ratchett is getting murdered. We find out in the end that everyone on the train killed Ratchett because all of them were effected by his killing of a Daisy Armstrong five years earlier.

What the movie is really meant to do, in my opinion, is to make the audience think about justice because at the end of the movie, the killing of Ratchett is justified by Poirot and Bianchi. The courts were never able to try Ratchett because they could never catch him so his innocence was not found by a jury of 12 peers. All 12 of the people on the train planned and agreed to bring justice to the loved ones they lost because Daisy Armstrong was killed. It is revealed that Ratchett is responsible for 5 total deaths; Daisy Armstrong, Her pregnant mother, Father, the Armstrong's maid. Everyone on the train agree that Ratchet deserved to die so they kill him.

Morality is regulated by the courts in the places the passengers on this train come from but this film in a away justifies vigilantism except it is more moral because a group decides rather than one individual like Batman. The strangest part to me is that the movie just ends after they all decide that the murder was justified, there's no denouement questioning what we just saw.

Either way the movie is fun and I'm sure that a second viewing will be greatly rewarded. Sidney Lumet is a masterful filmmaker and the cast is incredible.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) Dir. Kenneth Branagh

I have a lot of problems with this film and they mainly stem from the fact that Branagh (and the screenwriter Michael Green) changed the story to focus on Poirot as a person rather than Poirot's role in solving the crime while making Poirot the most Sheldon Cooper version of that character possible.

The first scene is a good example of this. Poirot is tasked with solving a case at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and make a whole song and dance about hard soled shoes and police sowing unrest so the can keep their jobs. It doesn't make much sense because are they just not going to have any form of police? He'll just say off handed comments that I guess are suppose to be funny but just aren't like about how he was whining about eggs in the morning. The real kicker is that he stops the guy because some how the chief of police runs into a cane sticking 3 feet out of the wall. I don't even know why this scene is in the movie. One of the great things about the original is that narrative that was important for the next 2 hours showed you he was a great detective rather than them putting a shitty case at the start.

I also found the moral grand standing and philosophizing in the movie blow my brains out boring and child tier. There are multiple scenes where it's Branagh and his dumb ass Groucho Marx looking moustache talking about how great he is. the worst scene in the movie is the scene before he boards the boat. It just sucks.

There is so much time in the movie that is wasted on pointless, unfunny jokes that could've gone into developing the amazing ensemble cast because the cast of this movie is pretty amazing. Daisy Ridley, Leslie Odom Jr., Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Josh Gad are all great and the characters are great and complex people but in this movie they fucking suck so hard. They're so boring and basically are just stage pieces for Branagh's shitty Poirot.

I thought that the intellectual depth to the movie would come from looking back at the time it's set in and questioning the realities of the 1930's a little bit but the closest they get to that is Willem Dafoe saying some racist shit then 30 minutes later be just says he isn't racist and it's all good. How do you not bring up race and class in a meaningful way in the second film adaptation of a novel written in 1934?

I think that modern adaptations need to take the original story and give it a different twist to be intellectually and artistically worth while in the 21st century but this film is just the lite version of the original and I fear that the Death on the Nile remake will do the same. Also a quick side note. How is Poirot being told about Death on the Nile if he's suppose to come across the murder while on holiday in Egypt? That tease doesn't make sense at all.

Poirot stars in these movies but he isn't suppose to be the star if that makes sense. That's the biggest failure of this movie for me but maybe that works for audiences. It made over $300 million at the box office which is insane to me and it didn't get absolutely blasted by critics. My favorite piece of trivia is that the Alliance of Women Film Journalists nominated it for Remake or Sequel that Shouldn't have been Made along with Baywatch and The Mummy (The Mummy won). They also have a hall of shame, actress in need of a new agent, and most egregious age difference between the lead and the love interest award that they vote on every year (The Sexual Tormentors (Weinstein, Spacy, Ratner and others), Kate Winslet, and I Love You, Daddy (That creepy Louis C.K. movie with Chloe Grace Moretz and John Malkovich) won for the respective categories).

This movie is just a flat and unfunny cash grab. There was so much potential but the cast goes unused and if there's anything that I've learned from watching old movies (Specifically Sidney Lumet) is that spectacle can't replace story but story can replace spectacle.