In the interests of full disclosure, this writer has not yet seen the Goetz Brothers' remake of Pascal Laugier's controversial 2008 horror. I will also admit to not being at all enamoured with the original, which I personally found pretentious and tiresome. Nonetheless, I respect that a great many feel very differently. Laugier's Martyrs is one of those polarizing films which audiences either love or hate, with very little middle ground. Still, whichever side of the fence viewers fall on, all can agree that the last thing it needed was an English language remake. Again, having not seen the remake I'm not about to condemn it, although reviews indicate that, as feared, it's a considerably softer, watered-down take on the unrelentingly bleak and savage original. Perhaps there's a certain logic in trying to remake Martyrs with a touch more optimism, as they never had any hope of topping the original's pessimism; but then, the bleakness was the very thing that defined the original, so what are you left with if you remove that? There's just no avoiding the sense that the remake was damned either way, which begs the question, why bother at all? (This, of course, is a question we could ask of a great many remakes.)
