One film draws an easy moral arc about moral redemption, the other comes to a point of closure that leaves the audience feeling uneasy. The original by contrast ended with the killer eliminated and Stellan Skarsgård returning to Sweden having successfully covered up his own crime and no-one left the wiser. The ending of both films is the same, but this version invents a big shootout climax that banally redeems Al Pacino, allowing him to die and tell the still uncorrupted Hilary Swank not to lose the way. This adds a subtle difference to the story – while the original explored the dilemma of a cop who made a mistake during the course of the film and crossed the line to cover it up, the remake creates a wider backstory in order to show that Al Pacino is a decent cop used to bending the rules to do good who ends in getting into a situation that is over his head. In the original, Stellan Skarsgård’s only initial crime was that he had become involved with a witness the remake invents an entire backstory about an Internal Affairs investigation. This is most clearly evidenced in the scene where the detective shoots the bullet into a dog in an alley – in the original, Stellan Skarsgård shoots a live dog, whereas here Al Pacino with less moral contention shoots into the body of a dead dog he finds in an alley. The most disappointing aspect of the remake is the way that it cleans up the central character of the detective.
#Insomnia 2002 serial#
This brings Insomnia squarely into serial killer thriller territory, rather than the original, which was simply a police investigation thriller and did not feature the killer as an adversary playing cat-and-mouse games. Most noticeably, the remake has made the suspect into a psychopath and made them into a star nemesis opposite Al Pacino. What is crucial to both films is the moral angle – the story is a thriller that is less about the solving of the crime than it is the chain of events following a detective who tries to cover up the fact that he accidentally shot his own partner while pursuing a suspect. The remake essentially charts the same terrain as the original but the script subtly amplifies and emphasises different aspects. The original film in question was the Norwegian thriller Insomnia (1997), which featured Stellan Skarsgård as a Swedish cop travelling to Norway to investigate a murder. (2007), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Contraband (2012), Pusher (2012) and the spate of Asian horror remakes following The Ring (2002) – that remake foreign-language films for American audiences seemingly on the bizarre assumption that Americans are too illiterate to be able to read subtitles.
Insomnia joins a stack of films – from Three Men and a Baby (1987) through Point of No Return (1993), Just Visiting (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001), Funny Games U.S. Clear evidence of the acclaim that Christopher Nolan won can be seen the calibre of the stars he has lining up to work with him here – including three Oscar winners (Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank), not to mention Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney listed on the credits as Executive Producers. It brought director Christopher Nolan, whose second film it was, huge acclaim.
#Insomnia 2002 full#
Dormer tries to swing the investigation to incriminate Finch, all the while hiding his own guilt in shooting Eckhart.Ĭhristopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) was for my money the best film of 2001 – a thriller full of ingeniously original ideas and an extraordinarily fresh and striking narrative approach that stood out amid the dross with a rare intelligence. Finch wants them to cooperate to blame the murder on Kay’s abusive boyfriend. Dormer tracks the killer down as being Walter Finch, a local thriller writer. The killer then starts calling Dormer, taunting him that he knows that he was the one who shot Eckhart.
Afterwards, Dormer covers the killing up, substituting the bullet taken from the body for one from the gun dropped by the killer. Pursuing in the fog, Dormer shoots at the killer but hits Eckhart by accident. At the same time, Echkart tells him that he is thinking about making a deal with Internal Affairs for immunity. Upon arriving, Dormer finds that he cannot sleep because of the 24-hour sunlight.
Los Angeles detectives Will Dormer and Hap Eckhart, who are both in the midst of an Internal Affairs investigation over evidence-planting allegations, are sent to the small town of Nightmute, Alaska to investigate the murder of teenager Kay Connell.
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