There are plenty of foreign films that might deserve a US remake – both to shift their stories into a more direct cultural context and to draw attention to the original; Big Man Japan is the last on that list. The movie focuses on a man who inherited the job of defending the country against giant monsters from his father, but who can’t get his own life together. When called upon, he uses electricity to grow to unbelievable size, awkwardly fight whatever sick menace is knocking over buildings, and then return to his crummy life. It’s dry, sardonic, insane during the fight scenes, and more than a little boring when fists aren’t flying with slapstick precision.
The subject matter is so directly linked to a cultural convention of Japan (and Japanese filmmaking) that it makes zero sense to remake it here. It’s more tone deaf than any other foreign remake that’s come out in the last ten years.
Still, Variety is reporting that Clash of the Titans writers Phil Hay and Matt Mandredi will be writing a US version for Columbia and Original Pictures. There’s the off chance that something as crazy as this could yield epic genre results, but it seems a lot like writing a satire on consumer culture for a remote tribe in South America. Sure, a giant guy fighting giant monsters is wackysillymadcap, but will there be anything else to it?