For the next little while I’ve decided to write a series of short blogs about specific films or ideas in films that I find compelling. I will write these every week if I can manage it. So here is the first in the series.

Fred Zinnemann’s film of The Day Of The Jackal
Down here in my Doom Fortress under the ice in Antarctica (well, technically the main island of Kerguelen, but who’s counting, right?) my mad scientist teams have discovered many things. Cold Fusion (that’s a joke – get it?), the cure for the common cold, and a nasty strain of wandering-bowel syndrome which we have infected every politician in Canberra with as part of a secret ploy to take over the world we haven’t done this at all and you can’t prove we have.
We have also discovered, using hard scientific methodology, that The Day of the Jackal (1973) is one of the best movies ever made.
It’s too complicated to go into much detail here, but if you’re interested in our proof please read the paper “Using Quantum Physics To Prove That Day Of The Jackal Is Fucking Awesome” which will be published soon in all evil scientific journals. In short, though, here are the reasons:
- It’s a multithreaded story featuring numerous (sometimes briefly shown) main characters who often don’t actually meet.
- It treats the audience with respect, doesn’t talk down to you and tells you a gripping story which doesn’t feel the need to throw in random action sequences that don’t make sense to the plot.
- The one gunfight in the film is over in a matter of seconds. This makes it much more realistic than most other films, and this is one area in which realism is important.
Having proven this to you all with this incredible list (and the before-mentioned scientific paper) I will now get to my point:
Somebody should remake The Day Of The Jackal, set in modern day.
“But, wait a minute!” I hear some of you figuratively yelling. “Somebody already did that, back in 1997 with Bruce Willis!”

The Day Of The Jackal has provably some of the best scenes ever committed to celluloid. Also, a scene where a car chase is unfortunately undercranked.
To which my reply is “Fuck off, you cunt, that’s not a remake, that’s scrapings from a Hollywood producer’s bowels the likes of which made Fred Zinnemann’s last earthly actions be to threaten legal action if they didn’t disassociate their film with his 1973 masterpiece. I’m talking about a proper remake.”
Now, most film nuts lament remakes. We hate them. We fill our faces with hipster-disgust and woe when the name is mentioned, but the simple fact is this: no film is perfect, and every film is a product of its time.
This means that when you watch a film, you can learn a great deal about the filmmakers and the era s/he worked and lived in.
For this reason, remakes can sometimes be fascinating. Just look at the difference between the 1970s Solaris and the 2000s Solaris. One is always going to be greater than another, and your mileage may vary, but seeing the way different emphasis was placed on different parts of the story and how different creative decisions are made by the new filmmakers can be a fascinating thing.
After all, we love plays being put on over and over, so why not have a dozen re-tellings of our favourite movies? Imagine if Star Wars was remade, with a large budget, every ten years by a different director.
In 1987 we’d have the Tony Scott version.
In 1997 we’d have the first version with CG, done by Curtis Hanson.
In 2007 we’d have seen a darker remake done by Christopher Nolan.
In 2017, we’d be seeing a socially-conscious re-telling from the Empire’s perspective by Neil Blomkamp.
Now, it may not be a great idea, but it’s a fascinating discussion to have anyway.
So, why remake Day of the Jackal, especially if, as my scientists have proven, it’s so very nearly perfect?
Simple: because it’s something which would entirely change given the context.
The Day Of The Jackal is a movie about a failed attempt (indeed, knowing he fails from the start makes the story more fascinating) on the life of Charles de Gaulle, and a hugely accurate and authentic portrayal of the failings of that system. Re-make it being about, say, a failed attempt on the life of George W Bush in 2007, and you’d be telling a wildly different story.

Imagine this scene in the remake, in which The Jackal informs high up al-Qaeda or hard-right Christian groups in the US (there’s an interesting idea in itself) that their efforts at terrorism have queered the pitch so badly that they simply must employ a professional – in this case, him.
How would we get into the country? How would he get his weapon in? What technique would he use? Bush would be unlikely to make the kind of arrogant in-the-open speaking engagements that de Gaulle did, so how to get at him?
This new film would be a fascinating look at things such as TSA, post-9/11 paranoia and the political situation in the US just before the 2008 banking crash.
When remade again years later, it might be a whole new story involving the government regulation of social networks, the ethics of chipping your population and how the President is no longer the real head of state. Who knows?
Point is that while some movies can be remade and have something new to say, I think The Day Of The Jackal wouldn’t just have something new to say – it’d be a totally different experience, just as culturally relevant now as it the original was then.