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The Manchurian Candidate Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for violence and some language) Theater release: July 30, 2004 by Paramount Pictures Directed by: Jonathan Demme Runtime: 2 hours 10 minutes Cast: Denzel Washington (Ben Marco), Meryl Streep (Eleanor Shaw), Liev Schreiber (Raymond Shaw), Kimberly Elise (Rosie), Jon Voight (Sen. Thomas Jordan), Vera Farmiga (Jocelyn Jordan) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Calling a film one of the great remakes of all time sounds like faint praise indeed. Most celluloid retreads are bad ideas, badly executed. Either the first go-round wasn't all that good—so why waste everybody's time and money again? Or it was truly great, and the new version is at best a decent knockoff—so why bother? Just watch the original.

Not so with Jonathan Demme's new treatment of The Manchurian Candidate. Rent the 1962 version, by all means—this classic Cold War thriller was released last week as an affordable DVD—but mostly so you can see how dazzlingly inventive a remake can be.

Liev Schreiber as VP candidate Raymond Shaw

This time around, a Desert Storm recon mission is ambushed and, after a few days missing in action, the soldiers find their way back to safety with only a couple of casualties, earning Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) a Medal of Honor and an eventual nomination to the vice-presidency of the United States. One problem: two of the other survivors start having terrible nightmares that suggest the whole thing may never have happened. Or, at least, that it happened very differently.

The further the story progresses, the more obvious it becomes that this really is the right movie at the right time—again. In 1962, with Cold War anxieties everywhere, McCarthyism a not-distant-enough memory and the Korean conflict a pretty good stand-in for the escalating troubles in southeast Asia, a movie about a war hero who'd been brainwashed by the Reds and placed like a time-bomb in the center of the American democratic process was close enough to plausible to send real shock waves through a fearful nation.

Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright

In 2004, we're again preoccupied with enemies on the home front, confronted with the very real threat of neighbors who may turn out to be terrorists, an anxiety that's only compounded by an unsettling mistrust of governments and government agencies—not to mention multi-national corporations, who prove to be the real Bad Guys this time around. Now Manchuria isn't a place, it's an entity—Manchurian Global, a vast organization that buys and sells everything under the sun, presumably including private armies, biotechnology and the souls of politicians. We trust these men in suits like we trust the guys from Enron, or the organized crime families they are made to resemble. Pictures of burning Kuwait oilfields are to the Second Gulf War generation what Korean images were to almost-draftable Baby Boomers in '62, and a street-level remake of "Fortunate Son" invokes that very specific, cynicizing Vietnam-era helplessness and rage. Our latest traumas get stirred up when video experts review security tapes of assassins making their way through metal detectors. This is a Manchurian Candidate for a new—and newly fearful—generation.

It's eerie to revisit the highly-praised original, and realize that its scenario of covert manipulation and presidential assassination plots screened in America a year before the JFK shooting—and the endless conspiracy theories it spawned. The savvy '04 edition plays on all those fears and more: knowing references to lone gunmen and homeland nuclear risks evoke Cold War worries that seem suddenly pertinent again, and one character makes a compelling (and troubling) argument when she says "Americans are terrified, and we can arm them"—with a war hero as Vice President. Set slightly in the future, background news broadcasts ratchet up the tension with reports of suicide bombers and War On Terror rhetoric, suspension of civil liberties and U.S. raids on African countries, "touch screen voting" protests and security crackdowns.

Meryl Streep plays the powerful Senator Eleanor Shaw

Audiences who don't know the original are guaranteed a tense and tricky ride, pretty much free of the gaping plot holes that usually mar these twisty suspensers. If you're willing to suspend your disbelief to buy the admittedly goofy idea at the center of the story—"Sci-Fi Lite" in a Michael Crichton sort of way, no less implausible than the brain-washing premise of the original—the actual story mechanics and character motivations hang together remarkably well.

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