Revisiting The Fugitive

This year is the 30th anniversary of The Fugitive - that is, the Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones movie. It's a phenomenal movie, and maybe the high bar for the…I guess, the "mature thriller", we could call it.

Funny enough, it's a remake. In the conversation about good remakes, The Thing (1982) and The Fly (1986) are usually the main ones mentioned. There are other quality remakes - Ocean's 11 was a big success, and well regarded, and was a remake of an apparently pretty bad movie starring Frank Sinatra a few decades earlier. The Mummy was another late 90's/early 2000's remake that was a big success and launched a franchise. Also look at the 2000's version of Battlestar Galactica reimagining.

Of course, the 90's had quite a few TV shows-turned-into-movies like The Brady Bunch, The Addams Family, and The Fugitive. It's interesting that things go the other way these days, with movies being reimagined into streaming series!

I loved The Fugitive way back when, and revisiting it recently, it holds up really, really well.

What I think is interesting about it is the "lightning in a bottle" element it has. Watching the behind-the-scenes documentaries, there was a script floating around that Harrison Ford was interested in, but wanted some changes made before getting on board. The script changed, then surely changed more when the director came in - and on top of that, there was a lot of improvisation during filming, especially with Tommy Lee Jones and his crew of U.S. Marshals.

In fact, Harrison Ford apparently thought the movie was going to be a disaster. In spite of that, he worked hard on it, both at the script stage and of course, with his character.

Even outside of the changes and the improvisation, this movie (like all film) was created, or created again, in the editing. Looking at it more analytically, it's got a huge amount of backstory to take care of in its first few minutes, with Kimble's wife's murder, his accusation of a one-armed man and the failure of the authorities to find him, Kimble's arrest and incarceration before the story really takes off with his escape and pursuit of justice, while the law pursues Kimble.

Shout out to the distinctive, exciting music in this film. It was a great success; I don't think it's as well remembered after all this time as some other movies, but it does hold up as a modern classic thriller - and one of the great remakes.

I think even in making independent comics, there is an element of chance. We think of ideas, then write, and draw them, probably having some belief that what we're doing is worthwhile, and then we have to send our comics out there and see what happens.

See you next time!


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