"We are entering a dimension of both familiarity and surprise," said Michael Adams in The Wrap, "of exhaustion and excitement, of vague hopes and managed expectation." Yes, once again, Rod Serling's "classic" TV series The Twilight Zone is being brought to the big screen, this time by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way and Warner Bros. What a new take on The Twilight Zone "will offer is anyone's guess."
"I'd vastly prefer an anthology-style TV series," said Margaret Lyons in Entertainment Weekly, "particularly one that covered as much ground as The Twilight Zone did." But I'm also "optimistic about a feature's potential." The Twilight Zone "might be remembered as more of a sci-fi series," but underneath that it was "a profoundly political show," and our current "politics are rich for interpretation."
Rod Serling's series "taught us many valuable life lessons through allegory and ham-fisted liberal sermonizing," said Nathan Rabin in The Onion's A.V. Club. But news of yet another remake is kind of depressing: The Twilight Zone has "been resurrected for television multiple times," and the 1983 film version of it was "a famous debacle." To make matters worse, the script for the new movie is being written by Rand Ravich, "whose most prominent film credit, The Astronaut's Wife (watch the trailer), was widely compared to a bad episode of The Twilight Zone."
