Sequels, remakes, and reboots comprise over forty of the movies released or to be released in 2017, a lackluster year so far for Hollywood, producing historically low summer box office numbers. With the controversy of 2016’s Ghostbusters in recent memory, Warner Bros.’s announcement of an all-female Lord of the Flies in August came at a focal point for many controversial issues in Hollywood.

The remake is still in early production with no set release date, screenplay, or cast but will be written and directed by long-standing writing-directing pair Scott McGehee and David Siegel whose most recent work includes 2012’s “What Maisie Knew”.

Translated to film in 1963 and 1990 with male casts, the book depicts a group of British schoolboys deserted on an uninhabited island who descend into a chaos without any power structures.

In an interview with Deadline, Siegel expressed intentions to remain faithful to the events of the book and justified the all-female cast saying that “taking the opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn’t been told before, with girls rather than boys, is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew. It breaks away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression.”

Though a film that breaks conventions and tells a story from a new angle usually excites me, Siegel and McGehee need to walk an impossibly narrow line to justify an all-female remake.

The directors do not seem concerned with capturing nostalgia to turn a profit. With the 1990 film adaptation garnering no critical acclaim and ranking 85th in domestic box office out of its year’s movies and an original source material more commonly associated with an English classroom than the silver screen, the remake lacks the usual Hollywood recipe for financial success.

But pure creative intentions do not justify a remake. A remake should respect its source material and accomplish something that it could not have done as an original film, but if Siegel stands by his words that he “wants to do a very faithful […] adaptation of the book,” changing the genders of characters without changing the characters themselves will add little to previous adaptations of the book aside from introducing the shock value of girls being violent and savage.

Whether the film intends to or not, the all-female Lord of the Flies remake sets a precedent for how the movie industry approaches female leads and female representation in general. Though having girls who break traditional female stereotypes seems to break convention, having female leads whose personalities and dynamics were created for boys reinforces the idea that leads and strong characters should be masculine.

There is nothing wrong with female characters having traditionally masculine traits, but when female leads consistently fall into this trope, casting female leads might be little more than token representation. The strength of any character should not be defined by how similar they are to the standard male action hero.

Leads or powerful characters who deviate from the standard hero, whether by gender, race, sexuality or any other demographic, must derive strength from their unique experiences and different backgrounds rather than conform to the traits of a traditional male character. Characters with underrepresented backgrounds that embrace their differences not only make their films more compelling by adding new, unique possibilities to their narratives and dynamics but also justify more minority representation in both casting and production to more accurately depict their distinctions.

The directors’ faith to the source material and the potential of an all-female cast are mutually exclusive. The Lord of the Flies remake must rewrite its female characters as female characters. I cannot say for certain what this entails, but if Siegel and McGehee, two middle-aged men, can accurately depict the nuanced differences between an all-female and all-male Lord of the Flies and capture the intricacies of the interpersonal relationships of preteen girls, it will truly be a tour de force.

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on October 12, 2017.