Steven Spielberg always wanted to make a musical, and his colleagues in the business laughed. He finally did it with his remake of West Side Story. Even thought original film is 60 years old now, it stills stands head and shoulders above other musical films in our collective memories. What could Spielberg do to possibly improve upon the film we know and love?
Den of Geek takes a long, hard look at the two West Side Story films to see how Spielberg faced the challenges of bringing the story into the 21st century. For one thing, the Upper West Side of New York is nothing like it was when the original West Side Story was filmed. No longer a slum, it is home to some of the world's most expensive real estate. What happened? Gentrification. So Spielberg harnessed gentrification as one of the themes contributing to the social ills fueling the story of rival gangs and star-crossed lovers.
Another theme that Spielberg updated is the racism. While racism was the basic theme of the 1961 movie, that film was a product of its time. The 2021 movie delves deeper into the motivations behind the white characters and the Puerto Rican characters and avoids painting the Puerto Rican Sharks as malicious and threatening compared to the almost wholesome Jets (and avoids painting their faces, too).
Spielberg kept the classic songs intact, but moved them in time to allow the story to work better. He updated the dancing to make it less like a Broadway stage production. And there's more. It's as if Spielberg spent 60 years figuring out what worked and didn't work with the original movie. Read about all the differences in the 1961 and the 2021 versions of West Side Story at Den of Geek.