The trailer for The Manchurian Candidate is up, and it answers some questions I had posted last August.

First off, I’m not sure if this is just to explain away the outdated reference in the title (now that we don’t have a war near Manchuria), but the bad guys of the film are now a corporation named “Manchurian Global.” The evil corporation as bad guy is such a tired Hollywood premise, but I have to admit it is about the only workable plot when you remove the book from the context of the Cold War. It’s not like Islamic terrorists have the patience to mentally reprogram a sleeper agent who will affect American politics a dozen years later. In fact, I don’t really see al Quaeda doing any kind of plan that doesn’t end in innocents getting blown up. The Red Chinese (who would be able to fund something like this) are still a threat, but nobody in Hollywood or Washington wants to endanger relations by saying that. Heck, Cuba would be a great villain in something like this, given that medical facilities would be involved and everyone in Hollywood believes they have the best health care system…but that would mean casting Castro as a villain. So that leaves corporations…and of Communist Chinese, Communist Cubans, Islamic terrorism and global corporations, the latter are the only ones filmmakers don’t have qualms about using as disposable bad guys. I suppose that’s sound thinking. Make the People’s Republic of China the baddies and you lose a market of a billion people. Ditto Arab terrorists. But if a corporation is the bad guy, who is there to offend, really?

There is undoubtedly more to the plot in the movie than what comes out in the trailer, so I could be completely right or wrong.

Meryl Streep comes off better than I expected, though she looks like a reheated Angela Lansbury. Denzel Washington appears to do a top-notch job.

Still, I get an uneasy vibe from the movie. Why do I have the feeling that it’ll be Americans who are the bad guys? Granted, there were American conspirators in the original film, but they were traitors working for the U.S.S.R.

More to the point, why not just watch the original again? It’s still a creepy, suspenseful thriller. If you haven’t seen it, I hope you’ll check it out of your local library, rent it or buy it before you seen this new version.

ADDENDUM: As I added the link to the DVD to this post, I discovered that there is a special edition due out in July. Is this timed to coincide with the new movie? The trailer says only that it is “Coming Soon.”