The original version of 3 Idiots is probably my favorite Bollywood film of all time, because of how closely its themes resonated with me and my fellow engineering friends. For a whole generation of Indian-American students, Rancho was almost a superhero - a genius engineer, but always on his and only his terms. Because of this, I was thrilled to hear about the Spanish remake, 3 Idiotas. I was hoping for a movie equally powerful and magical. Unfortunately, 3 Idiots falls well short of its potential. The basic plot is the same - 3 students (the 'idiots') meet each other at an intense engineering college run by a ruthless director. All three have their own motivations and pressures for being there. The film chronicles the ups and downs of their academic and social lives. Later, in the present day, two of the friends, (Beto and Felipe in 3 Idiotas, Raju and Farhan in 3 Idiots) search for a lead on their friend (Pancho in 3 Idiotas, Rancho in 3 Idiots), whom they haven't seen since graduation. There are some key differences between the original and the remake which illuminate the ways in which director Carlos Bolado didn't fully understand what made the original movie work so well.
- 3 Idiotas runas for about 1 hour and 45 minutes. anti half the runtime of 3 Idiots. I knew this might be problematic before I stepped foot in the theater. The movie's plot revolves around its titular 3 idiots bonding through trials and tribulations of college. A movie like this needs time for those relationships to breathe and blossom. 3 Idiots has several scenes of the three friends shooting the breeze and pulling all-nighters. These scenes are sorely lacking from 3 idiots, and the ones that are there are edited with too many cuts, which makes the friendship feel rushed and underdeveloped. I'm not saying 3 Idiots needed to be 3 and a half hours long, but it needed more scenes of their friendship growing and unfolding in real time.
- When we first meet Pancho (Alfonso Dosal), we immediately see him ogling Mariana (Martha Higareda). We later learn that Pancho signs up for all the same classes as Mariana. This quickly establishes Pancho's infatuation with Mariana as his primary trait, and makes his interest in engineering secondary. Though the film later develops Pancho's engineering passion, his introduction is badly botched - for reference, in the original Rancho simply wanders from class to class (even ones in which he isn't enrolled), for pure love of learning. (Ironically, this is the kind of sexist rewrite that happens to female characters in a lot of movies).
- Furthermore, I think this movie does a great disservice to Mariana, compared to how 3 Idiots treats Pia. In 3 Idiots, we don't meet Pia until well after it has been established just how spectacular Rancho is. Thus, when we see how Pia catches his eye and flummoxes his usual charm, we automatically infer that Pia must be pretty incredible in her own right. From there, 3 Idiots gives Pia a lot of interesting material - she struggles to reconcile her love for her father with her distaste for his educational philosophy. One of the most powerful moments in 3 Idiots involves Pia confronting her dad about his role in his son's (and her brother's) suicide. There's no such conflict for Mariana in 3 Idiots; she's a doctor who secretly loves Pancho. The end.
- Early in 3 Idiots, a student asks for more time to finish his senior project. He explains to the dean that he fell behind on his classwork while caring for his sick father. Unmoved, the dean declares that he can give sympathy, but not an extension, and informs the student that he will not graduate. The student throws his project - a helicopter with a camera - in the trash. Rancho discovers it, fixes it, and flies it up to the student's room - only to find that the student has hung himself. This vignette tells us a lot about Rancho's curiosity and skill - and about the intense pressure faced by many of the engineering students. In the equivalent scene in 3 Idiotas, after the dean (Rodrigo Murray) informs the students that he won't graduate, we literally never see or hear about that student again. Pancho finds his project in the trash, and marvels at it, without doing anything about it. This scene shows how regimented the dean is, but misses all the other thematic points in the original movie.
- That's not the only suicide attempt that the new movie excises. In the original film, the three idiots go to Pia's home to help Rancho profess his love to Pia. In their drunken escape, Raju pisses on the dean's door and curses him loudly; the dean was up and glimpses Raju scampering away. The next day he gives Raju the choice: be expelled, or implicate Raju. Raju takes option 3: jump out of the window. This choice shows his fear of failure, his desperation to graduate, and his commitment to Rancho. He has made an active choice, with consequences. When he wakes up from his coma, it makes logical sense that he would learn to stop letting fear hold him back - fear led I'm to take what he thought was the easy way out, and it didn't solve his problems. By contrast, in 3 Idiots, after Felipe (Christian Vazquez) is expelled, he gets hit by a car. It's an accident, not a choice, so it tells us nothing about Felipe and the audience can't possibly be as invested in its consequences. I guess you can argue this lets Felipe appreciate life more because he sees how quickly it can be taken away, but there's no evidence that Felipe didn't fully appreciate life before the accident. All in all this is emotional manipulation for unearned sentiment.
- Raju wakes up when Rancho claims that Farhan will marry Raju's sister, for whom the family hasn't been able to find a groom who wants a reasonable dowry. This makes sense, because it was previously established how much Raju cares about his sister and hates when his friends joke about her. By contrast, in 3 Idiotas, Felipe wakes up when when Pancho makes up a story about an amazing play by the Mexican national futbol team. It was literally never mentioned prior that Raju cared about futbol. I'm not saying 3 Idiots needed an outdated subplot about Felipe's sister, but it could've used a better impetus for Raju waking up from the coma. This isn't a big problem in and of itself, but its a microcosm for the movie's overall haphazard writing.
- 3 Idiots had a character named Chatur, nicknamed The Silencer for his incessant flatulence. This gag gets repeated, but typically only as a small joke within a larger scene. 3 Idiotas takes this gag to the extreme - multiple scenes end with a joke about entire rooms needing to be evacuated because of Isodoro (Vadhir Derbez) passing gas. This might tickle your funny bone, but it does absolutely nothing with mine.
- In 3 Idiot, Rancho espouses the mantra "All is Well" when the going gets tough; he explains that this is what they would tell him in his orphanage growing up, even when there was a break in or robbery. In 3 Idiots, Pancho repeats this phrase at random times, but the significance of the phrase is never explained. It has no meaning or impact in this film.
- In 3 Idiots, during the student convocation the dean shows the students a pen designed for use in outer space. He was given the pen by his dean, and told to pass it on to a student whom he deemed worthy. Rancho flippantly asks "why didn't the astronauts use a pencil?". The director fumbles for an answer before shooting Rancho a dirty look - and immediately we know so much about both characters and their relationship. Later, after Rancho designs a vacuum cleaner suction to help deliver the dean's grandson, he explains that if a pencil broke in space the graphite could float into the wrong space and mess up the entire ship. He then bestows the pen on Rancho. It's a powerful sign of the two characters meeting each other halfway. 3 Idiots never mentions the pen at the beginning. After the delivery, the director gives Pancho the pen along with a vague explanation about that pen meaning a lot to his wife. This means nothing to us as an audience because this is the first and last detail the movie actually gives us about his wife. The movie doesn't invest in getting us to care about the pen, and predictably the payoff is reduced when we actually see it pass from one generation to the next.
- In 3 Idiots, after graduation Rancho leaves on his own volition. It's an active choice that makes us wonder what Rancho is hiding or feeling. In 3 Idiots, Pancho is blackmailed by Isodoro into leaving the school. IT's a passive non-decision and thus carries little emotional or thematic weight.
While I appreciate the attempt at a remake of a Bollywood classic, ultimately 3 Idiots fails at basic screenwriting tenets - like writing active characters and matching setups with corresponding payoffs. The result is a movie that undoes many of the best aspects of the original while adding nothing new or interesting.
Grade: 3/10
