I don’t typically like remakes because most of the time they’re lazy, trading on the name of a property that’s remotely familiar with people so that film makers don’t have to do something original, running the risk that whatever they do might not resonate with audiences.

Or there’s another slightly – I suspect – more sinister reason.

Sometimes movies are produced in other countries, and domestic studios remake them – as opposed to backing them domestically and releasing them either with subtitles or dubbed – because they think fewer people would want to see a movie that’s in some instances full of non-white faces.

And I don’t mean to imply that racism is the only reason – or the primary one for that matter – foreign movies are remade for domestic audiences, though I get the feeling that it’s a (mostly) unspoken motivator.

And besides, you could offer Rec (2007) – remade domestically as Quarantine (2008) – to counter that argument if you’re being particularly shallow/clever (Rec is a Spanish movie, but the people are Spanish by way of Europe and it was remade) though given any sort of thought one can probably see that one example does not invalidate the other.

Which brings me to Alone, which revolves around a guy who’s stranded in his apartment, running out of food and sanity, while chaos rages all around him in the form of a pandemic that turns people into cannibalistic rage monsters (not the green, massive Mark Ruffalo-variety).

If you look at the trailer and it seems familiar it might be because you’ve seen #Alive, current screening on Netflix, which is a South Korean film that Alone is a remake of.

It’s worth mentioning that #Alive is a pretty good movie though I don’t think the lead is as handsome as Tyler Posey though that’s not enough reason to remake it.

Though I get the feeling that it might have indeed figured into someone’s calculus though.