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What happens when video games enter the classroom? For the past thirty years, video games have been mired in negative stereotypes. Considered revolutionary in the 70s, brainless diversion in the 80s, youth-corrupting entertainment in the 90s—attitudes towards video games have run the gamut. In the past ten years, there has been a palpable change. Games have gone from social pariahs to hotly-contested media seeking artistic validation. But it isn’t the conversation about the video game’s place in the artistic world that is radically changing the way games are used and thought of in our society. Thanks to the work of literacy and education researchers, video games are gaining prestige as powerful learning tools.

The Karate Kid is a story of two lost souls, sans fish bowl, and a classic archetype of the surrogate father-son dynamic. Jaden Smith puts his cute kid mojo to work as Dre, who’s uprooted from his childhood home when his widowed mother is transferred to China as part of her job. The local handyman, Mr. Han, takes compassion on him when he’s continually beaten by bullies who are almost as skilled in kung fu as the handyman. Naturally, Mr. Han’s kung fu is better, both because the hero’s journey requires it to be, and because Mr. Han is played by Jackie Chan. As conventional as the story is (and familiar, given that it’s a remake of a beloved 80s classic), it works because it is a completely artless approach to a well-worn story.

Professionally executed from beginning to end, the exact purpose of Samuel Bayer’s New Nightmare (a.k.a. Nightmare Redux) isn’t really clear. Apart from the vibe that it’s trying to be a crowd-pleaser, the precise aim of how it expects to do that is muddy. Barely a remake, it’s more of a retread, gathering up some of the original film’s more indelible scenes, reshuffling them, and dealing them from the bottom of the deck — apparently at random — in an attempt to catch established fans off guard while simultaneously re-entrenching those scenes in the minds of a new generation that might (rather unbelievably) not be at all familiar with the source material.