Here’s what the ‘West Side Story’ remake looks like side-by-side with the original

7 December 2021, 16:02 | Updated: 13 December 2021, 14:40

Watch the trailer for Steven Spielberg's West Side Story

West Side Story – how it started, and how it’s going.

Steven Spielberg’s film remake of the great 1959 Leonard Bernstein musical, West Side Story, is soon to land on the silver screen.

It’s a classic tale of forbidden love between Maria (Rachel Zegler) and Tony (Ansel Elgort), and the warring gangs that divide them, the Sharks and Jets – but with a fresh, 2021-coloured lick of paint.

The remake has cast only actors with Hispanic backgrounds for the film’s Hispanic characters, in contrast to the 1961 film version starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer which cast a number of white actors in makeup to play Puerto Rican characters.

There’s also been a lot of attention given to the striking shots of the Sharks and Jets’ ‘rumble’ scene in Spielberg’s remake.

Read more: West Side Story 2021 movie – we reveal the soundtrack, cast and release date

As for the music, asking Venezuelan maestro Gustavo Dudamel to conduct the score was a money shot. The sweeping strings and build-up of Bernstein and Sondheim’s timeless ‘Somewhere’, heard in a delicate rendering by Rita Moreno, is shiver-inducing.

But to help us get a clearer idea of how the remake will differ visually from the 1961 film, here is a shot-for-shot comparison...

With curiosity mounting as to how Spielberg’s remake will differ from the 1961 film, a YouTuber has put together a video to compare even more shots.

“This side-by-side is intended to show the different choices made by two groups of filmmakers sixty years apart when adapting the same work,” YouTuber Matt Skuta said.

Watch his work below.

West Side Story (1961/2021) side-by-side comparison