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The Manchurian Candidate is a 2004 American film based on the 1954 novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, and a reimagining of the previous 1962 film.
The film stars Denzel Washington as Marco, Liev Schreiber as Shaw and Meryl Streep as Shaw's mother. While the plot still centers around a candidate brainwashed with the involvement of his mother and her own political aims, the mechanics of the story and the parties involved are quite different in cases.
Tagline: This summer everything is under control.
Plot
The movie has Shaw himself as the vice-presidential candidate; and Marco, also brainwashed but not fully aware of it, as the assassin. The film attempts to adapt itself to the modern world by having the brainwashing conducted by Manchurian Global, a large multinational corporation and government contractor, with the aim of expanding corporate influence as well as government contracts for themselves. Instead of capture during the Korean War, and being brainwashed by communists, Marco and Shaw's unit is captured during the first Gulf War (Desert Storm), and brainwashed at a secret Manchurian Global facility.
Eugenie's incredibly friendly first meeting with Marco is retained almost verbatim, and made realistic when it is discovered that she is an FBI agent assigned to monitor him. It is Eugenie who then discovers Marco after the altered assassination (who kills Shaw, having just won the election, as opposed to the original where the assassination takes place just before a candidacy declaration). Unlike the original, where Shaw commits suicide after killing Iselin, the assassin (Marco) is subdued before he can do so.
After hospitalization and conditioning, Marco helps the feds locate the abandoned island facility where he and his unit were brainwashed. In the original version, the question of whether the Communists' brainwashing technology could be used again are never addressed, and they simply disappear from the story.
The motives behind the brainwashed assassination plot in the 2004 version are more straightforward than the collusive politics of the original version: a corporation desires increased influence over government, so brainwashes a candidate who can be made pliable to their wishes.
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