Emmanuelle is back! The legendary porn film is being remade 50 years later and the reviews are already in: is it as hot as the 1970s original or is it destined to… flop?

The remake of classic erotic drama Emmanuelle returns 50 years after the film shocked viewers around the world with its steamy scenes, but the rehash of the French film that was noted for its adult plot is just one big anticlimax, critics said.

The 1974 “softcore” cult hit starring Sylvia Kristel follows the erotic adventures of a young French woman who travels to Bangkok, Thailand, to enhance her sexual experience.

Directed by French filmmaker Just Jaeckin, the adult classic caused a huge stir, with millions flocking to see Kristel, who appeared half-naked on a poster with a pearl necklace dangling over her breasts.

The film played for more than a decade on the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Spaniards, who lived under Franco’s dictatorship that saw the scandalous Emmanuelle banned, flocked to France to see the racy film.

But the most recent version, directed by Audrey Diwan and starring French actress Noemie Merlant, tells a revised story of Emmanuelle’s sexual awakening as she travels to Hong Kong.

The French-made erotic film was famous for bringing softcore pornography to mainstream media.

Its leading actress, Kristel, also became famous for her steamy nude scenes in 40 other films, starring in adult versions of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and the World War I spy drama Mata Hari.

But in the era of MeToo, the version of Diwan, which premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain over the weekend, appears to have ditched its raunchy sex scenes amid its aim to shift female sexuality and pleasure away from the male gaze.

Talking with The times, Diwan said the film is “about how we treat pleasure in our society, not just sexual pleasure,” speaking of the surprising lack of explicit sex scenes in the film.

“If people want to see sex scenes, they have the Internet,” he said.

But as reviews of the film have poured in, the general consensus is that the long-awaited remake of the French erotic drama “can only be considered a disappointment from Diwan.” According to Variety, who called the film “a great anticlimax.”

The American magazine said that “the most striking departure from the 1974 film is a significant reduction in sexual content,” adding that “saying something new and substantial about female desire while also honoring the film’s defining spirit of bland, gauzy horniness is a complicated and potentially unfeasible task.”

For Daily screen, The updated version of the 1974 soft-porn classic is a “crippling, pointless reaction” to the original film, while IMBD called the revival “disappointingly hollow.”

Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter He has said that ‘the erotic drama Emmanuelle is more or less the embarrassing exercise in mindless revisionist cinema that most expected it to be’.

French newspaper Le Figaro He said he does not expect the film to be screened on the Champs-Élysées for another ten years.

Some critics have enjoyed the feminist approach of the new film, however, with European Cinema praising her for placing ‘woman in the foreground as a desiring subject, full of beauty, cinematic power and sensuality’.