The idea of remaking a film isn't inherently wrong. Unfortunately more often than not they aren't made by people who have any love for and understanding of the original material, and/or no clear idea how to make it their own.
Steven Soderbergh has a knack for remakes:
Solaris (2002),
Ocean's 11 (2001),
The Underneath (1995) and
Traffic (2000).
The Underneath, starring Peter Gallagher, Alison Elliott, William Fichtner and Joe Don Baker is a very good remake of a Noir classic, Robert Soidmak's
Criss Cross (1949), which starred Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo, Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally. A couple of the scenes are almost shot for shot, but overall Soderbergh takes the same premise and character types, amps it up with his own style, and plays out basically the same plot but with his own twists and turns along the way. Soderbergh's Oscar-winning
Traffic is a condensed remake of the 5-hour 1989 BBC television mini-series
"Traffik". That one was set in the London, Hamburg and Pakistan. Soderbergh changed those settings to Washington D.C./Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Tijuana, the main character types are kept the same, and although it is condensed the structure is essentially the same. Once again Soderbergh's visual and editing style is very evident, but in the larger respects it is a faithful remake that also makes specific points of its own.
Soderbergh has a really good eye for material that he admires and respects, but that he can do his own thing to without completely trashing what the original succeeded at. He still finds a way to make it very much his. Everything he seems to do right, so many remakes do wrong. They have no reverence for the material, don't seem to even understand what made the original worthwhile, and the end result is a hacky piece of garbage that is a remake in name only because the message or energy of the first movie is completely absent in the new version.
In the theatre, a playwright understands implicitly that if successful their work will be reproduced and even retranslated by different actors and directors down the line. Because the theatre is a live beast that requires it be performed over and over and over again, this is understood. But since film theoretically lasts forever and the director and actors hone their one and only performance until it remains one way forever, it's less a given that the project will be produced again and again in subsequent generations. BUT, when somebody like Soderbergh tackles somebody else's film he seems to approach it like a play. This was Tarkovsky's take on the material, this is how they staged it, shot it, cast it: let's see what we can do to remain true to the same ideas in the Lem novel, but also bring our own into the whole.