RoboCop

The great thing about not getting paid to pay attention to your blog is that, by the time you get around to fleshing out a thought or idea that's been bouncing around your head for a few weeks, someone else who does it for a living has probably already written about it. Two weeks ago I watched the original 1987 RoboCop starring Peter Weller, hoping to validate next year's remake. But of course, being a grad student and all, among other setbacks -- cough, Mark never got around to watching it, cough -- I did not have time to write until now. A couple days later a Cracked article was published covering pretty much the same topic. Being a good sport and all (and an avid reader of Cracked), I'll go ahead and link the article here.

(I'll point out that I avoided reading the article before writing this, as not to steal any ideas, consciously or otherwise)

I won't blame you for choosing their article over this one; they have funny pictures. But damn it, I sat down to watch this movie and by God, I'm going to write about it!

Where to begin. How about I first remind everyone of the plot. Alex Murphy (Weller) is a policeman in near future Detroit, where crime is out of control, and the police force is privately owned by a technology company currently developing a machine that will replace cops and more effectively restore order. When Alex Murphy gets killed in the line of duty, he becomes the guinea pig for an alternative program at the same company, one attempting to meld man and machine. As a result, he becomes RoboCop (I think in the '80s it was just cool to prefix words with robo-).

Directed by Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers) you should pretty much know what to expect. For one thing, I am now convinced that his main method of world-building is cutting to faux commercials that provide exposition of the setting and time period: futuristic organ transplants, extremely violent video games, and other things meant to juxtapose advanced technology with a declining society. Part of what irritates me about this is that in some sense, this vision of the future has already been achieved. We have medical technology these days that would boggle Asimov, and violence in video games is laughable. And yet, unlike the world of RoboCop, our society continues to function.

RoboCop, having spawned a couple of sequels, seems like a bit of a cult classic. It has the shoddy plot, ultra-violence, and poor CG that are the mainstays of a 'great' '80s sci-fi actioner. And yet, watching it, I was mostly annoyed at how terrible a cop RoboCop proved to be (each perp either got away or was brutally murdered). It also aligned disturbingly well with The Crow, if you replace vengeful ghost with cyborg, right down to the cartoonish villain archetypes. Now that I think about it, a Crow-RoboCop crossover would be pretty awesome (RoboCrow? Crowbot?).

Anyways, let me rope myself in here. This movie is being remade, because robots are obviously a new theme with seemingly endless cinematic possibility.

That is assuming you ignore Elysium, three Iron Man movies, Dredd 3D, and to a lesser extent Avatar, the Matrix, AI: Artificial Intelligence, and Wall-e, all films that ask us what it means to be human. (Well okay, I put Dredd in there because I like it, and the new RoboCop suit is a blatant ripoff of judge armor).

Decide for yourself...

At least Urban gets an ass kicking chin.

Okay, this is just frustrating.

I mentioned something earlier about endless possibilities. I do truly believe that there are new ideas out there to be explored, even in the realm of robot sci-fi. There are thousands of original and exciting robot and man/machine stories waiting to be told. (I'll reference Isaac Asimov again; I'll do it, I swear). And as I said, the technology of RoboCop is not far off, what with pilotless drones and constant advancement in military robotics. So why limit a story idea to remaking a hokey, ultra-violent '80s action movie, when the real world that we live in is already more futuristic and interesting? On top of this, the next few years are going to be overwhelmed with sci-fi movies, all trying to up the "wow, future" ante.

In conclusion, the 2012 remake of Total Recall is a good example of why remaking an '80s sci-fi film just doesn't work. Oh hey, and that was also based on an original by Paul Verhoeven.

As it happens, the trailer for the remake was recently released. Check it out and see what you think.