We finally have our first peek at the upcoming remake/reboot of “RoboCop,” due February 7, 2014.
It seems like this one’s been in the pipeline forever, and while it’s way too soon to gauge the quality—and, let’s be honest, the necessity—of the finished product, the teaser trailer offers a mixed bag of excitement and woe.
Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 “RoboCop” certainly ranks in the highest echelon of the action and sci-fi genres, deftly mixing a superhero tale and revenge fantasy with biting social satire that ridicules violent culture, corporate and mass-media proliferation and consumerism run amok.
Despite two stunningly awful theatrical sequels and a few lesser-known straight-to-DVD projects, it’s a no-brainer that MGM opted to re-launch the “RoboCop” franchise.
Yet, as proven with many a remake that pales in comparison to its original, you can’t necessarily capture the same lighting in a bottle.
Based only on the two-minute preview, here’s what we know so far.
The bones of the screenplay look to be essentially the same: in a futuristic crime-ridden dystopia, heroic cop Alex Murphy is done in by bad guys and subsequently resurrected as a part-man part-machine crime-stopper dubbed RoboCop. But there’s an unexpected bug in the program—the cyborg is haunted by memories of his former human life and family and he still retains some semblance of emotion and free will.
Early on in the teaser, it’s revealed that New Murphy (Joel Kinnaman—um, who?) becomes the victim of a car bomb. Considering the vital symbolism of the gruesome and barbaric “crucifixion” sequence in Paul Verhoeven’s original, this tweak to the origin story might prove to be more damaging than the filmmakers ever pondered. I don’t get a good vibe from this change.
The new Robosuit is black, with a retractable visor accented with a glowing band of red light borrowed from “Tron.” This means we’ll get to see more of Murphy’s face beneath his armor, and we’ll surely get an earful of hardcore fans’ arguments for and against this (much like the “Judge Dredd” versus “Dredd” scenario where we often saw Sylvester Stallone’s face in the 1995 version while the 2012 reboot remained faithful to the source material by keeping Karl Urban under the helmet for the entire movie).
Glimpses of the new RoboCop in action are disheartening, in that he doesn’t appear to move like a machine. Perhaps because original RoboCop Peter Weller’s eyes were shielded beneath his visor for most of the running time, his physical performance was that much more emphatic. I don’t get any sense of that here, but maybe it’s simply due to the way the trailer has been edited. With longer camera takes and a fully realized sound design, the servo whirs of his body movements and the heavy clumps of his footsteps may compensate for new RoboCop’s far-too-fluid motion.
On the upside, the supporting cast looks interesting, featuring the likes of Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, Jackie Earle Haley, Michael Keaton and Miguel Ferrer (who played Bob Morton in the 1987 original). Visually, the scope here seems larger, though Verhoeven and his crew managed to work wonders on a big scale with a relatively limited $13 million budget in 1987. Towards the end of the trailer, a fleeting glimpse of an Enforcement Droid in action gave me a genuine thrill, even if the final CGI rendering looks more plastic than the stop-motion puppetry of the original.
Budgeted at roughly $100 million, the filmmakers spent some considerable coin on making this new “RoboCop,” a notion that fills me with utter dread: in order to recoup the production, distribution and advertising costs, the final release will most likely be watered down to a softer and bloodless PG-13 so the kiddies can get to see it, even though the pre-pubescent audience was definitely NOT Paul Verhoeven’s target demographic for the original (which underwent numerous rounds of edits before the ratings board lowered the initial “X” rating to a more marketable “R”). If anyone over at MGM has the cajones, they’d be wise to reconsider this strategy and instead go full-speed-ahead with a “hard-R” cut.
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| Or, the much lauded Rated-G cut. |
Finally, what gives me the most trepidation is the apparent lack of faith MGM is showing by dumping “RoboCop” in the middle of the winter wasteland (the movie was reportedly scheduled for this past summer but got bumped). Any February release date ought to be dubbed “A Good Day to Die Hard,” in deference to that wretched fifth “Die Hard” flick that opened and bombed the same time earlier this year.
I’m afraid. Very afraid.
