Robocop Remake - February 2014 - PG13 Rating Confirmed at ComicCon

[Hanzo the Razor]

I was actually really enjoying this, right until its final act where they clearly ditched the nice ideas they had going and decided to simply ape the original.

The final scenes were fucking shocking.

The whole thing was fucking shocking. I have never sat through such a boring, amateurish, convoluted, undramatic, poorly paced, badly acted, horribly directed and just plain bad film in my life.

It's not even the fact that I love the original and was dreading eventually seeing this. As it's own film, taking away the original, it's just awful. The lead actor looks awful in the suit for a start. He looks like Peter Crouch dressed as Bender from Futurama. The seemingly endless scenes of Gary Oldman and co fretting about how "Murphy" is feeling belonged on the Hallmark channel. In fact the whole thing is like a Sunday afternoon Channel 5 remake of Robocop.

Samuel L Jackson was awful as well. His scenes dragged on and on and were neither clever or well implemented. In fact it would be a (marginally) better film without them. And why is it that only Quentin Tarantino can drag a decent performance out of him these days? His turn in Django Unchained was a revelation compared to the phoned in shite he's been peddling for the last decade or so.

Finally I come to my biggest gripe. We are constantly told that street crime is a huge issue and that the introduction of Robocop has improved things massively. However as far as I can remember we see precisely one instance of Rococop doing anything even vaguely "Robocop-ish". And that only involved coming across three dodgy looking characters hanging around a dodgy looking street, looking dodgy as Roboturd went past on his bloody awful bike thing. They were too busy showing scenes with Michael Keaton (Who interestingly now looks like Murphy did in the original film with the helmet off. His face looks like it's been stretched over someone else's head) worrying about the middle east and what their investors would think if Robocop so much as looked at someone the wrong way.

It actually beggars belief that someone has managed to make a boring, angsty, pofaced Robocop film. I would rather sit through Robocop 3 until my eyes melted than ever see even a minute of this gigantic cinematic turd again.

[DocG]

But apart from all that, Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?

[Hanzo the Razor]

That's clever, man.

[Padlocked]

Watched it last night.

The opening scene was decent. Like, really decent. It set the tone of something that never came, really, and that's the biggest miss. It never really built on the resistance to machines on US soil except through pie charts and Jackson's monotonous delivery in his fake news channel that we never actually saw on TV, and a senate hearing that wasn't in the senate.

The disconnect of the main villain from OCP was a massive misstep. Yes, we know the true villain in Robocop is the corporate world that abuses humanity for a dollar, but the genius of the original was the linking of the personal tragedy to the overarching messaging. Instead, here, we get a hand waved and heavily hinted at link that the captain is dirty and on OCPs payroll, but only as we work through the final act. Terrible.

The main villain also has just 3 scenes, I think, one of which is a flashback.

The action is fucking dull. I know there was some excitement over Padilha doing the film, but having watched Elite Squad 2 before he was connected to the project, I expected the film to be slow paced, ponderous and without dynamic action. That's what it was. It could have been great - shit, the shoot out in the main villains factory was so close in terms of visual style - but it always just felt like CONTINUOUS FIRE AND RUNNING AT THINGS. The action was boring, and difficult to follow. At no point did it really feel like Robocop was in danger, even as he took on 4 ED209s! At least this varied the gunplay a bit and featured him running away and shooting.

Everything it lifted from the original felt heavily handed. That perfect shot as Murphy's humanity peaks out from behind his visor in the original is replaced with half the visor being blow asunder and it seeming a bit fucking stupid when we've been told his head is vulnerable. The hand being kept as an indication of his humanity being stupid in the context of it really not being strong enough to hold on as he fights things, or failing to get blown to pieces. The fact combat mode should take over his mind, but it doesn't consistently.

Even the man vs machine bit is shit. Instead of being pre-programmed, we're given Robocop as a human, who's then "wiped" to help him cope with all the CCTV footage he can see, but whose humanity comes back as he solves his own murder.

And this, really, is the problem. OCP are his saviour, not his murderer. They're a corporate that are seeking to exploit their investment, but their investment was of benefit to the individual. They saved Murphy! Turned him into Robocop! Awesome! And this left me, the viewer, conflicted.

There are some good themes in here, somewhere. Some solid acting. The movement of Robocop was lush, btw. The suit looked great, in silver. But it was sterile, clean and gutless. Worse, it was incoherent and inconsistent. With another director it may have been noteworthy, with a different script it could have been splendid. As it is, it's immediately forgettable.

[Goose]

Great review, sir.

[Smitty]

Exactly as I would have expected.

[Nick R]

This link is about the original rather than the remake, but this seems the best thread to mention it:

Here's an interesting observation about the structure of RoboCop's scenes, comparing the similarities between scenes from the start and end of the film.

http://dejareviewer.com/2014/04/29/cinematic-chiasmus-robocop-is-almost-perfectly-symmetrical-film/

Of course it's obvious that scenes from the end of the film echo those from earlier - but I hadn't realised there were quite that many, or that they happened in such a precisely symmetrical an order. I suppose it's an example of a successful application of the "It's like poetry, they rhyme..." school of filmmaking!

(One of the comments on the post is apparently from the film's co-writer Michael Miner.)

[Commander Jameson]

Wow. That's a really interesting read. Thanks for that. The sequence breakdown is very impressive.

Bonus points for the poetry/rhyme reference.

[Jimmyzilla]

I saw the remake and I should have known better...

What really got me was that even the action was shit, I knew the rest of it didn't have a chance but they could have at least choreographed the gun fights better.

[Mentazm]

I watched this last night and had an opposite reaction. I thought it was almost an overall better film than the original. I really liked how different it was to the original, in both content and tone. I wasn't expecting that at all. Yeah, the action wasn't that great, but it felt very much like an origins story.

What I most liked about it is how well they handled what it means to be human, something that was barely touched on in the original.

The ED209 design was really the only major letdown for me, the original was better.

[AK Bell]

...

I can't watch ...

[Smitty]

By contrast I watched it the other night and thought it was a turd. Flat bland dreck like into darkness. So meh . No character no style flat performances

[Padlocked]

What I most liked about it is how well they handled what it means to be human, something that was barely touched on in the original.

In what ways do you think it did this? I also disagree with your second point, but as I'm not sure of the context I'll wait.

[Commander Jameson]

I found there was more human feeling with that single scene with RoboCop's broken visor than the whole of the remake.

[Glasgowchivas]

I wasn't as offended by this remake as I thought I would be, mainly because the filmaker (mostly) explored new territory than the original. There were deliberate call-backs and mirroring of some scenes but overall it was content to be in it's own thing.

It's not really successful of course as I ultimately found it to be quite boring but I did think that it was a hell of a lot better than I was expecting; particuarly in the first half.

All the complaints about the action, the suit, the lack of any iconic imagery are all valid though.

5/10.

[Smitty]

4/10

[DocG]

I might watch this on the plane later. It seems like plane fodder to me.

[Commander Jameson]

I might watch this on the plane later. It seems like plane fodder to me.

Can you flyyyy, Glyndwr?

[errollw]

Not as awful as I feared.

Glad it tread new ground with the whole vaguely-plausible drone fear angle.

The leading man was a bit pants and it really let itself down towards the end, throwing around references to the original over painfully bad CGI and weak villain posturing.

A decent supporting cast with Samuel L Jackson and Gary Oldman made it more bearable.

[DocG]

Can you flyyyy, Glyndwr?

Forget it, kid. This guy's a serious glasshole.

(Also now I wish my iPad had the original on it instead of the remake. Ho hum.)

[Goose]

Yes, better than expected but still dull.

Made $242M globally, off a $100m budget.

[Mentazm]

I think the main problem was the lack of a proper bad guy. ED209 was emasculated by the sheer number.

Re: the emotion stuff I feel was played on a lot more, what with the dopamine levels stuff. I found that interesting, but then they ruined it by making him "fight" his programming and raise his levels himself. In the first we always knew he was still murphy, in this it felt like Omnicorp could actually make him into a proper robot, up until that dumb moment.

I thought SLJ was great! I guess he was supposed to be a black corporate Glen Beck.

[DocG]

Yes, better than expected but still dull.

this. I had substantially lowered expectations, which the film exceeded. If it had caught me on a really good day I might even consider it a 3/5 film.

Thing that bothered me most:

let's re-cast Lewis, a genuinely badass woman who doesn't have a shoehorned-in lame duck romance sub plot, as a guy because otherwise idiots might be confused that there's a woman who does something other than screaming and kissyface. Fuck's sake.

I also didn't like Oldman's "arc". It was paper thin. "I'm a principled scientist! I like money! I remembered my principles! Each of these changes of heart arrived without warning because the script demanded it!" Jackson was phoning it in and Keaton was nowhere near sleazy enough. All three of them should have been able to kill those roles, they were well cast and the roles themselves could have been interesting I think. Keaton needed more charismatic sleaze, Jackson more edges of wild-eyed bombast leaking out, Oldman a bit more nuance.

Overall it actually had more potential than I thought. I didn't dislike the structural changes. This could have been an alright film with some better execution. Instead it's just meh.

(Bonus marks for making me appreciate the original all the more, though.)

[Smitty]

Every aspect of the film is paper-thin.

Christ those 'action' scenes. What a load of bollocks.

[Jumble Jumble]

5/10 and 4/10 aren't as bad as I was expecting actually. I haven't seen it yet, but I'll probably put it on as a background movie while I'm working on something if it's at that level.

1/10 is what I'd give Zombie Strippers, which I think is probably the worst film I've ever seen.

[Daewoo Sex Machina]

Forget it, kid. This guy's a serious glasshole.

(Also now I wish my iPad had the original on it instead of the remake. Ho hum.)

Do you remember the version that ITV used to put on? Airhead, mothercrusher, why me, etc...

[Daewoo Sex Machina]

Blimey, that's pretty conclusive. Thanks for tracking it down.

That was quite interesting. You could even see the American flag in the searchlight in the hostage scene.

[Kryptonian]

I'm a massive (original) Robocop fan and thought this was alright. About 1/3 of the way in I was thinking what the hell have they made here, they've got it totally wrong but then it became apparent it wasn't trying to ape the original at all and watched it for what it was rather than comparing it.

I thought the ED209 fight was interesting too, I wasn't expecting the brutality of a particular bit.

[Monkeyboy]

I thought the ED209 fight was interesting too, I wasn't expecting the brutality of a particular bit.

Well, whatever that brutal bit was (can't say I remember it myself), it probably only seemed brutal because the rest of the film was so bland.

[Kryptonian]

Er, they completely aped the original's final act (sans Steel Mill). Only it was a really shit version.

Did they?

I meant more the mannerisms / personality of Robocop - he started off with a lot of humanity intact but they turned it down whereas in the original he was emotionless when he was first created.

Well, whatever that brutal bit was (can't say I remember it myself), it probably only seemed brutal because the rest of the film was so bland.

Brutal might have been too strong a word, I meant the bit where he

severed his own arm

but yeah! it stood out compared to the rest due to it's rating - what was it, a 12? While the original was chock full of violence - the difference in the execution by Clarence's gang and the explosion that wouldn't have been out of place in Hollyoaks in the new one was quite dramatic.