RoboCop (José Padilha, 2014)

[flyonthewall2983]

First trailer

[knives]

Or: What Robocop was making fun of.

[Zot!]

RoboCop

Detroit now has mountains?

[flyonthewall2983]

RoboCop

Detroit now has mountains?

Drone technology is a major part of the new story, and according to the director the first scenes take place in the Middle East.

[Finch]

It looks absolutely terrible. I'll give this a wide berth and keep watching the original, my favourite action film ever and a great satire, instead. The only good thing to come out of this would be if Sony/MGM gave the original a new BD that Verhoeven's masterpiece deserves.

[criterion10]

I'll be avoiding this film like the plague. Looks like it's going to get everything wrong, so very wrong.

The original Robocop is a favorite film of mine. I worship my OOP Criterion edition.

[flyonthewall2983]

Since I don't hold the same reverence for the original that a lot of people do, I guess I'm more open-minded to this new version of the story.

[colinr0380]

So they've changed the corporation into a benevolent one and kept Murphy's relationship with his family as an ongoing thing, rather than have him wrestle with being an 'owned' piece of kit and not the human being he once was, forbidden to contact his family? This can't end well.

What happened with that Total Recall remake? I haven't seen it yet but didn't that also miss most of the satirical point of the ultraviolence in the Verhoeven original, turning it into a routine sci-fi actioner?

[flyonthewall2983]

What happened with that Total Recall remake? I haven't seen it yet but didn't that also miss most of the satirical point of the ultraviolence in the Verhoeven original, turning it into a routine sci-fi actioner?

I haven't seen it either but if it did, it's just as well since the "original" is apparently not very faithful to We Can Sell It For You Wholesale.

[onedimension]

These all seem on the surface like dumb changes made to draw in an audience. That said, hope triumphing over experience, good and accurate movie trailers are rare, and it's possible this movie could be ok. Nothing in these alterations is absolutely incapable of being done well, and I can understand the impulse to adapt the premise to a new era. Technology is certainly much more interwoven with our personal lives than it was 25 years ago. This is my fair side talking, though.. It looks painfully dumb.

[John Cope]

Well, this looks pretty pro forma (and the mere presence of Jackson in these things has become almost suffocating, verging on self-parody) but I will give Padilha (whose work has been great till now) the benefit of the doubt until I have solid reason to do otherwise. His L.A. Times interview was typically thoughtful and eloquent. Hopefully some of that will carry over unobstructed.

[Forrest Taft]

What happened with that Total Recall remake? I haven't seen it yet but didn't that also miss most of the satirical point of the ultraviolence in the Verhoeven original, turning it into a routine sci-fi actioner?

There wasn't a hint of satire left in the remake. Wasn't much fun either. In the Verhoeven interview on the latest BD release of the original, he applauded the casting of Colin Farrell, saying that with Arnold as his leading man he had no choice but to make the movie funny, even if he sometimes wanted to go for a more serious, philosophical tone. He was hoping we would get to see a more serious take on it in the remake, but I guess he wasn't expecting such a tedious, humorless outcome. When the film finally opened, Farrell and Neil Mortiz both sort of dismissed the original as Kitsch, pissing off Verhoeven, who amusingly said he enjoyed watching it bomb.

[stroszeck]

The remake grossed $200 million on a $125 million production budget I don't think that exactly qualified as a total bomb even factoring in marketing.

[jindianajonz]

I thought I heard somewhere a good indicator of success for a film is if the gross is double the production costs; if that is true then the film certainly didn't do all that well.

[Forrest Taft]

Huh. Would have never guessed it grossed that much. 'Bomb' was the word I chose, and it is perhaps inaccurate. The story I linked to simply uses the word 'Fail'. But the movie certainly underperformed compared to what many expected/predicted, on top of which it got mostly poor reviews, and if memory serves it was almost universally disliked by those who actually saw it (and bothered to express opinions etc on the internet). So it's safe to say it wasn't a success.

[Matt]

The old saw is that it costs just as much to market and distribute a movie (prints and advertising = P&A) as it does to make it. However, contemporary movies now earn more than half their total revenue in the video/on-demand market, so it's archaic to call something a bomb just because it didn't make twice its announced budget in its few weeks at the theatrical box office. It may have been true before video rentals existed, but it's not the case anymore. Furthermore, video and on-demand revenue figures are not trumpeted as loudly in the press as theatrical box office figures (and are typically not available to the general public at all), so it's much harder these days to determine the true financial success or failure of a movie unless you're in the business and have access to those proprietary sales and market reports.

The 2012 Total Recall did not do well in the US, but it did quite respectably in foreign markets and I'm sure it's done a fair amount of business in video and on-demand. It's not the massive blockbuster that the original was, but I don't think anyone expected it to be (given the budget and the choice of director and star). It pretty much hit the mark it was expected to.

[rohming]

I like Padilha, the interviews he's given about this project are some of the more thoughtful I've seen from a director about a Hollywood action flick in some time, and so it is pretty much on those grounds alone that I still anticipate this movie. I fear for it, mostly, because Padilha was actually so bold as to state that it's been a nightmare working with the studio on it. The trailer is generic and bland-looking and for that I primarily fault the cinematography, which looks TV-movie quality and a far cry from the vibrant, gritty dynamic of the Elite Squad films (same DP so I don't know what happened other than 1) the guy's not playing to his strengths, or 2) the trailer is not a representative sample). If you can get past the presentation in the trailer, though, there's still some hints at a pretty compelling story...but maybe I'm projecting too much from the director's interviews.

[Dylan]

So by having RoboCop don "darker" metal, is this an attempt to make him out to be another "dark knight" or something?

[onedimension]

Is the new version set in Detroit, too? That could have been a fascinating angle...

[Roger Ryan]

Is the new version set in Detroit, too? That could have been a fascinating angle...

Not if it's supposed to be modern-day Detroit; poor Robocop would be left wandering vacant streets mourning the loss of his pension and wondering if the next paycheck will even clear!

[Zot!]

Is the new version set in Detroit, too? That could have been a fascinating angle...

Not if it's supposed to be modern-day Detroit; poor Robocop would be left wandering vacant streets mourning the loss of his pension and wondering if the next paycheck will even clear!

That's actually the plot of the original film. The police force of a bankrupt Detroit is sold to a corporation who intends to replace the cops with robots. Very prescient indeed.

[Roger Ryan]

Is the new version set in Detroit, too? That could have been a fascinating angle...

Not if it's supposed to be modern-day Detroit; poor Robocop would be left wandering vacant streets mourning the loss of his pension and wondering if the next paycheck will even clear!

That's actually the plot of the original film. The police force of a bankrupt Detroit is sold to a corporation who intends to replace the cops with robots. Very prescient indeed.

I forgot about that aspect (haven't seen the film since the early 90s)! I don't remember if the original film predicted the dramatic population loss, but there's a reason Detroit keeps being chosen for major motion picture production despite the incentive slashing: very little crowd control is needed and street closures can be accomplished with ease since the downtown area is vacant most of the time anyway!

[Lionel]

Or: What Robocop was making fun of.

My thoughts exactly!

[who is bobby dylan]

Yeah because Robocop's enduring legacy as a satire, is for it's prescience to make fun of future Robocop movies.

Here's another interview with Padilha.

[warren oates]

Yeah because Robocop's enduring legacy as a satire, is for it's prescience to make fun of future Robocop movies.

Or perhaps just the ones that seem to mindlessly embrace the glossy corporate militarism the original was skewering? Padilha's documentary Bus 174 was not bad. But those Elite Squad cop films are superficial, muddled and middling. And this reboot looks terrible.