Just got back. I can’t believe anyone is defending this turd. All I have to say here is that Robocop’s leg pistol was a taser, A TASER. WTF?!?!?
Boring as hell. I’m ok with telling a new story, but forcing this movie into a PG-13 rating killed it. You just can’t have Robocop without the ultraviolence and foul language.
Oh, the motorcycle was weak too. As were the totally 1-note wife and kid. And his partner.
(In the interest of full disclosure Robocop is my favorite movie of all time)
Given how these remakes are apparently dumbing down the source material, methinks a remake of that film right now would give you an aneurysm.
I’d buy that for a dollar!
To be fair…
…it’s obvious the corporate execs view him the same way in this movie. For PR reasons they wanted to emphasise his humanity which is why they publicised Alex Murphy as a hero they saved from death. In private they repeatedly refer to him as property. I’m sure they regretted doing that instead of just letting Mrs Murphy think she was donating her husband’s body to science. This does create a major plot hole. The whole purpose of the Robocop project was to sway public option in favour of letting machines do police work on US soil (& have the power of life & death over citizens), but at the same time they kept marketing him as human with cybernetic enhancements and not a machine :dubious:
Only if the dumbing down occurred for the sake of the writers and not the audience. Starship Troopers should be aspirational military sci-fi. It should be a movie about what we should want our military to be, and you can do that with broad strokes without losing the essence of it. You can do that if you don’t think the military we have today is up to scratch, but you can’t do it if you’re an idiot like Paul Verhoeven. The only thing he did right was including women in front-line units.
And he did a good job with that scene. As a musician myself, I found that scene touching. It was also a good way to introduce one of the major themes of the movie.
He had two guns, one in each leg. The go over it in the scene where they introduce Jackie Earle Haley’s character. One is a stun gun, and one is a semi-auto/burst/full-auto.
It didn’t have all the squibs, which was disappointing, but I thought the action was fine. As much as I love the original, I did always fine the slow walking part he did a little weird. I liked that he was much more maneuverable. Also, a huge chunk of the violence was directed at drones rather than people, so I think that’s part of how they managed to skirt the R-rating. I do think the action could have been even better if they hadn’t gone with that.
I’m not really sure what was so weak about the motorcycle other than just how it looked, which was a little lame. I think it actually makes more sense for him, given that he doesn’t need a partner.
I will agree that the wife and son were very flat and boring characters. But, really, they’re just there as a plot device, so I’m not so bothered by that. I loved Gary Oldman’s character, I found his motivation compelling, and I thought he had good chemistry; then again, Gary Oldman always brings it.
Also, for the record the original Robocop isn’t my all-time favorite, but I do love it and it’s definitely up there.
My expectations going in, based on reviews was that it wasn’t as good as the original, but it was better than Robocop 2. I would tend to agree with that. Like you, I loved the opening sequence, and the social commentary on current major issues we’re looking at, terrorism and drone strikes, was well done. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of that.
In fact, that’s exactly where I felt this movie strongly succeeded, was evaluating the themes of the original movie, seeing how they’ve evolved in the nearly 30 years since then, and updating it accordingly. In the original, there was commentary on the cold war, the drug war, religion, fear of technology, economic issues. Here, we get commentary on terrorism and drone strikes, fear of losing our humanity in technology, mega-corporations and news outlets manipulating public opinion.
Yes, the original Robocop was hyper-violent, but I really see the soul of the movie was that it served as a snap-shot of the cultural zeitgeist. It captured all those things we were thinking about and cleverly packaged it in an 80’s action movie. In that sense, I think this movie was somewhat successful, in getting some of that social commentary, even capturing it in the 80s nostalgia which is also part of our movie culture now.
Agreed. Sure, we still get the stock-price and profits is all that matters evil executive we had from the original, but I liked this choice as well. In the original, even the least evil of the executives, Bob Morton who pushed for the Robocop program, was still a pretty awful guy. It was nice to see an acknowledgement that there are good people out there, even if trapped in a difficult situation.
And like you, I’d agree that it won’t be the best film this year, hell, it may not even be the best film this month (I’ve heard Lego is awesome, though I haven’t seen it yet), but I enjoyed it for what it was. I loved the original, but I’m also open to remakes because I’m interested to see where it goes, and if it sucks, it doesn’t change the original anyway.
I went to the cinema to see this last night, I’m a fan of the original and I had low expectations of this movie (although I did avoid 99% of pre-publicity and spoilers for it) and I have to say I enjoyed it, certainly not a classic like the original but a perfectly decent movie. I would say it was overly slow and choppy in places and the plot wasn’t that tight but that’s not a show-killer.
I think the main problem was the characters weren’t nearly as charismatic and interesting as in the original, I didn’t care what happened to them like I did to the original Officer Murpy and Lewis and even the bad guys.
As you and someone upthread said the intro was excellent and could have been expanded into an interesting movie in itself, there was something rather chilling about the fact the imbalance of power was so extreme that all the insurgents could hope for is that their death would be caught on camera.
I think we’re OK with spoilers in this thread as the title has a warning regarding it, but I agree, that aspect did make me wonder as well. And where were they going to get all the other ‘units’ out of if they were intending them to be cyborgs?
Although I imagine people like the first two of the three candidates shown would jump for the chance at a full body prothesis. And that raises the question of why they didn’t use the second guy who they had no real objections to, at least he would be able to give informed consent and know exactly what was going to happen to him unlike poor Murphy.
Agreed, Le Ministre de l’au-delà, can tell his friend that he did very well in that role. I did think from that they were kinda of introducing potential emotional issues for Robocop, ie if he let anger and other strong human emotions surface he would have problems interfacing with his systems, potentially making him vulnerable when he needed protection most.
I did think there were several suprisingly subtle concepts introduced for what is basically a Hollywood action-flick, namely the removal of his free-will when in combat mode, again I thought they were building towards something with mentioning that, for example that Robocop/Murphy kills someone in combat-mode when he doesn’t have to and afterwards he has problems coming to terms with and understanding why he did it.
Also it was quite well done showing the difference in effectiveness between a robot and Murphy the Cyborg, the robot has no hesitation or sense of fear, although I’m still not entirely sure at the end of the movie why a cyborg like Murphy would be more effective in his intended role than a robot, though it did show him making some intuitions and connections from memory that a robot would be incapable of.
And again neither was as ‘charismatic’ or memorable as the hand-cannon issued to Robocop in the original, which is a strange thing to say about a gun but there you are.
I do think going for the lower rating did impact negatively on this movie, and I’m very much not a blood and guts person, but it did seem overly clean and sanitised.
And agreed his faster reflexes and combat style was a visually interesting change from the original Robocop, but the original had a certain imposing presence which the new guy lacks, original Robocop was basically a humanoid shaped tank and moved and fought as such.
I also liked that new Robocop (as was the original) was shown to be very much not invincible, he was very nearly defeated in the raid on the warehouse (but why did the defenders think turning of the lights was a good idea? That put them at a disadvantage not Robocop, it would be a fairly good guess that he had night-vision capability), and, in one of the best scenes, if Lewis hadn’t stepped in front of the ED-209 Murphy was finished.
Which brings me to another point, the ED-209 and other robots had no IFF capabilities, they were programmed that everyone with a gun was hostile? That wasn’t the case during the scenes in Tehran so why was it the case in Detroit? Were they perhaps a law-enforcement model working under different instructions, but what then about the human cops working alongside them?
Unfortunately, and through no fault of his, Gary Oldman is one of those actors where I have difficulty suspending disbelief for, he always comes across as Gary Oldman playing ‘X’ character rather than the character itself. Except for Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy, I loved him in that for some reason!
Saw it last night with low expectations, and I thought it was pretty good. I think there was a really good movie in there that didn’t come out because they had to show a CGI RoboCop shooting a bunch of CGI robots for some dumb reason.
I liked the backstory a lot, probably more than the original “we need human brainmeat to make a robot solve crime” angle in the original. It was complex enough to be interesting but easy enough to follow for an action movie. It allowed them to do some nice scenes with the prosthetics angle (like the guitar scene!) and gave most of the main players believable motivations – Michael Keaton wanted to make shitloads of money, Gary Oldman wanted to save lives, and Rorschach, who only wanted to produce good robot soldiers so real soldiers didn’t have to die, reluctantly was forced to participate in this police nonsense. I also liked how they solved the “problem” of human interference by making RoboCop think he was calling the shots. That’s a great setup for the central conflict.
Unfortunately, I think the movie took a turn for the confusing. Someone help me out here, but from what I saw, RoboCop took it on himself to solve his own attempted murder, which then led him to uncover the crooked cops. So far so good, except his handlers aren’t sure if they have control over the situation, and he starts shooting up a police station, so they literally pull the plug on him. That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do when your not-really-human killing machine stops following orders and starts shooting cops. And then, fearing the monster they’ve created, Michael Keaton tells them to kill RoboCop. Legal? Probably not, but it’s certainly understandable, and would make for one hell of an interesting episode of Law and Order.
Up until this point, I’m seeing Michael Keaton as a perfectly reasonable character, but then because they need to have some great climax they have RoboCop decide to hunt him down for attempted murder, and then everything goes weird on the helipad and Keaton must die. What a waste of a good setup. A simpler but more sensical plot would have been if the AI part of RoboCop had start shooting innocents, thus uncovering a massive flaw not just in RoboCop’s software, but by extension all of OCP’s war robots. Maybe they’d been killing civilians all along but Michael Keaton et al had been covering it up, and that’s why he had to die. Oh well.
Lastly, as the Gawker review linked above points out,
This jumped out at me. Apparently they have exoskeletons and HUDs and real-time access to all of this CCTV data, but all of the beat cops are just out there like regular old cops.
Missed the edit window, but I also wanted to say that I absolutely do not understand all this blubbering about a PG-13 rating. Yeah, it sucks that bad guys are replaced with robots too much (in the boring scene I mentioned above), and it sucks that questionable decisions are sometimes made to avoid blood (let’s turn off the lights so we can surprise a walking machine with bionic eyes), but that’s not to say that robots shooting each other can’t be fun with better writing, or that a shootout that happens in the dark can’t be suspenseful with better directing. And, having just watched the original today, I can say that if you love RoboCop (87) because of the occasional swearing or the 1.5 seconds of random boobs, you’re ridiculous. The only thing I can see missing are the ridiculous squibs, but even squibs can only carry a movie so far. And it has to be the right kind of movie. Paul Verhoeven and squibs are great, but they wouldn’t have elevated this movie to greater heights.
I think it’s clear they never intended on mass producing Robocops. Even if the costs came down 99% there just aren’t enough viable candidates. Selling domestic versions of their military drones was their goal all along.
Really, you thought he was a perfectly reasonable character when he was fine with overriding Murphy’s free will and keeping him as a slave? :dubious: And I think it was implied that they’re not as good at telling threats of non-threats as OCP says they are. Wittiness the one that responded to a boy freezing while holding a kitchen knife by killing him with a machine gun and how quick they were to cut the feed before it could be shown on American TV. Of course the fact they gave Murphy a Taser implies that they might have intended the police models to less trigger happy than the military ones.
But that implies that the general public is so ignorant they can’t tell the difference between a cyborg and a robot.
…actually, wait, forget I said anything…
Well, when you put it that way it sounds pretty bad. 
But to be fair, the decision to override his free will was Gary Oldman’s. Sellars was somewhat insulated from that decision, and the deception only applied to tactical situations. If we trust the robots to make moral decisions, which Sellars most certainly did, then he may not have seen it as a problem.
The movie somewhat glossed over the devil’s bargain that was made, i.e., who made it and to what extent. Murphy’s wife agreed to let them turn him into RoboCop in order to save his life, but what were the terms? Did they say, “We have the technology for a full body prosthesis, but it’s incredibly expensive and we’ll only do it if he becomes a RoboCop instead of a RoboStayAtHomeDad?” Are there terms and conditions on how many hours he has to work in exchange for being able to use the suit? Could he quit the police force? If he did, would he still have access to his daily dialysis machine, along with parts and labor? What would happen if OCP went out of business?
They show him making the decision not to suicide himself in order to be there for his family, but they don’t show him signing any employment contracts or anything. I think we need to assume that, in-universe, Murphy was able to sign his freedom away in exchange for use of the RoboCop apparatus, a contract that certainly wouldn’t hold up in our world. That leaves a lot of questions about how much control OCP actually had over him, and how much free will someone can actually have if they’re a slave to a job like that.
That’s actually a very interesting point, I never considered that. The movie actually opens a number of questions and scenarios that could be explored in future movies or even a TV show.
Again, it would probably have been wiser to use a person who could give direct consent to what was going to happen to them rather than via a third party.
I remember in the original they addressed the issue in a rather calloused, dismissive way: “Well legally, he’s dead. We can pretty much do whatever we want with him.” “Right. Then lose the arm.”
True. In the original movies OCP made all of it’s privatized police officers sign waivers allowing use their corpses for research. They actually planned to turn every officer killed in the line of duty into a Robocop. Didn’t Robocop 2 have the technicians tossing around Cain’s empty head while his disembodied brain watched?
There’s even an easily missed line where they mentioned they specifically moved officers they thought would be good candidates for being turned in to cyborg into more dangerous precincts to make it more likely they would be killed.
In the original they could have saved the arm.
I kind of got the impression the producers of this movie went out of their way to do the opposite of the original movie and saving Murphy’s hand/arm was one of these points.
Though as someone said above it seemed distinctly odd, you do a full-body prothesis on someone but save their hand, why?!?
I’m assuming Murphy had tactile input from his new body, ie when his son rested his hand on his leg he could feel that, if not it would be very disturbing for him.
btw a minor point, when Murphy is running from the facility (which was quite a nice touch, revealing it was in China) and they switched him off they were lucky their multi-billion dollar cyborg didn’t just fall flat on his face and drown before they got there!
I got the impression they saved the hand so Robo would appear a bit more human, being able to shake someone else by the hand for instance, think they showed this happening one time in the film.
Threads a bit old now, but I saw this today after finishing at work earlier and finding myself with nothing else to do.
The original RoboCop is one of my great 80s movie pleasures, over the top, satirical, stupidly violent and full of hilarious cartoon villain characters (Kurtwood Smith and Ronny Cox are amazing as basically comic book villains.) Since then character has been abused a lot, basically studios saw a lowish budget movie about a robot cop do better than expected and wanted to make it into a sort of super hero type franchise. Thus we had two terrible sequels, cartoon spin offs and etc that ripped away the core of what RoboCop was, which was an over-the-top satire.
I don’t really think the original RoboCop can be remade, because it’s not a big-budget friendly concept. It’s the opposite of a modern, mass market appeal action flick. The hero is slow, lumbering, he has serious limitations to his free will that he can never overcome (he only kills Dick Jones because Dick gets fired and thus becomes a valid target for Murphy.) Further, it’s extremely violent, it came out near the end of the 80s (a very violent time in film) and is probably the most violent movie of the 1980s. Its only competitor I can imagine is The Thing, maybe, depending on how you look at it. And finally the original RoboCop almost never really takes itself seriously, it’s not gearing up to be the next Iron Man franchise. To do RoboCop justice in a remake you’d never get $100m to do it, you’d need to slap it together with a lower budget and I don’t know that it’s even possible, but at $100m+ it’s got to be setup so it can be a modern day sci-fi action.
That’s basically what the new RoboCop is, but it’s still a decent movie and I look at it more as being made in “honor of” the original RoboCop instead of being a true remake and with that in mind I think fans of the original can enjoy it as a decent but not great sci-fi action movie to kill a few hours with. As a fan of the original the things I really liked about it that all other post-original iterations failed at:
Satire was at least present, mostly in the Novak scenes, in a manner consistent with the original. But these were just small parts of the film I almost feel like the director didn’t even want but was somehow pushed into doing because of the satirical nature of the original.
This movie recognizes becoming RoboCop is a bad thing, RoboCop isn’t a superhero and no one comes away from this movie wanting to get turned into RoboCop like you might with Iron Man.
A minor point but I like that it shows that AI controlled robots in the year 2028 are far better at targeting, reacting and etc than a human. Too many movies make it seem like futuristic robots could be easily outmaneuvered or outsmarted by a human and this movie doesn’t do that.
The last few minutes of him are kinda weak but overall I liked Michael Keaton as more modern/realistic version of the Dick Jones type CEO. I’m not sure what I think of Oldman, he’s sort of a stand-in for Bob Morton. But Morton was a non-tech division head responsible for the RoboCop program who was the quintessential 80s guy executive (snorts coke, power suits etc, complete scumbag.) While replacing him with the more multidimensional Oldman character would seem an obvious upgrade I still prefer the Bob Morton character because it’s part and parcel of the over the top satire.
At the end of the day I think RoboCop remains a movie that was made in the 80s and should have been left there. I think some movies from that era would be really fun to see remade, but RoboCop should be left alone. It’s a true 80s movie, and even a perfectly done remaking just doesn’t need to happen. Guys like Weller as Murphy, Ronnie Cox and Kurtwood Smith as the villain and all the squibs, cheesy dialogue and etc were done pretty much perfectly for what the original was and it doesn’t need remade.