RoboCop
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He always was.
Even in the real film.
It was a number of things that make him put the puzzle pieces together but the memories of his wife and son make him take revenge for what happened.
Even in the real film.
It was a number of things that make him put the puzzle pieces together but the memories of his wife and son make him take revenge for what happened.
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Resident Evil: Retribution was my one-pointer
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I'm surprised they didn't change even that to make RoboCop more modern -- like maybe the new RoboCop could have been gay! Or a polygamist.
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My point on it is that it has taken 10 years and who knows how many hundreds of millions of squids to get an hour's worth of footage using a script that was already written.
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I still don't understand where you are coming from, you have already stated by your own admitance it is 108 minutes long which as far as I know is 1hour and 48 minutes, so it is not an hour long. How do you know it took ten years to get that footage? And where did you read about how long the script has been written from? I am really struggling to understand how this has much reference to the film.
This RoboCop reboot has been in production for years bud.
They were going to remake it back in the 1990s after the Prime Directives was met with distain... but nobody was interested back then.
This incarnation has had a number of directors attached as well. In the end, they brought in Padhilla, a guy who has no interest in the film and was paid on the cheap.
Ok, the hour of footage thing was me being pedantic, but still, squillions of squids and, well, near 15 years of production hell and they've crapped all over what made RoboCop great by making a churned out kids' film that's 1h45m long.
Just long enough so that toddlers won't get bored.
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To be fair I can understand why no-one would have touched Robocop back in the 90's after the abomination that was Robocop 3 - lets face it, it would have been career suicide - I am still unsure of how it will. From the trailer I am unsure of so many things about the film such as the reason he became Robocop to begin with and why they decided to leave a real hand attached...
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http://www.theguardian.com/film/film...paul-verhoeven
As a kid, I heard of Detroit by watching RoboCop, which portrayed the city as a disaster area marked by rampant street crime and corporate exploitation. I knew it was a fantasy, a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of Reagan-era social anxieties, but the associations lingered.
Now reality is catching up: Detroit recently declared bankruptcy, with a judge noting that it "no longer has the resources to provide its residents with basic police, fire and medical services". It's a desperate situation for the city's residents, but I thought it might at least lend the new remake of RoboCop the satirical urgency that Paul Verhoeven brought to his 1987 movie.
It is disappointing, then, to see that the Detroit in José Padilha's film is in considerably better nick than the real thing, let alone the one in Verhoeven's film – more bourgeois suburbia than urban dystopia. Disappointing, but not surprising. It's almost impossible to imagine Verhoeven being allowed to make his movie today.
With RoboCop, Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997), Verhoeven established himself as the maestro of the subversive action blockbuster – perhaps the only Hollywood film-maker to successfully marry big-budget populism with stealthy but trenchant satire. These movies delivered spectacle and thrills but consistently targeted corporate greed, unbridled militarism and the perils of allowing escapism and propaganda to dominate public discourse. But they are now being remade more or less in the service of those very things.
First came 2012's reboot of Total Recall. Verhoeven's film was deliciously slippery: character, environment and narrative were hard to pin down from the off. Swept up in the action, we and our hero, Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), lost track of the overwhelming likelihood that the whole thing was, in fact, hooey. Yet Len Wiseman's remake fudged all this, ramped up the chick-on-chick violence and swapped Martian mutants for off-the-shelf robots.
Verhoeven's RoboCop brought a hardwired Christ figure to a society geared around corporate profit. And it had , that crazy, feral killer droid! Padilha's remake does focus on corporate villainy and has a shrewd, funny Tehran-set prologue, plus some heavy-handed media spoofery. But it lets the big targets off the hook by finding a hero within the corporate machine and making the lead's prime concern the integrity of his family life. What a RoboCop-out!
Starship Troopers was arguably Verhoeven's masterpiece, ostensibly a rightwing propaganda epic that dared audiences to disengage with its outrageous politics or just, you know, enjoy the giant bugs. It was a highly irreverent adaptation of the problematic novel by Robert Heinlein but an upcoming reboot will, according to one of its writers on Twitter, be "an actual adaptation of the Heinlein novel. An Officer and a Gentleman in power armor"<&callback=load_tweet">/font>. Gross.
It wasn't just the satire that made Verhoeven's movies such gems. They were witty and mischievous, with strong, clear storytelling, quirky production design and a vivid sense of the grotesque. They had giant, quivering grubs, nuclear-war-themed family board-games and Arnie dressed as a middle-aged woman in a fierce raincoat.
So far, their remakes offer little like that. Their scripts are po-faced and messy; they look like every other shimmery, machine-tooled SF action picture out there; and instead of engaging playfully yet seriously with the structural forces determining contemporary life, they offer straight-up sentimental heroism.
In other words, they're in keeping with a studio blockbuster culture that celebrates turbo-charged techno-militarism and cashes in on audiences' familiarity with established entertainment brands. Transformers and Avengers, I'm looking at you. By contrast, Verhoeven was an original and a provocateur. He wanted to make audiences squirm – to alienate them from the spectacle of fetishised violence even as he slathered it on. Good luck getting that greenlit today.
The new RoboCop movie is, in part, about bad guys trying to remove the soul of their corporate property to make it a more reliable cash cow. I doubt it's deliberate but that part, at least, feels like satire.
Now reality is catching up: Detroit recently declared bankruptcy, with a judge noting that it "no longer has the resources to provide its residents with basic police, fire and medical services". It's a desperate situation for the city's residents, but I thought it might at least lend the new remake of RoboCop the satirical urgency that Paul Verhoeven brought to his 1987 movie.
It is disappointing, then, to see that the Detroit in José Padilha's film is in considerably better nick than the real thing, let alone the one in Verhoeven's film – more bourgeois suburbia than urban dystopia. Disappointing, but not surprising. It's almost impossible to imagine Verhoeven being allowed to make his movie today.
With RoboCop, Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997), Verhoeven established himself as the maestro of the subversive action blockbuster – perhaps the only Hollywood film-maker to successfully marry big-budget populism with stealthy but trenchant satire. These movies delivered spectacle and thrills but consistently targeted corporate greed, unbridled militarism and the perils of allowing escapism and propaganda to dominate public discourse. But they are now being remade more or less in the service of those very things.
First came 2012's reboot of Total Recall. Verhoeven's film was deliciously slippery: character, environment and narrative were hard to pin down from the off. Swept up in the action, we and our hero, Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), lost track of the overwhelming likelihood that the whole thing was, in fact, hooey. Yet Len Wiseman's remake fudged all this, ramped up the chick-on-chick violence and swapped Martian mutants for off-the-shelf robots.
Verhoeven's RoboCop brought a hardwired Christ figure to a society geared around corporate profit. And it had , that crazy, feral killer droid! Padilha's remake does focus on corporate villainy and has a shrewd, funny Tehran-set prologue, plus some heavy-handed media spoofery. But it lets the big targets off the hook by finding a hero within the corporate machine and making the lead's prime concern the integrity of his family life. What a RoboCop-out!
Starship Troopers was arguably Verhoeven's masterpiece, ostensibly a rightwing propaganda epic that dared audiences to disengage with its outrageous politics or just, you know, enjoy the giant bugs. It was a highly irreverent adaptation of the problematic novel by Robert Heinlein but an upcoming reboot will, according to one of its writers on Twitter, be "an actual adaptation of the Heinlein novel. An Officer and a Gentleman in power armor"<&callback=load_tweet">/font>. Gross.
It wasn't just the satire that made Verhoeven's movies such gems. They were witty and mischievous, with strong, clear storytelling, quirky production design and a vivid sense of the grotesque. They had giant, quivering grubs, nuclear-war-themed family board-games and Arnie dressed as a middle-aged woman in a fierce raincoat.
So far, their remakes offer little like that. Their scripts are po-faced and messy; they look like every other shimmery, machine-tooled SF action picture out there; and instead of engaging playfully yet seriously with the structural forces determining contemporary life, they offer straight-up sentimental heroism.
In other words, they're in keeping with a studio blockbuster culture that celebrates turbo-charged techno-militarism and cashes in on audiences' familiarity with established entertainment brands. Transformers and Avengers, I'm looking at you. By contrast, Verhoeven was an original and a provocateur. He wanted to make audiences squirm – to alienate them from the spectacle of fetishised violence even as he slathered it on. Good luck getting that greenlit today.
The new RoboCop movie is, in part, about bad guys trying to remove the soul of their corporate property to make it a more reliable cash cow. I doubt it's deliberate but that part, at least, feels like satire.
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Idea for the sequel
But seriously, none of the reviews I've read have said it's Transformer 2 level awful or anything which is better than I expected given all the production problems and the director's conflicts with the studio. I've never seen the original so maybe I won't hate the remake as much as Rodent or pretty much everyone else who has seen the Verhoeven version.
But seriously, none of the reviews I've read have said it's Transformer 2 level awful or anything which is better than I expected given all the production problems and the director's conflicts with the studio. I've never seen the original so maybe I won't hate the remake as much as Rodent or pretty much everyone else who has seen the Verhoeven version.
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Seems to be getting decent reviews, nothing amazing but a lot are saying it's not as bad as they thought it was going to be. The usual suspects that I follow felt the same and they usually give these type of films 1 or 2 stars.
Saw a clip on the BBC Film Review show and it looked very interesting.
Still looking forwards to it.
Saw a clip on the BBC Film Review show and it looked very interesting.
Still looking forwards to it.
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http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014...robocop-review
Another damning review.
RT Critics are divided as well... exactly 50/50.
Another damning review.
Paul Verhoeven's black-comic gem from 1987 has been remade – which is to say, all the wit has been removed and it's been turned into a dumbed-down shoot-em-up frontloaded with elaborate but perfunctory new "satirical" material in which the movie loses interest with breathtaking speed. The original film imagined an anarchic future Detroit in which authorities yearned for robotic solutions. An early, tank-like prototype was discarded after it failed to respond to orders and killed an official – a famously hilarious scene for which, tellingly, this new version has no equivalent. Then the mangled remains of a half-dead officer were salvaged into a cyborg-style armoured "RoboCop", who clanked and wheezed around the streets with thrilling and hilarious efficiency and ruthlessness. In its opening 10 minutes, this new film appears to remember both the early and later "tank" and "humanoid" prototypes, deploying them against counter-insurgents on the conquered streets of Tehran, and these robots are explicitly called "drones". All cute or cute-ish ideas. But once the action is removed to the US, all these cerebral touches just vanish, and they turn out simply to have muddled and delayed the main event: a deafening, boring action pile-up that is more Call of Duty than RoboCop. And if you're waiting for action sequences in the legendary ruins of that economically ravaged place – forget it. Director José Padilha seems uninterested in or unaware of Detroit's tragi-surreal reputation. Or perhaps he thinks the ruins will be cured, because this just looks like any generic sci-fi dystopian city, and Padilha is as heavy-handed as he was in his Brazilian "Elite Squad" movies. A serious case of rust.
RT Critics are divided as well... exactly 50/50.
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http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/the.../robocop-25843
WARNING: "Robo 2014" spoilers below
This slick retooling of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 classic lacks the bleak satirical edge of its predecessor.
Did the world really need another dystopic supercop B-movie just 18 months after Pete Travis' scintillating (and superior) Dredd?
It's a question that was apparently left unaddressed when the greenlight was given to this straight-laced remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 tech noir classic. Though, in fairness, it's been in the works since 2005, thereby predating Alex Garland's Dredd script by one year. This update, while not entirely unnecessary, suffers for having been soullessly retooled to fit 21st century action movie standards. It's darker, slicker and, well, less fun.
Detroit 2028, and Officer Alex Murphy (The Killing's Joel Kinnaman impressing in his first major lead role) inadvertently discovers a miracle weight loss cure courtesy of a carbomb planted by a couple of rotten cops in cahoots with local druglord Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow). As his wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) prepares for the worst, pioneering roboticist Dr Norton (Gary Oldman) steps in with an extraordinary proposition: to give her back her husband by making him the world's first bionically-enhanced law enforcer.
Michael Keaton is in cracking form as OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars, the self-serving, orphan-stomping face of multinational greed who funds Murphy's multi-million dollar transformation with the view to swaying public opinion over his company's ethically dubious military drones. By keeping Norton sweet, Sellars secretly engineers it so that Murphy is way more machine than man manipulating him at every turn and falsely leading him to believe he has control over his newly acquired powers.
Like Frankenstein's armour-plated, trigger-happy cousin, RoboCop is a monster who is beholden to his despotic makers. Despite being hardwired to serve and protect, however, he's also a PR disaster waiting to happen. In one awesomely merciless act of vengeance, Murphy manages to override his programming long enough to track down Vallon in a thrilling warehouse raid scene. The bloody retribution doesn't end there.
Elsewhere Samuel L Jackson is reliable as ever as the propaganda-spewing political talk show host whose direct-to-camera rants neatly break up the action while bridging the plot. The media coverage motif was a Verhoeven staple, of course, and it's encouraging to see the same satirical device being put to good use here, albeit with less bite. The flipside of this is that while RoboCop is a sleek and solidly constructed popcorn flick, it ultimately lacks originality tinkering with your hero's iconic suit so he resembles a Teflon Power Ranger isn't going to cut it.
Its hi-tech heart may be in the right place, but under ?the controls of Brazilian director José Padilha, who deservedly landed this gig off the back of his excellent Elite Squad films, there's not a lot going on under the heavily polished chassis.
Did the world really need another dystopic supercop B-movie just 18 months after Pete Travis' scintillating (and superior) Dredd?
It's a question that was apparently left unaddressed when the greenlight was given to this straight-laced remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 tech noir classic. Though, in fairness, it's been in the works since 2005, thereby predating Alex Garland's Dredd script by one year. This update, while not entirely unnecessary, suffers for having been soullessly retooled to fit 21st century action movie standards. It's darker, slicker and, well, less fun.
Detroit 2028, and Officer Alex Murphy (The Killing's Joel Kinnaman impressing in his first major lead role) inadvertently discovers a miracle weight loss cure courtesy of a carbomb planted by a couple of rotten cops in cahoots with local druglord Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow). As his wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) prepares for the worst, pioneering roboticist Dr Norton (Gary Oldman) steps in with an extraordinary proposition: to give her back her husband by making him the world's first bionically-enhanced law enforcer.
Michael Keaton is in cracking form as OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars, the self-serving, orphan-stomping face of multinational greed who funds Murphy's multi-million dollar transformation with the view to swaying public opinion over his company's ethically dubious military drones. By keeping Norton sweet, Sellars secretly engineers it so that Murphy is way more machine than man manipulating him at every turn and falsely leading him to believe he has control over his newly acquired powers.
Like Frankenstein's armour-plated, trigger-happy cousin, RoboCop is a monster who is beholden to his despotic makers. Despite being hardwired to serve and protect, however, he's also a PR disaster waiting to happen. In one awesomely merciless act of vengeance, Murphy manages to override his programming long enough to track down Vallon in a thrilling warehouse raid scene. The bloody retribution doesn't end there.
Elsewhere Samuel L Jackson is reliable as ever as the propaganda-spewing political talk show host whose direct-to-camera rants neatly break up the action while bridging the plot. The media coverage motif was a Verhoeven staple, of course, and it's encouraging to see the same satirical device being put to good use here, albeit with less bite. The flipside of this is that while RoboCop is a sleek and solidly constructed popcorn flick, it ultimately lacks originality tinkering with your hero's iconic suit so he resembles a Teflon Power Ranger isn't going to cut it.
Its hi-tech heart may be in the right place, but under ?the controls of Brazilian director José Padilha, who deservedly landed this gig off the back of his excellent Elite Squad films, there's not a lot going on under the heavily polished chassis.
Last edited by Yoda; 02-09-14 at 05:51 PM.
Reason: Fixed spoiler tags.
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So what's the verdict on this remake? Is it a certified turd or is it simply mediocre?
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There's just no way I'm ever going to pay a single cent to watch this tripe. The trailers make this movie look like total crap. Slick, shiny, crap.
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It wasn't all bad but it felt more like a collection of other movie franchises than the original. Batman - Ironman...all in there.
Last edited by Yoda; 02-17-14 at 11:35 AM.
