Escape to the Movies: Robocop

[Kargathia]

Better watch Tropa de Elite 1 and 2. They were directed by the same guy, but you'd never knew unless someone told you. I guess Hollywood producers decided to use him as a director only because his films were smash hits in Brazil, so the would capitalize on that. Everyone else will go just because it's Robocop. And it's pg-13, so they'd bring kids. Fuck you, fuck you and fuck you Hollywood.

... Seriously? That honestly kind of blows my mind, judging by just how much of a polar opposite this is, in everything apart from the law enforcement protagonist.

What I was trying to say TdE 1 and 2 are much better films. I find it weird not a lot of people are familiar with them. Padilha's previous works became cultural phenomena back in Brazil. And that's the only reason Hollywood must've contacted him. Because money. Why he accepted their proposition is his own business, all I know it makes me very sad. Hopefully he just needed money for some new project, his first movie was a documentary so may be he decided to return to that... Gotta go, my tinfoil hat is melting.

P.S.: If you enjoyed playing Max Payne 3 you definitely should see those movies. I believe Rockstar drew inspiration from them.

I've seen both movies. And yes, they (and their cousin Cidade Des Deus) are lightyears above and beyond this uninspired piece of high-budget shovelware for precisely the reasons MovieBob stated he loved the original RoboCop movie: a viciously violent movie about a violent topic, while dealing with complex moral, ethical, and intellectual topics.


And not just a paint-by-numbers shoot-em-up holding a placard "we're talking about deep stuff nao, hmkaaaay?!".

Seeing as how several or so of the Escape to the Movies/Moviebob blog ending bits had some variation of "fuck everything about this [shows poster for remake]" it's pretty much a given Bob went in with a hate-on for this movie. Besides, fetishization of stuff from his youth (Nintendo, eighties movies, shitty eighties cartoons) is pretty much par for the course. What, so New!Robocop isn't about what the first one was about and that makes it bad? It's a product of the times, just like the last movie. It's not like Old!Robocop was flawless either; It lacks tension in the fights, the satire only works if you were alive in the eighties and aware enough to get it, and some of the scenes are just stupid (who's dumb idea was it to arm ED with live ammo INDOORS?).

While I certainly agree on that the original Robocop was far from flawless, and mostly appealing to people well alive in the 80's, I find it hard to find any redeeming features in the steaming pile of mediocrity that's the current iteration.

And no, before you ask: I don't like the original Robocop, nor am I old enough to appreciate its topicality.

 

[fnartilter]

Person on IO9 gave the new Robocop a 'decent' review, but I was way too skeptical, as I am with most of their movie reviews. Glad Bob dropped the Bomb O' Truth on it. Kind of disappointing, really. I watched the original on Netflix recently, and it was as great as I remembered.

 

[Darth_Payn]

Well, back to Metal Gear Rising, the cyborg you play there also doesn't have guns, but at least he has a High Frequency Blade to cut your enemies into ribbons! And it seems that the movie isn't even anywhere near Kojima World Order level of military paranoia xD

I just had to laugh when Bob called them Metal Gears, and then I freeze-framed it and said, "Holy crap, he's right!"

OT: The throwing in of political hot-button terms just to make a vague point has me insulted. Old-school insulted, to the point where I have to slap one of the filmmakers with a leather glove across the face and challenge them to a duel to get satisfaction.

 

[Lightknight]

Hopefully this is mostly the case of nostalgia making it out to be worse than it actually is. But something tells me it really is this bad... so I'll wait to see it elsewhere.

 

[Mr_Terrific]

Robocop
Total Recall
The Man of Steel
probably the next Terminator....all ruined. Thanks Hollywood.

And I agree about Jessie whatshisname. At this point, it really doesn't matter who they cast. This film is clearly not for Superman fans or comic book fans just like those overrated Nolan Batman movies are not for Batman fans or Comic book fans.

You know what's funny? When ever my kids pretend they're heroes, instead of holding there arms out to fly like Superman, they hold them at their sides and fly like Iron Man or swing their hammers to fly like Thor....and if you're a DC guy like I am, that's incredibly sad. Yeah...Iron Man and Thor are this generations Superman and it's all WBs fault for ignoring everything that makes Superman, Superman.

 

[RandV80]

As a Canadian I kind of love the cringe worthy political audacity (or it's probably more just utter stupidity and incompetence) here as well: 'Every country in the world has purchased and deployed OCP's drone/robot police... except for America!'

Because Land of the Free I guess? I'll skip my own country, but yeah right a peaceful nation like Japan or New Zealand would need these, or a socially progressive nations like the Scandinavian countries, or even worse for completely the opposite reason Russia or China buying, deploying, and most importantly trusting American made automated military hardware to police their citizens, as opposed to just making their own competing product.

Reality is that if these things were ever made the first place they'd be deployed is in the Middle East, primarily in US occupied countries. With the way corporate political lobbying works there second place would probably be the US itself. Maybe not as a police force right away but they'd probably sneak them in at the border to protect America from those very bad illegal immigrants, and work up from there.

 

[Baresark]

While I think Bob is completely over idealizing the original Robocop movie (he put a lot of themes in there that were just clearly not part of the original writers intent), I was expecting them not to really hit any major heavy points. I was just expecting fun action, a shallow story, and some shooty shooty fun. But a Stun gun.... UGH. Gimme a break. I get why the US was in Iraq in the movie... the same reason we are now... which is?... Yeah, exactly. I don't know why its a questionable point now, especially since Bob doesn't question a great many of these things in movies like Act of Valor. Why question what those guys are doing. Anonymous terrorism without a face... yeah same situation.

I'm gonna wait till it's on Netflix though, I don't expect it to be worth an $11 trip to the theatre.

 

[Ashley Blalock]

On the bright side a couple of months after the DVD release you will be able to buy it for a dollar.

 

[Thomas Larsen]

Hmmm.. I do not agree. At all. Not even slightly.

I went to see this on Wednesday and came out entirely satisfied. It's not flawless, but it's nowhere near as bad as Bob says.

The story isn't a scene for scene retread of the original (which Bob hated with Oldboy)
It deals with issues of this generation (i.e. the ethics of using Drones to take human lives and the removal of civil liberties)
Corporate lobbying to get laws changed in the corporation's favour.
The nature of what makes us human and how much you can strip away before being classed as merely a machine.
Manipulation of the media
Manipulation of the individual
Freedom and the illusion of freedom
CCTV and abuse thereof.
The De-humanizing of anyone Not American.

If a cop makes a mistake and kills someone, the cop is held accountable. If a drone goes wrong, who is to blame? How easily it is to use a machine to commit atrocities with the get out of jail free card of "The robot went wrong, it's just a machine"

The effects were brilliant and I felt sorry for Murphy on his journey, he'd lost everything. His family, his body and even his free will.

So, no. This wasn't a bad film by any stretch of the imagination.
I wonder how much was Bob expecting to hate it and it not being the exact retread of the original with a fresh coat of paint to bring it into the current age he expected and defaulting to his initial opinion, 'cos to be honest, the original is pretty dated now.


And Tazer because guns for cops are mostly for defence. Robocop is almost invulnerable and so he doesn't have the kill or be killed justification. His job is to protect and apprehend, it's society's job to punish.

I agree with ascorbius here. if you want to see 80's nostalgia and a man turned to sludge we still have the original Robocop. Making that movie again is really not needed, what we got was the updated version, adressing questions of dehumanizing ourselves with technology internal and external.

i like Bob's reviews, but i also like this movie... now can someone borrow me a kid so i can go and see the Lego movie please...?

 

[Karavision]

Unskippable ads are fine on their own. It is simply paying the bills but I am going to stop watching videos on this site if you guys insist on letting some preachy bastards disgust me to get their points across. I will give it another two weeks and see if it cycles out but that ad is bullshit.

 

[Flatfrog]

*sigh* When I heard that "He-thinks-he's-in-control-but-he-isn't" line in the trailer, I thought that just maybe this movie had a slight chance of not sucking. I didn't really believe that that would be the case, but it was a small ray of hope.

Yes, me too. I was one of the few people who saw the trailers and thought - hey, this looks like rather than doing a straight remake of the original, they're trying to jump off it to explore some interesting new territory. And it sounds a bit like somewhere deep in an early draft there might have been something like that in there, but it was killed by a thousand committees. Sigh. Never mind.

 

[major_chaos]

You know I would have put up with a lot, but they had to go and take out the violence. That was quite possibly the best thing about the original, and what made a certain other remake (Dredd) fun to watch. But no, gotta cater to the all important thirteen year old demographic apparently.

 

[cefm]

I don't mind that the new Robocop is attempting to discuss other more current hot-button issues (inner-city drug gangs are no less deadly today, and Detroit is worse, but those topics have been around for long enough that we're not so terrified of them anymore). The "drones are bad" thing was so obvious back in the '80's that the original didn't even feel the need to discuss it (other than to mock it in the incompetent destruction of the ED209). It's actually sad that it has now become an issue that needs to be discussed. I get a knee-jerk negative reaction in dropping the female cop partner too, but that was a big deal in the 80's and is less so now. Chicks can be cops. Big deal.

BUT - focusing the franchise on new targets isn't the problem. Doing it BADLY is the problem. You need to have a coherent storyline that builds up legitimate conflicts that make sense to the audience and present the protagonist with rational and realistic options and resolutions. The new one treats the audience like babies.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

To summarize: watch Dredd instead.

Or, grab yourself a copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Director's Cut) and play that. That game has so much in common with RoboCop it's fucking scary. And it kicks ass to boot.

 

[Sofus]

I watched a trailer for this movie and I pretty much expected it to fail miserably. That said, I thought that the only thing they would screw up was Robocop himself.

 

[The Great JT]

I'd buy that for...nothing! This review, though, I'd buy for much more than a dollar. I don't know how you'd do a good reboot of Robocop, but I'm sure you CAN. They just didn't.

 

[J Tyran]

I'm not completely opposed to robotic combat units, but it's going to be a very long time before any sort of AI tech is developed that is complex enough to perform satisfactorily in that sort of situation. The battlefield, especially the modern, urban battlefield is just too fast and too chaotic for autonomous combat machines. Some of the time it's too fast and too chaotic for flesh and blood humans. Any sort of machine would need to be able to make complex decisions on the fly, and be able to distinguish between friend, foe and noncombatant, and we're just nowhere close to that. Even then, I wouldn't be able to support a fully-robotic military. There has to be humans in the loop. I could see robotic combat units attached to human infantry squads though. Most likely in a scout sort of capacity due to the inherent expandability of the robot.

We are closer than you think, if someone wanted to they could already build a robot that would recognise a wanted face, distinguish non combat and combat gait and movement (as well as identify an individual) with a high degree of accuracy and tell if someone is carrying a weapon or not although it wouldn't be much use for anything other than basic area denial with the ability to perhaps not fire on a civilian just yet. Soldiers already make mistakes, the amount of controversy over the killing or reporters and civilians prove this. At least a robot wouldn't hold a grudge over a lost comrade and want revenge on the first thing he perceives (or claims) was a target, it would have simple parameters over kill or not to kill.

Distinguishing friendlies is simple, how do you think automated air defence systems work? The way they operate they don't have time for operators input in war zones so they see a target and fire before it gets out of range or puts the horizon between it and the missile/cannon. Soldiers could simply carry an IFF, telling non combatants apart would also be easy. It could demand surrender (in any number of languages) and call for operator input, if they attack or draw a weapon it would fire and if they ran away store the biometrics and carry on.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Gadzooks MovieBob, I don't think I have ever heard you come down as hard on a movie as this one.