Why RoboCop Shouldn’t Have Been Remade

He’s part-man, part-machine, and all-cop, and he was a hero to anyone familiar with Betamax, MTV, and the emergence of techno music. But then, he got a makeover.

Discussions about remakes of classic films generally revolve around comparisons to the original. The phrase “remakes are never as good as the original” yields over 36 million Google results. Many of these either ask why originals always come out on top, or claim that remakes shouldn’t be made.

José Padilha’s RoboCop — released in Australian cinemas this week — is no different. For the most part, its reviews have been disappointing, and even those reviewers who’ve reacted somewhat favourably to the film have admitted walking in with low expectations. The original RoboCop (directed by Paul Verhoeven) received very positive reviews, and was considered one of 1987’s best films. Verhoeven used an urban pop art style in his film, painting RoboCop (played by Peter Weller) as a type of superhero. But this isn’t Batman, and the remake just can’t match it.

It’s as simple as this: you do not remake RoboCop. Sure, that could be said for any film, but the 1987 classic hadn’t even gone cold when Padilha started poking at it. Take away all the gritty bits, add a big budget, and you’re left with a typical Hollywood blockbuster, pumped full of noise for good measure.

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A tale of two RoboPlots

RoboCop is the Brazilian director’s first English-language film. Like the original, it is set in a dystopian future in Detroit, Michigan, which remains America’s most dangerous city, even as crime rates fall. Fictional corporation OmniCorp (a branch of OCP from the first film) makes robots for military use, exporting them overseas as a US Act prevents them from being used on home soil. Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is a policeman who, after a near-fatal attack, is revamped into a cyborg by OmniCorp: RoboCop.

The two RoboPlots are significantly different. They’re polar opposites with regard to a robot’s ability to feel emotion. In the original film, ‘RoboCop’ was produced as a machine with a human’s face. In the remake, he’s a human with a machine’s body. The plot change is more a reflection of time than anything: present-day society renders technology such as droids so overwhelmingly untrustworthy that only a humanised machine would be welcome. “We’re going to put a man inside a machine!” is OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars’ (Michael Keaton) answer to convincing America to legalise militarised robots.

Verhoeven’s Murphy was a smart, skinny guy with his shirt buttoned all the way to the top. Padilha’s Murphy is pumped full of testosterone, muscular, with stubble and a Michigan accent, and a wife who gives him beer when he’s down. Ladies, are you swooning?

Verhoeven’s version critiqued consumerism. 2014’s RoboCop skims across themes of terrorism, media, ethics in science, America in a global context, and the human condition without covering any of them in depth.

The original RoboCop featured this man in the background:

Verhoeven used the cheap, crass “I’d buy that for a dollar!” ad campaign to grossly exaggerate America’s obsession with money, following the recession of the early ‘80s. Kurtwood Smith embodied this in Clarence Boddicker’s behaviour — he was obsessed with money and power. There’s a tiny nod to this in the new version when Rick Mattox, OmniCorp’s military arms expert, says, “I wouldn’t buy that for a dollar.” He’s referring to RoboCop’s inferiority when compared to proper robots such as the EM-208s. It’s cute, but it doesn’t really compensate for the lack of social critique Padilha had the potential to mount with this film.

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It’s a love story, baby just say yes

The original RoboCop also had a strong focus on Murphy’s camaraderie with his force partner, Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen — in Padilha’s film, Lewis is a man). She’s an exemplary independent female character, the force’s resident tough-girl. In Verhoeven’s version, Murphy’s wife only takes the form of a flashback in his pre-Robo memory.

However, Padilha casts aside the idea of a friend trying to break down the cyborg barrier in favour of a love story. Murphy’s wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) desperately wants her husband back, which is totally understandable — if someone I loved became a robot, I’d be crying too. But when compared to the original — where the most prominent man-woman pairing is career-based and platonic — it’s obvious that Padilha has added the love story as bait for Hollywood fans.

The idea runs in the same vein as Her and the upcoming Transcendence, where machines are so human-like that it’s possible for us to fall in love with them (or to continue to love them even when they’re half computer). It could’ve been potentially interesting, but apart from a bit of making out and Clara’s fight with the law to see her robot husband, the romance feels flaccid.

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Evoking a classic

Much of Padilha’s film’s emotional energy is derived from Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman), the scientist behind prosthetic limbs 2.0. He wants to help people regain essentially normal lives after serious accidents, but he’s also concerned about their mental health (one of his first scenes concerns the emotional state of a patient, and he refuses to robo-fy a psychologically unstable cop). Norton is one of the better parts of this film, adding another dimension to the ethical dilemma of using robots in the military.

The original RoboCop tapped into a fixation with sci-fi and new technology that developed during the ‘80s, when computers and video games boomed. RoboCop could be seen as a saviour, a symbol of progress (like, “If we can turn a man into a robot, there’s nothing we can’t do!”).

I’ll admit I wasn’t born until a few years after Verhoeven’s film came out, but I have a soft spot for the period (I basically just want to wear leather jackets and Ray Ban Wayfarers all the time), and I loved RoboCop as soon as I saw it. It tried to make the most out of its estimated $13 million budget (compare that to the $100 million that was pumped into the new kid) with guns and blood capsules a-plenty.

The stop-motion ED-209 was priceless, with a warped voice and lion’s roar. It’s mostly funny now, because today’s film technology has advanced far beyond stop-motion vehicles. However, it’s also part of the reason people still love the original RoboCop so much — its name sounds like a comic book, and the characters reflect it.

Verhoeven’s RoboCop himself was fantastic. His monotonic voice and minimal dialogue, plus the initial erasure of his identity so that he’s purely a robot, made him so wonderfully, well, not human. The whole point of the 1987 film was that Murphy, undergoing the transformation of becoming a robot, had lost his memories and his ability to think for himself. Lines like, “Madam, you have suffered an emotional shock. I will notify a rape crisis centre…” were as funny as they were thought provoking. Plus, he could give the finger.

I watched Verhoeven’s RoboCop for a cinema studies subject at uni. In the class, I met someone who said something along the lines of “I saw RoboCop on the film list for this class and said YES!” That won’t happen with the new film. It doesn’t have nearly the same appeal that slotted the old one into the “classics” category.

One of my main gripes with the remake is that it’s too safe. There’s no blood, no real violence. The original was filled with chunks of flesh flying about. Murphy’s death is possibly the most gruesome scene in the film:

But you won’t see any bullet-holes in heads in the new RoboCop. You won’t even catch RoboCop flipping the bird. Nor will you hear any of the bad guys drop an f-bomb.

Admittedly, Padilha’s film isn’t the worst thing ever. Samuel L. Jackson provides quite a few laughs as Pat Novak, host of current affairs show The Novak Element. He makes some great quips about “biased media”, as well as satirising the ‘patriotic American’. Similarly, Michael K. Williams, who plays Lewis, has a great one-liner regarding RoboCop’s new black suit: “At least they made you the right colour now”.

Padilha also does a good job with his special effects (which is probably what happens when your budget reaches over seven times that of the original). Strobe light gunshots and the echoing sound of bullets being fired heightens the sense of action and suspense. RoboCop’s fight with the ED-209s is significantly more intense in this film, too — an improvement on the ED-209 that couldn’t walk down stairs in 1987. Look at the sleekness of his suit and the enhanced and amplified sound of his footsteps and movements; he’s had a shiny new makeover, and he looks Hollywood-ready.

Nevertheless, it’s possible that Padilha could have dispensed with the cop theme altogether and just made a film about robots with feelings. Instead, what he’s made is a sci-fi action film that, try as it might to appeal to a wider audience, will for the most part attract low expectations.

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RoboCop is now showing in cinemas nationally.

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Michelle See-Tho is editor of Farrago, and a freelance writer and journalist. Her work has appeared in The Conversation, Kill Your Darlings, and Crikey. Follow her on Twitter at @stmischa