Review: Robocop
Reading internet reviews of this movie before going to see it, I noted that they tended to fall into two categories. The more vitriolic ones were written by people who had seen the original, and had often been around when it originally came out. Then there were those written by people who hadn't seen the original and were reviewing the new movie on its own merits, and those reviews tended to have less bile but weren't overall very impressed.
After seeing the movie, I can say that they're both right.
Robocop-2014, taken apart from its status as a reboot, doesn't particularly stand out amongst recent releases. It very obviously borrows from movies such as Iron Man, plays quite a number of clichés dead straight, and is disappointingly sloppy about the aspects it chooses to emphasize.
As a reboot, there are a number of aspects which are updated, but they feel misassembled. The entire film feels more like an episode of a TV show than a blockbuster production.
Overall, there are some really great elements to the movie. The update of OCP's motivation for creating Robocop in the first place. The Chinese testing facility. Michael Keaton as a more modern, jeans-wearing, Jobs-type CEO - who isn't just a Steve clone, but is a standard corporate psychopath who wears that image deliberately, and wrings every drop of positive PR out of things like his prosthetics division.
However, there are so many Chekov's guns which are left on the wall. The guitar-player scene where strong emotion is linked to prosthetic malfunction. The whole dopamine issue. Half the movie being about Murphy being able to be overridden by his own combat software. Murphy's partner - is he supposed to contribute to the plot, or not? Murphy having a suicidal breakdown when confronted with how much of his original body remains (and it's a lot less than what the car bomb left him with), but then never mentioning anything about it again. The retention of one human hand - and we see that it's not his entire arm, it's just a floating hand. Why? It never becomes important, although there are many scenes where it could have been.
Then there are all the aspects of the original movie which are referenced, but nerfed hard. The original's guns are now (largely) tasers. Detroit looks like any other 21st-century US city, not the beaten-down urban wasteland presented in the 80s. The original Robocop's helmet, which required a power drill to remove the bolts sticking into his brain, is now a faceplate which can be flipped up and down at will, negating the original's point of the face-concealing, vision-altering visor being designed to be a permanent fixture - when it does come off in the original, what's underneath is not pretty or good PR. Sure, the new design makes sense from the perspective of the new hyper-PR-sensitive OCP, but the original message of loss-of-freedom is gone.
Or the confusing aspects. Robocop's bike is the only one of its kind we see - but there's no indication it was specifically built for him instead of for general motorcycle-cop duties. Sure, it's kept in its own little micro-garage instead of a police general garage, but is it a Robo-Bike or just a Detroit Police vehicle, maybe with heavier shock absorbers? If it was built for Robocop, wouldn't it make sense for it to be able to be remote-controlled, or have tasers of its own which could aim and shoot on the move, or have built-in knockout gas and/or smoke dispensers, or something?
Or the just plain dumb aspects. Robocop is a prototype, one-of-a-kind, still being tested and checked, and yet someone thinks it's a great idea to upload the entire city police database into his head ten minutes before his first public press conference, not knowing anything about what that might do. There's never even any indication that the corrupt CEO or anyone else particularly pushed for this, so it's not a case of executive meddling. It's just poor plotting.
Overall, it's a movie which could have been done a lot better, both as a standalone and as a reboot. As it stands, it's just messy.
After seeing the movie, I can say that they're both right.
Robocop-2014, taken apart from its status as a reboot, doesn't particularly stand out amongst recent releases. It very obviously borrows from movies such as Iron Man, plays quite a number of clichés dead straight, and is disappointingly sloppy about the aspects it chooses to emphasize.
As a reboot, there are a number of aspects which are updated, but they feel misassembled. The entire film feels more like an episode of a TV show than a blockbuster production.
Overall, there are some really great elements to the movie. The update of OCP's motivation for creating Robocop in the first place. The Chinese testing facility. Michael Keaton as a more modern, jeans-wearing, Jobs-type CEO - who isn't just a Steve clone, but is a standard corporate psychopath who wears that image deliberately, and wrings every drop of positive PR out of things like his prosthetics division.
However, there are so many Chekov's guns which are left on the wall. The guitar-player scene where strong emotion is linked to prosthetic malfunction. The whole dopamine issue. Half the movie being about Murphy being able to be overridden by his own combat software. Murphy's partner - is he supposed to contribute to the plot, or not? Murphy having a suicidal breakdown when confronted with how much of his original body remains (and it's a lot less than what the car bomb left him with), but then never mentioning anything about it again. The retention of one human hand - and we see that it's not his entire arm, it's just a floating hand. Why? It never becomes important, although there are many scenes where it could have been.
Then there are all the aspects of the original movie which are referenced, but nerfed hard. The original's guns are now (largely) tasers. Detroit looks like any other 21st-century US city, not the beaten-down urban wasteland presented in the 80s. The original Robocop's helmet, which required a power drill to remove the bolts sticking into his brain, is now a faceplate which can be flipped up and down at will, negating the original's point of the face-concealing, vision-altering visor being designed to be a permanent fixture - when it does come off in the original, what's underneath is not pretty or good PR. Sure, the new design makes sense from the perspective of the new hyper-PR-sensitive OCP, but the original message of loss-of-freedom is gone.
Or the confusing aspects. Robocop's bike is the only one of its kind we see - but there's no indication it was specifically built for him instead of for general motorcycle-cop duties. Sure, it's kept in its own little micro-garage instead of a police general garage, but is it a Robo-Bike or just a Detroit Police vehicle, maybe with heavier shock absorbers? If it was built for Robocop, wouldn't it make sense for it to be able to be remote-controlled, or have tasers of its own which could aim and shoot on the move, or have built-in knockout gas and/or smoke dispensers, or something?
Or the just plain dumb aspects. Robocop is a prototype, one-of-a-kind, still being tested and checked, and yet someone thinks it's a great idea to upload the entire city police database into his head ten minutes before his first public press conference, not knowing anything about what that might do. There's never even any indication that the corrupt CEO or anyone else particularly pushed for this, so it's not a case of executive meddling. It's just poor plotting.
Overall, it's a movie which could have been done a lot better, both as a standalone and as a reboot. As it stands, it's just messy.