Movie Review: RoboCop (2014)
So. They remade RoboCop (1987). And while I’ve been looking forward to it for months, it wasn’t until some of my friends said “it was surprisingly good” that I decided, “alright, I’ll see it in theaters.” Unfortunately, my friends are liars (love you guys). If you’ve seen the original RoboCop, then you already know the basic story. The 2014 reboot, directed by Jose Padilha, alters the original concept as follows: in 2028, OmniCorp, a high-tech military contractor, has teamed up with the military to combat crime and terrorism abroad, using robotic enforcers. OmniCorp’s CEO, Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), wants to bring this technology to the United States, but the public and Congress fear the absence of the human component. In steps Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), an overzealous Detroit police officer who is seriously injured in an assassination attempt after discovering dirty cops within the DPD. In order to sway public opinion, OmniCorp repairs Murphy’s body to create RoboCop, a cyborg which will, we’re told, end crime for good. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the human component almost always gets in the way… Honestly, that description is pretty crap. Trying to explain what this movie is about without simply saying “a guy becomes a robot and fights crime; things don’t go according to plan” reveals a lot of what’s wrong with this film. How do I describe the massive disappointment that is the remake of RoboCop? I could say that this film is a testament to the fact that good things from the past are better off left alone. We would have been better off receiving some kind of Final Director’s Cut version of the 1987 classic. The studios could have given us a cool box set with documentary material and a remastered film — maybe they could have shoved an mp3 download for the soundtrack and a RoboCop figurine in there, too…or the box could have sung to us as if it were an advertisement for that spoof Robocop musical from Funny or Die. Or maybe the box could have been a mini-RoboCop that actually walks to you when you call it. All of these would have been better uses of the studio’s money. Alas, what we’ve been given here is little more than a sad, bloated, confused little “update” of a film. Sure, the writers tried to add some more stuff about downloading data and memory overloads and other techno mumbo jumbo, but in the end, it’s just a mess of a film that wishes it could capture the feeling of the original. A mess. That’s what I’m calling it. RoboCop is not unlike the first Hobbit film in that it tries to do so many different things at the same time, but without any clear tie between them all. In the first half hour of the movie, we’re presented with a satire of FOX News or Glenn Beck (seems like both), a commentary on the use of military drones and robots in the Middle East, questions about the use of said machines in the U.S., police corruption and rampant crime, a buddy-cop drama, the shock of prosthesis, what it means to be human, how memories are not easily controlled, human autonomy, and a whole bunch of other minor threads I won’t talk about here. There’s so much going on in the beginning of this film that I’m left with a series of questions: What exactly is this movie about? Is it a commentary on drones? Is it a commentary on the human condition through the use of cyborg tech? Is it about the police? Is it about corporate greed and the desperate push for technology? Is it about human relationships? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE ABOUT? I ask these questions because I think it’s obvious from the start that this film is about something. It has a message or a point. It wants us to follow that point to its logical conclusion and ask ourselves to consider the possibilities. But the film asks so many fucking questions that I can’t fathom how we are supposed to go from Point A to Point B to Point C without jumping from Question #2 to Question #13154. The end of the film seems to suggest that question we should have been asking is the one about corporate greed and human autonomy, with a side of human relationships, but the beginning of the film and the middle are all over the place, jumping from a narrative about politics to one about technology to one about the police to one about family relationships to one about X and Z and Y and Q. There’s no narrative cohesion here. RoboCop is a film that tries to do so much at once that it loses sight of what made the original so good: it set up its major concerns right from the start and did its best to keep those in sight. In the reboot, the main “issue” of the original (the idea of one’s memories clouding one’s programming) is saved until more than halfway through. Sure, the original takes a while to get to that point too, but the reboot goes about it by showing us normal Murphy-as-RoboCop (combating all of his “I’m a robot” worries and family problems), reverting him to the RoboCop we remember from the original (the corporate greed is coming!), and then proceeding with the “but his memories will take over” bit. It’s a mistake of order — too much back and forth. If the structure of the narrative doesn’t provide a sense of cohesion, then the tone of the film doesn’t help either. RoboCop cannot decide if it’s a blistering satire or a serious thinking flick. From the start, we’re presented with Samuel L. Jackson’s patently absurd Pat Novak, modeling himself, I assume, after FOX News and Glenn Beck. Novak provides our introduction to OmniCorp’s involvement with the military, but all of that is funneled through an insanely biased mockery of cable news. Unlike in the original, which was itself a withdrawn satire,