RoboCop was the ultimate forbidden fruit for a 12 year-old boy back in 1987. After all, it’s a movie about a guy in an awesome robot suit who goes around fighting crime with cool weapons and tough sounding one-liners like “Your move, creep.” Who wouldn’t want to see that? However, the film was rated R because it was ridiculously violent, bloody, and foul-mouthed, so as my parents wisely told me when I begged them to see it, “NO WAY!” Eventually, I did see it, and truth be told, all that robot stuff was pretty cool, and all that other stuff was shocking, gross, and quite frankly, uncomfortable. So, I’ve never quite understood its lasting legacy as some sort of “social commentary” and what not, but I do get the lasting coolness of the fact that it’s a guy with a cool robot suit to fight crime. Now, did this movie really need to be remade, even if it tones downs some of the gratuitous elements? Of course not. Is there any movie that really needs to be remade, except maybe for Logan’s Run? However, with Hollywood, it inevitably will, and so all we’re left with is the question of whether the remake is any good or any sort of improvement. Well, this new RoboCop left me feeling kind of like the original; sort of conflicted. It tries for some improvement and has some interesting ideas, and of course, it has all that cool robot stuff, but in the end, it falls short of being anything really memorable.
First, let me say that the look of the new suit and the modern technology available to help it do really cool looking things definitely adds to that appeal of just how awesome the concept of a RoboCop can be. While the original certainly had its appeal, I’d say this version is a big improvement in both looks and function. As for the man in the suit, I was impressed with Joel Kinnamen’s ability to both give this RoboCop a more human feel but also to emulate the cold, robotic, removed persona made famous by the original film. I also appreciated that they got that awesome sound of him walking down so perfect. I loved that sound in the original. It just sounds so heavy, menacing, and…well, robotic. It’s just a cool sound effect, so I was glad they brought it back here. The return of some of that 80s music…not so much.
I also appreciated that this film tried to explore some interesting philosophical quandaries presented by all this technology and blending it with humans. What ultimately runs that hybrid result; the program or the humanity? Is free will an illusion, especially if you have a microchip in your brain? Is morality what sets humans apart from robots? Indeed, one character in the film argues that robots just don’t know what right from wrong is, so how could they be trusted? Now that was an interesting question since in our culture, we’re so determined to make morality relative and to redefine what’s right and wrong. If we truly believe that right and wrong are arbitrary, purely based on opinion and therefore constantly in flux and can never be concretely defined, it seems to me that it wouldn’t matter if a robot didn’t know right from wrong since those concepts are nebulous at best anyways. The robot probably knows about as much about that as we do.
On the flip side, a friend wondered why a robot couldn’t just be programmed with what’s right and wrong. C.S. Lewis suggests in Mere Christianity, that in a sense, that’s the case with humanity’s perception of right and wrong; there is a clear standard for what that is that’s been “programmed” into us from something outside of us. The reason morality can be clearly defined is it isn’t defined by us, but defined for us, and we all innately acknowledge that standard really does exist. These are all interesting thoughts, and while the movie briefly touches on them, it doesn’t really delve into them in much detail. After all, there are bad guys to be busted in spectacular, robotic fashion. Who has time for figuring out if the man rules the machine or if the machine rules the man when there’s stuff to blow up? Or to examine the consequence our little compromises on principles can lead to when wanton destruction awaits? Yes, there are some great themes in here, but they get pushed aside to make more room for bloodless gun battles and some nice explosions.
Basically, I kept waiting for this new RoboCop to do something to help make it memorable, which for better or worse, the original did with its bloody “hyper-violence as commentary on violence.” Yet, the action for the most part is fairly generic, the plot is pretty straightforward and generic without ever really connecting on any sort of meaningful level, and the noble attempts at adding some heart with the scenes of a loving family, wife, and daddy never really make an impact. In the end, what we get is an enjoyable but forgettable movie that at least tries to do some interesting things with the material but never really gets anywhere in doing so.
RoboCop tries to do something interesting with the material, but then forgets to actually do that with the focus on the action, which leaves it in fairly middling ground. There’s lots of bullets, but very little blood, unlike the original. Just a smattering of language, unlike the original and a few kind of creepy scenes of the man without the suit. So, take that PG-13 rating seriously. It may not be R any more, but it’s still not for kids.
