Nearly everyone is familiar with the original 1987 RoboCop. Exploring the boundary between man and machine, that film became a critically acclaimed sci-fi classic. Hopefully many have forgotten the disappointing successor RoboCop 2 and the even worse RoboCop 3. Not long ago a new RoboCop film was announced: not a sequel, but a remake of the original. Would this be any good? I was skeptical.
It is 2028. Robots are widely deployed to provide security in in other countries that are occupied by the United States. The American public does not want those machines on their own streets. This is legally prohibited. Instead, people want safety and security to have a human element: a machine should not be able to pull the trigger by itself. Playing into this demand, the country’s market leading manufacturer of military security robots, OmniCorp sets out to combine man and machine. The CEO of Omnicorp, Raymond Sellars, asks one of his key employees, the brilliant doctor Dennett Norton, to spearhead this ambitious project.
The recently seriously injured Alex Murphy is chosen for the program with the consent of his grieving wife. After waking up in his new body, Alex’s first reaction is to panic. He has major problems adjusting to his new situation, and is also much less effective in combat than the fully computer controlled robots. However, the public loves the man in the machine dubbed RoboCop, leaving Sellars and Norton with a dilemma. Furthermore, RoboCop’s human “Alex” part also wants to take revenge on those that caused his injury in the first place.
There are many parallels between this new version of RoboCop and the original, but I would not call it a remake. It’s a story with roughly the same ingredients: a maimed cop that becomes a cyborg, a vengeful arms dealer and corrupt cops and businessmen. However, the mixture and emphasis is different. This re-imagined version is a more human story, with less focus on technology and pure action. Undoubtedly, this shift is likely to disappoint fans of the original, but it makes the film more accessible.
Strangely, RoboCop himself (Joel Kinnaman) is not the main attraction of the movie. The heated conversations between doctor Dennett and Raymond Sellars give the film its gravitas, with excellent performances by Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton. They become tangled in juggling public perception, business interests and scientific goals, and have to deal with their differing moral points of view.
Like other contemporary films, RoboCop also has parts where the viewer is addressed directly. Via newscasts presented by the, obviously biased, news anchor Pat Novak (Samuel L. Jackson). Though this is good for laughs and intended as satire, it is also distracting. Novak hardly flinches when a machine kills a young child, which seems contradictory to his commitment to safety and security.
This 2014 RoboCop manages to evoke a better emotional connection with the characters as the original, but also manages to mix in enough humor to keep things digestible. Though the film is enjoyable for eighty percent, it suffers from a predictable and too slow cliché ending. Nevertheless, it is certainly not as bad as I expected it to be. A good choice if you enjoy not too serious rough action science fiction.
★★★★★★★☆☆☆
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