Sweet Trailer…'Robocop'

Did you completely forget that there’s a reboot in the works for Dutch filmmaking master Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop? Full disclosure: I sure did, and ignorance definitely felt an awful lot like bliss. The first trailer hit the Interwebs last night, and after taking a look, I’d be grateful to return to that idyllic state of not knowing. Hachi machi, this looks like a tone-deaf dud.

I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m not giving the movie much of a chance, but I’ll also quickly point out that my wholesale disinterest in the production and my immediately prickly reaction to the footage has more to do with the fact that MGM doesn’t seem to really care about it than my love for Verhoeven’s film. Keep in mind one simple mantra when approaching any remake – “it will not tarnish the original” – and you’ll always be able to go back to the source and enjoy it no matter how badly it gets maimed in the process of being remade.

But after what feels like a decade’s worth of rumor-mongering, studio woes, directorial swaps, terrible set photos, and all kinds of other related nonsense and hijinks, watching the clip above is kind of deflating. This is the most that MGM could come up with? Granted, nobody’s expecting genius here, and nor should they, but “genius” and “half-baked narrative about what it means to be human” are sort of like two ships passing each other in the night.

Maybe Jose Padilha has mined something really thematically satisfying out of that conceit, and maybe in doing so he’s made a RoboCop that feels like RoboCop while also standing out as uniquely his own creation. That’d be kind of cool. I’m not holding my breath, of course, but amidst the film’s completely humorless sheen, I’ll hold out hope that there’s something worth latching onto here.

Source: Badass Digest