Robocop BeRoot, a slight glitch in the system but on par for most/all remakes

I wanted to do a compare and contrast like I had with Conan: The Barbarian and its remake, however I haven’t been able to get a hold of the original Robocop movie from the 80’s so I’ll have to some of it by memory.

Robocop tells the story of an incorruptible cop that is turned on by vicious members of society and forced to go through radical experiments to save his life, namely by turning him into a cyborg. He returns to society feeling more than out of place and begins to try to solve his own attempted murder. This leads him down a path that forces Omni Products, those that made him a cyborg, to turn him more and more into a product as opposed to a cop/person. With his shear force-of-will/soul-power, he overcomes the programming that makes him a robot and “saves” the day from...well, he’s already lost (this is the other really big appeal of the Robocop movie)

The acting is as good as you could hope with relatively unknown faces. Joel Kinnaman does a good job, but ultimately just does what the director asks (and that's not always a good thing). The supporting cast carries some big names, like Garry Oldman and Michael Keaton. The rest aren't really known by name, but you'd recognize them if you've seen a lot of movies. They all do a good job, but it's not anything really memorably great (but certain things stunk, but we'll talk more about that later). 

The questions raised about humanity and free will, aside from the ultra violence of the original film, are ultimately the focal point of the film’s theory/theme/the-part-that-makes-you-think-about-stuff. Lamentably, the reboot doesn’t do this awesome idea the justice it deserves. Once “problems” get address with Robocop, Garry Oldman then explains the mystery of Robocop, that he doesn’t actually have any control and that he is just following programming. This isn’t the kind of stuff we’re supposed to know until the climax. That was probably one of the biggest appeals of the original Robocop. Where did the man begin? How much of a robot is he? Those kinds of questions need to be shown more than told. I know that in a recent bunch of reboots and other movies in general that is a giant push of “show don’t tell” (it’s a writers mantra that isn’t always the best, but it’s a good on in general) and it’s been a problem. There has been a lot of showing and it’s been losing audiences and critics. But in this case, and in the case of almost all action movies, showing is better than telling. With the Mystery genre you have to do a balancing act of showing and telling. The original Robocop had some flavor of mystery and this new one does away with it entirely.

The other big focal point of the social theory of the movie is that we’ve already lost the social war between the corporations and the “average Joe”. Here is where the villains are really meant to shine. But the writers really dropped the ball here. The villain, played by Michael Keaton, is so obviously a villain it gets a little obnoxious after a point. He seems rather fine until they encounter the “problem” with Robocop (which I didn’t think was a big deal and actually could have been done much more efficiently) then he turns all, “Screw the people, I only want profit for profit’s sake”. I like capitalist villains, I’ll admit I have a few “left of center” ideals, but there is a right and wrong way to do a capitalist-all-for-the-1% type of villain. This isn’t the way to do it. One line that he kept repeating that really got under my skin was “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done”. He kept thinking inside this box for so long that when he begins to think, “How can I get this to work to my advantage” it seems like it’s more of a survival tactic than innovated thought. Now this might be mostly current social commentary where the creators of the film see that the biggest problem with our society is corporate crony-ism (where the biggest corporations can get away with genocide because they’ve bought our politicians and yes it is a huge problem), so they decided to make him as obviously a villain as possible. However, how in the [various expletives] could his corporation ever have risen to where it is if he ran it the way he has been running it with Robocop? Instead of twisting things to “How can this make me more money” (and that is his ultimate goal, mostly dealing with changing public policy)

The roll of the dice give this movie a 7/10. I didn't mind the lack of the ultra-violence, since the whole idea was to make his a friendly-public figure. I did however mind very much the dumbing down and blatant exposure of what could have been a great mystery and thought provoking film.