FrankTrollman wrote:So I saw the new Robocop movie, and I was not terribly impressed. It's hard to put a finger on it, but mostly it just wasn't particularly engaging.
It seemed like the people making the film didn't actually want to make a Robocop movie at all, and instead wanted to make a political thriller about drone deployment policy. Most of the movie is not about Robocop, and Robocop never even sees several of the main characters.
It would actually be kind of a chore to fix this movie. Pretty much my favorite scenes are Samuel Jackson being a ranting news pundit in the future pushing a pro-drone deployment agenda. But... while that stuff is entertaining, it's not actually relevant to the main character's story. All of that is just background to the villain's motivation, which means that needs to get cut almost entirely. All the meetings of the Omnicorp leadership, that shit all has to go too.
The movie is called "Robocop" and needs to be about Robocop. He's the character we're actually supposed to be invested in. While the scenes of Michael Keaton talking to his head of marketing and developing a strategy to sell robotic law enforcement to the American people are entertaining, they aren't investing. Because when it comes down to it - none of that shit is directly relevant to the story arc of the main character.
They seriously made a superhero movie where they are desperately in need of less political philosophy and more faffing about with interaction between the main character and his mundane human partner on the police force and more time with the main character hanging out with his wife and kids. It's weird. I honestly didn't think that was possible.
-Username17
The big problem with the new Robocop movie, I think, is that they completely missed the core of the original.
Robocop is a story of resurrection. Murphy dies and he's effectively raised as a mindless cyborg zombie named Robocop. Over the course of the movie he gradually finds his humanity and becomes Murphy again. The soulless undead machne transforms into a living person once more.
The remake doesn't have that dynamic. New Murphy doesn't die. He's merely grievously injured. New Murphy doesn't lose his humanity in the transition from human to cyborg, it has to be actively suppressed by his evil corporate masters.
And that's a big problem. Because you can't have a movie about a undead zombie cyborg gradually regaining his lost humanity if he never loses his humanity in the first place.
They can't focus on the story arc of the main character because he literally doesn't have one. Murphy doesn't change or grow as a person. He merely has a chip implanted in his head that overrides his emotions. And this isn't even much of a problem for him, since he can ignore it pretty much at will.
The other issue, of course, is that the villains are fucking right and everyone would be better off if they won. Their plan is utterly stupid and nonsensical, but their ultimate goal is correct.
I really can't state this enough.
In the original Robocop, OCP taking over the police department was a bad thing for a variety of reasons, up to and including fucking over the officers themselves with various cost cutting measures. But the most important of these was that the ED-209 didn't work right. It didn't work right and was equipped with lethal weapons, a fact which did result in a spectacularly gruesome death.
But the ED-208s in the remake are not so horrifically flawed. They work. They've been been deployed in the real world without incident for years. The technology is proven and mature. And unlike flesh and blood cops they don't leave behind widows and children when they're shot on routine traffic stops. Nor do they mistake wallets for handguns.
Mass deployment of the 208s in a law enforcement capacity would have saved lives. You remove their weapons and give them insanely restrictive ROE because it doesn't matter if they're shot on a routine traffic stop. They don't have the same cognitive biases as humans. They don't have flawed perceptions that fill in the blanks with pure imagination. They don't feel fear. They don't panic.
In sort, the anti-drone crowd are idiots.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:How about that other movie that criticizes drone policy (or more specifically, the American security state) Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Is that any good?
Captain America:The Winter Soldier criticizes the actual problems with drone policy, that is unilaterally declaring people to be enemies on flimsy evidence and shooting them from guided missiles from far away instead of giving them a fair trial is morally dubious and will probably result in the deaths of many innocent people.
That's much better than Robocop, whose criticism seems to be with robots part instead of the murder part.