Hollywood’s latest valentine to the 1980s, Brazilian director José Padilha’s first English-language feature “RoboCop” released on Feb. 12, is a slick, kinetic reboot of Paul Verhoeven’s campier, gorier 1987 sci-fi action classic.
The plot broadly follows the original – a Detroit cop (Joel Kinnaman’s Detective Murphy) cut down in the line of duty is saved from death’s door by corporate experimenters, who transform him into a cyborg. Struggling to recover his humanity, he investigates his own attempted murder and winds up on a rampage against corrupt cops, organized crime and the corporation that created him. Both films spin violent satires about technology, power and greed into nearly plausible near-future thrill rides through a city that represents all of America’s anxieties about deindustrialization.
Padilha, however, offers us a more complex protagonist, in a vision for the age of drone strikes, surveillance and digitized identities, where cybernetic systems monitor and manage human existence on every scale.
Like the original, the remake opens with a newscast with Samuel L. Jackson, hosting an “O’Reilly Factor”-style show. He calls for the domestic deployment of military robots shown “pacifying” Tehran, railing against “robo-phobic” politicians prohibiting their use in policing during the opening. Michael Keaton’s smirking, self-righteous CEO – a “visionary” tech entrepreneur unlike Verhoeven’s coked-up, avaricious yuppies – wants to sway public opinion with “a figure they can rally behind: a product with a conscience.”
Traumatized, drugged and installed in a powerful mechanical body, the resurrected Murphy becomes an emotionless law-enforcing machine, electronically controlled but with “the illusion of free will,” embodying the corporate greed and feckless scientific curiosity that created him. As the prosthetics researcher overseeing Murphy’s transformation, Gary Oldman’s latter-day Dr. Frankenstein says “fear, instinct, bias, compassion will always interfere with the system … consciousness is nothing more than the processing of information.” Of course, Murphy’s soul – or whatever we should call it – rises from the abyss and overcomes his software at the crucial moment.
It’s in this climactic crisis that “RoboCop” risks becoming a metaphor for itself, since it has the same problem as Murphy – it, too, wants to be a “product with a conscience.” Though sleekly executed, it’s yet another over-charged, mostly synthetic commodity whipping along just fast enough to avoid collapsing under its own weight.
To be sure, today’s special effects surpass 1987’s by an order of magnitude, with plenty of gunfire and queasy touches of body horror that owe more to Neill Blomkamp (“District 9,” “Elysium”) than to Verhoeven. Padilha foregrounds the psychological aspect of Murphy’s transformation, making his wife and son major characters.
But mostly, the audience finds itself, like Murphy, a helpless passenger in his war-machine of a body, driven by the coldly efficient preoccupation with speed and design that dominates any sector of technical development today, from weaponry to entertainment. Although it pulls off some genuinely startling moments, the mood is simulated more than set with formulaic gestures, the battle scenes closely resemble video games, and the cinematography is a jerky, hyperactive mess.
Not every mindless killing machine of a techy actioner bothers with philosophical questions about consciousness, identity and will. But where “RoboCop” wants to be deep, topical and exciting, it often comes off, well, robotic. Its sparse, mechanical attempts at levity are vague, brusque callbacks landing like so many spent shell casings. Padilha’s grim, tortured hero has the excessive gravitas of Christopher Nolan’s “Batman,” and where the genre needs a good villain to be fun, his is basically Steve Jobs (a crucial scene involves him watching C-SPAN – seriously).
Meanwhile, Verhoeven had Kurtwood Smith (“That ’70s Show”) as a gleefully psychotic gangster, doped-up punkers and maniacal executives blowing each other to pieces. Oldman manages to bring an air of dignity to at least some of the proceedings, as usual, but only Jackson really livens things up.
It was more of a typical big-budget blast of CGI than the think piece it at times pretends to want to be. As a remake, it’s better-looking and more nuanced, but its thoughtfulness sinks into melodrama. Where Verhoeven’s film dealt with social bankruptcy and the re-conquest of chaotic urban space, Padilha’s takes on the militarization of normalcy in a metropolis obsessed with security and overloaded with control devices.
Ultimately, it’s about the irreducibility of the human element in any such system – the impossibility of the “product with a conscience” and its ideal linking of “man and machine,” politics and technology – which is where it resonates most with the dystopian vibe of the original, even as it feels most contemporary. It raises weighty, gruesome questions about drone warfare, medical ethics and state power, but declines to say anything substantial about them. Padilha has given us a hipper, more human “RoboCop,” but not necessarily a more interesting one.
Jan Dichter can be reached at [email protected].
