RoboCop Review - The future is now
Originally, the remake of Paul Verhoeven’s classic cyberpunk RoboCop had been entrusted to Darren Aronofsky, who dropped out at an early stage of development because of some issues with the studios.
Almost by chance, Brazilian director José Padilha, mostly known because of his Tropa de Elite movies, dropped in and chose, among the many projects offered him by Strike Entertainment, one out of the list.
The distopic future imagined by Verhoeven (later resurrected in two sequels, two TV series, two animated series, several comicbooks and videogames) was finally ready to come back on the big screen.
The story is more or less the same told in the 1987 movie: in 2028, multinational corporation OmniCorp is trying to obtain the complete monopoly over cybernetic warforce by selling its drones to several national armies. Problem is, in the States the law forbids to use robots on American soil, thus cutting out a big piece of market. CEO Raymond Sellars has an idea, and starts a project aimed to create a cyborg who is effectively part man and part machine, thus able to bypass the law. The perfect choice is Alex Murphy, a detective from Detroit police who had been severely wounded in action during an investigation on an arms dealer and several corrupt colleagues. Murphy will then become RoboCop, but in order to fully express the potential of his new cybernetic body, his human side has to be erased…
Tackling such a classic of the genre, an absolute cult in its own league, isn’t really an easy task; that’s even in the more “commercial” kind of cinema inspired by Verhoeven’s hyper-violent and smashing sci-fi.
Padilha, helped by writer Joshua Zetumer, smartly dodges the obstacle by totally changing his approach on detective Alex Murphy’s (who has the functionally blank face of Sweden actor Joel Kinnaman this time around) story: while Verhoeven preferred a sociopolitical and satirical approach, Padilha decided to bet on the human one, diving in bioethics, and his RoboCop is more focused on the relationship between man and machine rather than the one between society and violence.
At the centre of the debate there’s the man Murphy dealing with the machine RoboCop, and the hero’s genesis is told back-to-front to underline the duality: where the original was a machine who gradually recovered human emotions and memories, the new one is a human being whose characterising elements are ripped from him one by one, until “something” unexplicable by chemistry or physics intervenes so that he can redeem and reprogram himself. The presence of the family, eliminated with the “secret identity” pretext in the original film, makes this dichotomy even stronger, furtherly changing the narrative style and expedients from the original.
Certainly there’s no lack of a purely political satire: Gary Oldman‘s good doctor exploited by Michael Keaton‘s rich and unscrupulous businessman points a finger against the storming capitalism that only got stronger since 1987, while to the wonderful Samuel L. Jackson goes the character of journalist Pat Novak, summary of the flownest and most fascist imperialism ever generated by USA; not even Zach Grenier‘s “good” senator Dreyfuss is to be saved. While he insists about the importance to have someone “who knows the value of a human life” and feels some emotion behind the trigger, he has no problems in sending robots and droids abroad, with the results brilliantly and frightfully showed in the breath-taking incipit in Teheran.