Hacker Cinema
RoboCop
2014 · Film · 118 min
Directed by José Padilha
In RoboCop, the year is 2028 and multinational conglomerate OmniCorp is at the center of robot technology. Overseas, their drones have been used by the military for years, but have been forbidden for law enforcement in America. Now OmniCorp wants to bring their controversial technology to the home front, and they see a golden opportunity to do it. When Alex Murphy – a loving husband, father and good cop doing his best to stem the tide of crime and corruption in Detroit – is critically injured, OmniCorp sees their chance to build a part-man, part-robot police officer. OmniCorp envisions a RoboCop in every city and even more billions for their shareholders, but they never counted on one thing: there is still a man inside the machine.
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27 comments on Hacker News
TOTP license plates would be totally rad to see imagined in a badass dystopian sci-fi film. I'm imagining something along the lines of Robocop or Judge Dredd.
IRL we will probably need more mature solutions - legislation, regulation etc. At this point we know the tech can't really be contained. It'll be all-seeing, all-knowing and super cheap. Just as the source/link describes it. So the only way is to have actual adults working in law enforcement.
Other people have already given great answers: it plays faster, the levels are different, etc.
But to me the main problem of "remake replaces the original" approach is that it's a a very "content-consuming"-way to look at media. Videogames are art in their own way, old games can still be enjoyed for what they are and for what they were - same thing with movies. Silent Hill 2 (2024) doesn't replace the original Silent Hill 2. RoboCop (2014) doesn't make RoboCop (1987) obsolete.
That's my take on re_makes_, at least. With re_masters_ I'd be much more willing to recommend them over the originals (although the preservationist in me would still like the originals to be available in some way)
There’s an extremely goofy version of RoboCop that’s sort of like this as well.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3528906/
Armed with a powerful media platform with extensive reach, media executives are building the blocks of hatred and division in the ongoing and escalating war between the people who will benefit from automation and the people who will suffer. If you're reading this, you're probably on the side of those benefiting from automation, at least in the short term.
On a lighter note, I would love to see this technique used in a future Terminator or Robocop movie.
I'd expect Mr. Beast to appear in a Robocop movie.
> ... with the Nicaraguan capital expected to recover from the fallout within 200 years. That's it for the news tonight, up next is Mr. Beast with a big charitable payout of 150 000$ tonight, followed by It's Not My Problem!
> With that large a payout from Mr. Beast, you know what they say: I'd buy that for a dollar!
> Ha ha ha.
reminds me of robocop movie "you have 30 seconds to comply."
I first saw it around 1998 I think, in my early teens, and it made the same impression on me. So many of the ideas were amazing! It was also around this time I saw Terminator 2, RoboCop and The Fifth Element for the first time also. And then another few years later when my english teacher in secondary school had us watch the Matrix on VHS. It wasn't until I watched it in my own time I appreciated it. So many good films, rose tinted glasses!
Also in one of the Robocop movies iirc.
One thing I've noticed is that is seems more recent movies lack character observations. Everything is done is in service of the plot.
I think it was in Doctor No there was a conversation between Q, M and Bond. Bond's favourite weapon was the Beretta, and Q explained their downsides. Bond was ordered to use the Walther (IIRC) as a replacement. It was in a box. At the end of the scene, Bond picks up the box, surreptitiously hiding the Beretta underneath. As he is about to walk out, M, continuing with his writing and without looking up, says to Bond, "Oh and Bond, leave the Beretta behind on your way out." (Or something like that).
It's a small scene, but it tells you a lot about the characters. It just adds to storytelling, even though it isn't a key scene.
Another example is the difference between the original Robocop and the remake. In the original, the villain Boddicker is hailed into the police station. Battered and bruised, he spits blood on some paperwork on a desk and says "Just give me my fucking phone call."
How badass is that? The villains in the remake were much less interesting, and it made for a weaker movie. I guess modern screenwriters /could/ write decent if they wanted to, but I assume that gunning for a 13 certificate really neuters the possibilities. I also suspect that there is more influence by the producers, who insist that certain things need to be in certain ways "for the demographics". So what you end up with is a story that's bent to suit the demographics, rather than just telling a good story.
RoboCop and Starship Troopers are both far headier movies than what a lot of arthouse snobs would consider high art. And they actually made money!
You can deliver a quality film with a substantive plot while still making an action movie for the masses.
I'm just as into film as you are, if not possibly more so, but please just fuck off with your snobbish anti-Hollywood nonsense. Most of Europe's actors, directors, & what-have-you all work in Hollywood from time to time to eat.
Shit, while we're on the topic of Paul Verhoeven, the guy made the most successful (most seen) film in the history of Dutch cinema (1973's Turkish Delight) and put Rutger Hauer on the map with it. And did it again later with The Fourth Man (loosely remade later as Basic Instinct) which was a global hit and the most financially successful film made in the Netherlands.
I saw the Robocop (2014) remake on telly the other day. I couldn't help but wonder why the movie even existed. Its production values were vastly higher than the original, but it was just a completely boring movie. It's like the Total Recall remake. They just have no soul. There's just nothing there in terms of writing. Nothing witty, no great lines. In the original a guy rips his face of revealing his skull, and collapses. Completely daft to be sure, but it was funny. There's a creative spark that current films just don't seem to have. The characters have no personality. The actors have no charisma. Let's face it, Arnie is not a great actor. But he does have onscreen charisma.
There's just a different level of acting in the original Total Recall. Arnie, Ronny Cox, the growling Michael Ironside, Sharon Stone. The other supporting actors bought something to the table. With the remake? Nothing! Colin Farrell was boring, and his wife was leagues behind what Stone portrayed.
Maybe the problem is with the film certificate. RoboCop was a 12A, so I guess the executives thought "to hell with the writing, writing is hard."
Hollywood occasionally gets it right, I guess. Joker (2019) was pretty good, despite being a 15. I thought it was a very cohesive film in the way they chose characters like the dwarf, why Fleck committed the murders he did, and how the whole thing developed. You could tell there was a whole lot more thought put into the script.
>It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.
This is quite likely the intent. The same style that makes Robocop to be understood as a classic action movie even if the intention was to subvert.
When was the last time MGM did something truly creative? They pretty much just churn out the same formulaic franchise films every 2-3 years (James Bond, Rocky/Creed) or do pointless reboots (Robocop, Legally Blonde, Pink Panther). The studio has already gone through bankruptcy and layoffs and is on its last legs. There isn't too much left for Amazon to ruin.
Reminds me of the Robocop movies.
Ah, that reminds me of the classic film Robocop.
Dick Jones [big exec at Omni Consumer Products talking about the ED 209 enforcement robot after it wastes a middle-ranking exec during a demo/presentation]:
I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!
You are talking like either the movie RoboCop or as if the 1980s crack epidemic were still in swing. A lot has changed since violent crime started declining rapidly in the mid 90s.
It is partly due to new media however lets consider some other things which are really important.
1) The problem is that a lot of the remakes/sequels and reboots are quite frankly crap. I don't care too much about Disney. But other remakes and sequels are generally awful.
So lets take some case studies:
* Robocop (2013). The movie except for on 2 minute scene was dire. It was a PG-13 remake of what was at the time a shockingly violent film (the effects look awful now, but they were quite convincing back in the mid-90s still) that completely missed the point of the original movie.
* Ghostbusters (2016) was another movie that not only looked completely awful in the trailer, it completely again misunderstood the original movie, added nothing much new and they outright attacked the fandom after they said to the studio "What the hell are you doing". The original Ghostbusters movie wasn't really a comedy movie, it was a Action Horror with some Jokes. The new movie was just a comedy movie, which looked like a Spoof along the lines of "Scary Movie". I have no idea who they were marketing it towards.
Lets take sequels:
* They have also totally squandered two solid Sci-fi Action Movie franchises (Alien and Predator) to the point where the previous low points of the franchises look good (Alien vs Predator and Alien 3 & Alien 4: Resurrection).
* Star Wars has been completely ruined from a fan's perspective. The prequels (in the 2000s) has some terrible acting, iffy CGI now but I can at least appreciate what they were attempting to do and it was an honest attempt by Lucas to flesh out Star Wars universe. However the new Sequels go from "This is Okay, but it is the 1977 movie retold essentially" to terrible (The Last Jedi).
The Last Jedi doesn't make any sense on quite a number of levels. It also ruins one of beloved characters on screen and it was probably intentionally written to not only upset the fans but also kill the franchise i.e. there is at least one scene where Kylo Ren says to audience pretty much "Let the past die, kill if you have to", which is the director pretty much sticking his middle finger up to the fans. Yes in the scene he was speaking to whoever the main character is that doesn't seem to have a personality, but it was really a message from the director to the fans.
They also attacked the fan base (not a good move) because they didn't like a terrible movie. While the movies made money, they have tarnished the brand in the long term.
Disney bought Lucas Film because of Star Wars and monetising the fan base. Lucas Film under Kathleen Kennedy have tried driving away their a dedicated fan base. This strategy is madness.
2) The Hollywood Elite (and they are Elite) have forgotten they are actors and actively show distain for the audience. I don't really want to get into a political commentary, but they literally had The Avengers do an online piece of activism where they told the Electoral college to defy the 2016 Presidential Election result. This doesn't go unnoticed by the average movie goer. Just under half of the Country voted for the current president and then they do an advert where they are pretty much putting a middle finger up at the people who voted for Trump. A lot of those people took their kids to see those movies or saw went to see them themselves.
Audiences will forgive actors for quite a lot of things, but if they continually keep on pushing this audiences will associate them with their politics and not what roles they played.
They are actors. I want them to pretend to be Black Widow, not lecture me about Politics. I will go and listen to a political commentator if I wanted that.
3) Bollywood and the rest of Asia are making their own movies which kick ass. Take "The Raid 2". It has plenty of brutal fight scenes, but it also has a top quality plot about gangs, undercover cops etc. It is amazing to watch. A lot of guys are looking at overseas cinema because Hollywood isn't catering to them.
4) User generated content. I think the only movie I've watched recently was John Wick 1, 2 and 3. I recently listened to a recorded lecture series of the History of Islam on Youtube made by some guy who lives in Azerbaijan. I can listen for effectively nothing 1000s of hours of interviews of Joe Rogan and a Guest just talking for 3 hours about sometimes absolute nonsense or talking about say Leaving a Cult (Megan Phelps interview). I recently watched a series of lectures about the database as a filesystem from some Linux conference. There is a guy who made loads of mini-documentaries about old defunct computers systems and the quality now is on par with the Discovery Channel shows of the late 1990s.
5) Longer stories. Game of Thrones, The Wire and other shows that have very long running stories, lots of characters and complicated plots with lots of Lore have proven that audiences want more complicated stories. There is a guy called Alt-Shift-X on Youtube and he has huge number of people watching him and he just explains the Game of Thrones Lore of the Book vs the TV-series. Most Hollywood movies are pretty simple affairs in comparison.
I think Starship Troopers is outright the best of all of Robocop's sequels.
Yes, it is fascinating how divorced the book and movie are in what they think they have to say. I've always felt that Robert Heinlein was more of a provocateur than often given credit for, and while a strange adaptation, I think the movie still has an interesting conversation with the book. I'd like to imagine Mr. Heinlein would also have found it an interesting conversation.
In a way, that's very strongly one of "old guard" Sci-Fi's best qualities where (mostly short) stories flew back and forth on similar topics in conversation with one another. The movie manages to touch on many of the same topics and poke and prod at them and say "I think it would turn out this other way", and that's very much an interesting Sci-Fi conversation, whether you more appreciate the book or the movie they are still saying interesting things to one another (and both strongly in ways specific to their medium, which is also fascinating).
Besides this ham, evidently Chinese demand has been blamed for the global shortage of avocados [0] and the lack of butter in France [1]. I've personally most noticed the effect when it comes to wide-release movies, in which the heroes manage to find some reason to end up for a brief scene in China, or to use Chinese brand products -- Civil War, Transformers, and Robocop come to mind. There's also the suspicion that American movies have had to be more generic in their themes and dialog to be easier to translate/localize for the Chinese. Ghostbusters and Deadpool were not eligible for China's market because of their supernatural and otherwise offensive content, so it's not hard to believe that moviemakers will have to work harder to justify such content [2].
As an American, seeing these examples is still kind of amusing to me in a karmic way. I assume whatever annoyance or alienation I feel is just a small bit of how the rest of the world has felt the past 50 years, having to regularly adapt to and adopt strange influences and demands because they were popular in America (Sorry about "Jersey Shore", high fructose corn syrup, the backlash against MSG, and the cocaine trade).
[0] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-china-blame-global-avocado-shortage.html
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/09/news/economy/butter-shortage-europe/index.html
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/did-you-catch-the-ways-hollywood-pandered-to-china-this-year
> Many seem to criticize this adaptation for not exploring the same themes or reaching the same conclusions as the original
It didn't need do that. It could've told a totally different story and been set in Rio and it would've been fine if the script wasn't in Hollywood formula 101. I saw this movie before and it was called Robocop. And the dialogue was beyond awful. Arrival took a chance and assumed that the audience wasn't intellectually sterile. Pacific Rim (which I love btw) and its intentionally bad plot was better.
The whitewashing bothers me not so much that the Major needed to be Asian per se. It's that Hollywood just doesn't think an asian person can be a lead in a movie that doesn't have kung fu in it.
Got to say, I haven't seen it, mostly because I know I would hate it. But one of my friends told me that they are destroying a death star. Again. For the 3rd time. Seriously? How many times are they gonna try?
"One can envision Hollywood eventually turning out only two products: "Star Wars" movies and James Bond movies, each periodically "rebooted" for a new generation of customers."
Absolutely love the conclusion. This is exactly what is happening right now. It's like every single new movie is a reboot. Mad Max, Ghostbusters, Robocop, Point Break, The neverending story...
> If you know anyone over at Hollywood, pitch for turning the problem into a movie.
That was the last RoboCop. Seems that nobody cared enough to even recognize the problem.
Yes, Robocop did do this to me. It was one of the weirdest movies I had watched at the time. It's been a long long time since I've seen it though, I'm probably due for another viewing.
I watched the remake a few weeks ago. It was ok but it didn't leave an impression on me like the original did.
> "Most people are just looking for some simple thrills"
This is patently untrue. Two of the top films in theaters right now are Interstellar and Gone Girl, neither of which can reasonably fit under the umbrella of "simple thrills". In fact Gone Girl has been widely described as a very difficult film to watch in terms of its emotional impact on its audience - suffice it to say the appreciation of that film goes above and beyond mere entertainment, yet both are "popular art" in the sense that they are widely consumed by the mainstream.
The general public is capable of a substantial amount of artistic understanding, and there are more experts out there than you acknowledge. Appreciation of different types, genres, and subgenres of art change over time as a reflection of culture.
One good modern example of this is the comic book movie - comic books have unique thematic, structural, and aesthetic elements to them that were previously the exclusive territory of comic book nerds. In recent years this has gone spectacularly mainstream - and hundreds of millions of people now better understand stuff that used to be pretty inscrutable.
All art exist in a spectrum between the novice and the expert, mainstream society is quite expert at some (see: music, cinema) but not currently practiced in others (see: postmodernism). To boil the artistic sensibilities of the mainstream down to "simple thrills" is not only grossly cynical, it's grossly incorrect.
"Popular art" is not mere entertainment - and it has never been, and has always been a reflection of the time and place in which it's created. Captain America - popular right now - was a nationalistic symbol created during the midst of WW2 when it was felt that such a symbol be needed. The utopian portrayal of the future in the original Star Trek attracted viewers as an optimistic opposite to the Cold War. Heck, the conflict between the Federation and the Klingons is a direct analogy between the USA and the USSR (and naturally, the Federation always prevails).
And these art forms evolve - just this year we've had two massively profitable films between the X-Men and Captain America where the US government was portrayed as openly malevolent, and one of them directly addressed governmental spying. These works transparently reflect the times in which they were made. With the increasing media attention on drone strikes worldwide, even the RoboCop remake wasn't spared - the movie went from a reflection of 1980s crime anxiety to a reflection of 2010s morality re: drone strikes.
This isn't just movies either - Tupac built a huge mainstream career and long-standing legacy on works that plainly and openly commented on crime, race, and equality in the context of 1990s America. He's far from the only one - the general public is much more capable of expert artistic appreciation than you give them credit.
People seek commentary, understanding, belonging, and even escape from the world and times in which they live, and popular art has provided this, and in this way they are not substitutable. The notion that people can or should subsist on past art exclusively is plainly false, as is the basis assumption that "popular art" is merely entertainment.
Check out the occupation of Tehran in the first 10 minutes of the new Robocop movie.
Right, because movie ticket prices and dvd prices are going down in the face of free tv and cheap online streaming. Yes today's content has to compete with yesterday's content. But they do already. A new Robocop is coming out. I'm sure it will do just fine, even though you can find the original for cheap or free.
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack