ROBOCOP is another one of those classic franchises that should probably not be rebooted, prequelized or sequelized any further, but it was obvious Hollywood would revisit that idea sooner or later.
They’ve put Jose Padilha in charge of the project, and tasked him with giving a fresh new look at the story. He has previously stated that no, his version will not be a rehash of the original, and now for the first time he’s giving us some idea of what his new film will contain.
“‘RoboCop’ the first movie was fantastic,” he told us. “But even if there was no movie, the concept of ‘RoboCop’ is brilliant, first because it lends itself to a lot of social criticism, but also because it poses a question, ‘When do you lose you humanity?’ The way it does that is by replacing body parts with machine parts, and that’s very smart because guess what? It’s going to happen!” “I have my take on it,” he continued, “And I can tell you this: In the first ‘RoboCop’ when Alex Murphy is shot, gunned down, then you see some hospitals and stuff and then you cut to him as RoboCop. My movie is between those two cuts. How do you make RoboCop? How do you slowly bring a guy to be a robot? How do you actually take humanity out of someone and how do you program a brain, so to speak, and how does that affect an individual?”
You know, if we HAVE to make a ROBOCOP movie, I don’t think that’s a half bad concept. It sounds a lot more introspective than the original, and could be pretty cool if handled tactfully. The original is a balls-out shoot-em-up for the most part, and this description makes it sounds like that won’t be the case here.
But how exactly do you have a WHOLE movie about him being built into Robocop? Is it a process where he gets to wake up and try out his new gadgets? How will they fit action into that?