I won’t lie to you, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. Almost since I started this blog, actually. I’ve held off because there are already a lot of reviewers out there who do this sort of thing, but no one has done it with these two films, to date. I’m of course talking about Robocop (1987) and Robocop (2014). There’s really an interesting dichotomy between these two movies and even though they share many elements, like characters, settings and basic story foundations, they manage to be two very different films. The 2014 version doesn’t get a lot of love from anyone really, let alone fans. I’m pretty sure they’d all rather sit through Robocop 3 than watch this one and I really can’t understand why. Let’s take a look at these two films and see what they have to offer.
The ‘87 film begins in a very Paul Verhoeven style, with a news broadcast. This is an effective bit of narrative as it’s purpose is to download most of the important information to the viewer quickly so that the audience can then jump right into the rest of the story. So we get a snippet about one of the protagonists, Boddicker, and we instantly get the commentary on capitalist decadence and corporate greed. The whole film serves as a vehicle to rail against the excess of the 80s and it does so very well. Yamaha is making artificial hearts, there’s a company building the most fuel-inefficient cars ever conceived, and a corporation has managed to privatize law enforcement. It all lends itself to a gritty dystopian feel, which we were all over back in the 80s and Verhoeven doesn’t waste any time getting us invested and lost in the world that he’s created. We meet the character who will eventually become Robocop, Alex Murphy, as he’s being transferred from his cushy job at an uptown police precinct to an underfunded hell hole in the slums of Detroit. The atmosphere is further emphasized here as we hear talk of officers being murdered, strikes and just a generally bad situation all around.
The 2014 reboot starts in sort of the same way. There’s a broadcast, but this time, it’s a political show hosted by Samuel L. Jackson. He shows the ED-209 models at work in Tehran, there’s some terrorist activity, and it’s all pretty action packed. Our primary antagonist is introduced here, but you wouldn’t know that unless you’ve watched the film previously. When we’re finally introduced to Murphy, he already works at the one precinct in Detroit and he’s already investigating the drug lord. Right there, there are a few similarities between the two, but this i really where they start to diverge a little. Where in the original the audience really feels Murphy’s death as he’s blown apart by gunfire piece by piece, in the reboot, he’s blown up by a car bomb. Also, in the reboot less time is taken to help the audience connect with the Murphy character in a meaningful way. But, I get ahead of myself.
The rest of each movie both play out in much the same way. Murphy is killed, then revived as Robocop. Once that happens, he sets off trying to solve his own murder, which leads back to one of the head honchos at Omni, there’s a final confrontation and said honcho is ultimately killed. Although both stories maintain certain similarities on paper, the way that each film employs these components is totally different from one another. In the original, great effort is made to make the audience feel as if they’re apart of the universe Verhoeven created. Everything about the narrative is more personal. The death of Murphy is gruesomely intimate, which in turn, makes everything that happens subsequently feel more intimate. When Robocop learns that he’s been betrayed by the very people that created him, we feel that because we witnessed in gory detail the events that led to his creation. His wife leaves after he dies so he’s alone. This reinforces the bond between Robocop and his partner, Lewis. Even the narrative as a whole is much more intimately presented.
Contrast that with the reboot and you get a narrative that tries to be more broad. This may not seem like a bad idea on paper, but the resulting effect is that there’s less for the audience to grab hold of and get invested in. Sure it’s great seeing OCP use their robots to patrol warzones, but when things are portrayed at that level of detachment, it has to be made up for elsewhere. The director even goes so far as to use Murphy’s relationship with his family to emotionally blackmail both Robocop and the audience, as if he knew that there wasn’t enough there to emotionally ground the narrative. What I’m saying is that the reboot is less about the story serving the characters and more about the characters serving the story. This significantly impacts the narrative impact and not in a good way so if I had to give a point to either one on general storytelling, it would definitely go to the original.
Now let’s take a look at themes. The original looks at the decadence, decay, and moral corruption that results from capitalism run amok. It does this by throwing the audience into a near future dystopia and it really drives the dystopia home for the viewer. Everything about the setting is gritty,dirty, and lawless. There are thugs murdering cops, rapists running with reckless abandon, politicians taking hostages, and corporate executives taking out hits on co-workers. The idea that Detroit is two steps from hell is made absolutely clear and reinforced continually. And of course, all this is attributed to the corruption that exists because of the corporate mentality and the fact that that ideology is allowed to continue. Everything about the movie serves this notion, including the fact that we never see the main baddie, Jones, outside of his corporate tower. He spends his whole life completely out of touch with the world around him. By comparison, the reboot attempts to take up a slightly less tangible theme. The theme behind the newer entry is the illusion of free will. It’s a really fascinating concept and I give huge kudos to the film for attempting to tackle such a complex idea. However, it does suffer from making the attempt. See, it’s a very subjective theme in that some just aren’t going to get there and it needs subtlety in order to work, but if it’s too subtle, it will get lost and that’s really what happened. With the reboot, we only spend a handful of scenes exploring the theme. The rest is a lot of politicking and backdoor business dealing, which although it lends itself a little, lacks the intimacy to have any impact. There’s really only one scene that works with the theme in mind and it’s Robocop’s final field test. Gary Oldman explains how the AI system that runs Robocop while he’s in an altercation makes Murphy think that he’s in control even though he’s not.; The theme is carried through the rest of the film as we see scientists playing with the chemical balance of Robocop’s brain in order to keep him under their control, and it’s pertinent in today’s society where our every whims are monitored via GPS and the Internet, and so much of what we do is subconsciously guided by the media. It’s brilliant and if the rest of the film had been up to that standard, the entire thing would have been amazing. But it wasn’t. It quickly devolves into a soulless action film Hence, again, I have to give the point to the original.
Finally, let’s look at the setting a bit more. I know we’ve already done this to a point, but it’s something that makes the original very unique. See, the original was not apologetic in the way that it decided to depict the future. Verhoeven decided that it was a gritty dystopia and then he took that concept and cranked it up to 11. That’s one of the reasons that the film got an R rating. It didn’t pull any punches immersing the viewer in that world and as we previously discussed, it was not a friendly world at all. On the other hand, the world created for the reboot felt a little mundane. Gone was all the familiar corporate identities meddling in markets they shouldn’t (Yamaha making artificial hearts, for example) and in its place is a fairly bland and interchangeable future that, although maybe accurate, isn’t terribly unique. More time could have been taken making the setting more memorable and unique if so much time hadn’t been devoted to trying to show the audience the ‘bigger picture’. The original succeeds because we’re thrust into the story from the get go, everything about the setting is established and then just continually reiterated. The reboot doesn’t take the time to even establish why Robocop would be such an important development for domestic law enforcement. Detroit seems pretty tame and we get the impression that the rest of the US is more or less the same. There’s the struggle between Congress and OCP to implement the Robocop program, but the audience is not given sufficient reason to get invested in that struggle beyond, “It will make OCP billions.” The setting just doesn’t do a satisfactory job providing the depth and reinforcement necessary for the audience to invest in the film. Again, point to the original.
I could probably go on for a couple more paragraphs or so, but I think it’s pretty clear where I stand. The original still manages to be the best, which is typically the case in any franchise. It has enough story, character development and setting to still hold up to today’s standards. That’s not to say, however, that the reboot isn’t good. It’s got some great visual effects, a couple of exciting action sequences, some great actors giving good performances, and even a couple of laughs. It tries to operate via irony, which is somewhat different from film today, but in the end, the original sets the benchmark so high that I think it’s pretty much unattainable, but that doesn’t mean that they should ever stop trying. Catch me next week when we take a look at Bond films that are more shaken than stirred!
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