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Efexeye posted:The visceral, personal murder of Murphy by the film's protagonist is a pretty important part of the whole conceit of Robocop. So Murphy murders himself?
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Sep 13, 2013 19:11
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Boddicker was the protagonist.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:12
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Okay, smartasses, you know what I meant.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:13
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Strand posted:Where there's smoke, there's fire. I was actually pretty interested in this thing until I saw the car bomb in the trailer. Maybe it's pointless to get hung up on a single detail like that, but if they completely neutered one of the most memorable scenes from the original, I suspect the rest of the movie will be toothless as well. Part of the reason Robocop aged so well was because the violence is so over-the-top: The murder, the board room, the car, etc. There's nothing in the trailer that discourages me from thinking it won't turn out like every other reboot passed through Hollywood's digestive system. It'd be pretty awful and pointless for them to just directly remake a film from 1987, complete with all the scenes and social commentary that were meant to be effective... 25 years ago. The car bomb bit doesn't strike me as a very compelling change as presented - this ain't the Troubles we're living in, people in the modern US don't live in dread (even unjustified moral-panic dread) of their cars being booby-trapped like they did of giggling heavily-armed gangsters running amok did in the 80s - but I'm glad they didn't just regurgitate Boddicker's gang into the 21st century intact save for some added CGI whizbangs. It's also sorta funny that they picked such an apparently targeted way of getting Murphy into his robobody - one of the big things that underpinned the soulless hypercapitalist totalitarianism in Robocop was that Murphy was nobody in particular and nobody too much of a poo poo about him - Boddicker didn't hunt him down for foiling his latest scheme, he just tortured and killed him because he was there; OCP didn't single him out as the Best Cop Ever and thus a great candidate for their cutting-edge cyborg program, they encouraged random police casualties and then snatched up the first anonymous cooling body that came on hand because nobody'd miss him or raise a fuss. Lewis is his sole significant and enduring human relationship in the film and she knew the living Murphy for like an hour. Only the bad guys got to have specificity in Robocop (and IIRC Robocop 2), everyone else was a more or less interchangeable everyman, too small to matter. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 19:14
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Efexeye posted:Okay, smartasses, you know what I meant. I don't remember the OCP President personally murdering Murphy.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:14
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computer parts posted:I don't remember the OCP President personally murdering Murphy. The OCP president was not the antagonist either, you pedantic poo poo.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:15
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Efexeye posted:The OCP president was not the antagonist either, you pedantic poo poo. The guy that orders the criminal boss to murder people and is in cahoots with said criminal boss and orders a classified directive not to have the protagonist arrest him is not the main antagonist?
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Sep 13, 2013 19:16
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Dick Jones yes, is the senior president of OCP, and yes, he is the films' main antagonist. How about you address my point about the nature of Murphy's death, rather than having a semantic argument?
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Sep 13, 2013 19:18
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Efexeye posted:Dick Jones yes, is the senior president of OCP, and yes, he is the films' main antagonist. It's pretty grotesque but it's the furthest thing from "personal", you're pretty angry and bad at comprehension and that's a bad combo.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:20
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It's not personal to order flunkies to torture the man, then put a bullet in his brain- at least more personal than a car bomb is? I'm not angry either, I just don't like pedantry, the guy knew what I was trying to say. EDIT: The differentiation between Boddicker and Jones as "main antagonist" is not really important for what I'm trying to say, which is that the way Murphy dies is important. The entire character arc changes when it's a car bomb and his wife (apparently) gets a say in what's done with the body instead of the embodiment of the big bad actually murdering Murphy. boar guy fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 19:22
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A car bomb needs to be set up in advance on a specific car, it is specifically a premeditated and offensive mode of killing. Clarence kills people just for being in his line of sight. Far as anybody but Murphy is concerned, he might as well have been crushed under a falling vending machine; while Kurtwood Smith gives a performance that totally makes the film Clarence isn't the primary antagonist so much as a standin for the larger social decay with OCP at its heart. The whole point is there's absolutely nothing personal about it, there is no personal anymore, except in the transitory and random acquaintance of coworkers and rivalry between the corporate executives.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:29
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Efexeye posted:EDIT: The way Murphy dies is important. The entire character arc changes when it's a car bomb and his wife (apparently) gets a say in what's done with the body. Depending on what themes they choose to address a carbomb could be thematically appropriate. In the 80s we were worried about drug fueled gangs in the city. Today we're worried about terrorists committing asymmetrical warfare on American soil. If they use Robocop as a stand in for drone warfare then a car bomb isn't an inappropriate way to kill him. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:The whole point is there's absolutely nothing personal about it, there is no personal anymore, except in the transitory and random acquaintance of coworkers and rivalry between the corporate executives.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:30
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Gr3y posted:Depending on what themes they choose to address a carbomb could be thematically appropriate. In the 80s we were worried about drug fueled gangs in the city. Today we're worried about terrorists committing asymmetrical warfare on American soil. If they use Robocop as a stand in for drone warfare then a car bomb isn't an inappropriate way to kill him. The 'it's same, but with terrorism' reading would work if like someone blew up the local mall with Murphy in it; nobody's actually all that worried about al Qaeda rigging their personal Chevy to explode, and it rather changes the situation if Murphy is straight-up assassinated. Trying to equate all explosions to all terror and all gunshots to all crime is a pretty crazy superficial reading and I sure hope the film's doing better than that.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:34
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Murphy wasnt just murdered, he was crucified. Being killed by a boobytraped car is a throw away joke in the original. Also he was picked to be Robo, he was a good candidate so they transferred him to a more dangerous department. The fact he has a human hand seems like a slap to the original, where they made a point of being able to save it but choosing not too. I will be able to take my 10 year old (11 when it comes out) without being judged I guess. I do not think this movie will be as good as the original, but I don't think there are very many movies that are. AND lookie what I pre-ordered from toywiz! http://necaonline.com/41637/products/toys/action-figures/robocop-action-figure-ed-209-boxed-figure/ I have a scale matched robocop already, and am going to make a board room diorama with a dead Kenny when it ships!
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Sep 13, 2013 19:35
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:A car bomb needs to be set up in advance on a specific car, it is specifically a premeditated and offensive mode of killing. Clarence kills people just for being in his line of sight. Far as anybody but Murphy is concerned, he might as well have been crushed under a falling vending machine; while Kurtwood Smith gives a performance that totally makes the film Clarence isn't the primary antagonist so much as a standin for the larger social decay with OCP at its heart. The whole point is there's absolutely nothing personal about it, there is no personal anymore, except in the transitory and random acquaintance of coworkers and rivalry between the corporate executives. I always interpreted the angle that Verhoeven chose for the shotguns while Boddicker's gang tears Murphy up looked a lot like a bunch of penises committing a murderous rape (of Murphy's humanity) and the raw brutality of the scene- "does it hurt?" and the way Murphy went out made it more personal to me. That's why I always thought Robocop retained some of his humanity in spite of them trying to strip away all of it that they could, setting up the main character's internal conflict. I don't get that from a car bomb.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:36
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:The 'it's same, but with terrorism' reading would work if like someone blew up the local mall with Murphy in it; nobody's actually all that worried about al Qaeda rigging their personal Chevy to explode, and it rather changes the situation if Murphy is straight-up assassinated. Trying to equate all explosions to all terror and all gunshots to all crime is a pretty crazy superficial reading and I sure hope the film's doing better than that. I don't know if they are going to do that but I think a movie focusing on the American apathy to drone warfare, the sanitation of violence for mass consumption, and the convergence of private military interests with the public good could be just as good as the original Robocop.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:46
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:It'd be pretty awful and pointless for them to just directly remake a film from 1987, complete with all the scenes and social commentary that were meant to be effective... 25 years ago. The car bomb bit doesn't strike me as a very compelling change as presented - this ain't the Troubles we're living in, people in the modern US don't live in dread (even unjustified moral-panic dread) of their cars being booby-trapped like they did of giggling heavily-armed gangsters running amok did in the 80s - but I'm glad they didn't just regurgitate Boddicker's gang into the 21st century intact save for some added CGI whizbangs. The closest I've heard that we'll get is Jackie Earle Haley's mercenary contractor character. Supposedly, he (re)trains Robocop with his new body and is brought in to deal with him when he starts resisting. To be honest, a guy like Boddicker couldn't survive for long against a modern American police force, even with his contacts at OCP. Maybe in ten years from 1987, which is supposedly when Robocop was set, but ten years from now, with facial recognition, biometric cameras, police intelligence-sharing networks, the surveillance state, and an overgunned police force geared toward terrorists and active shooter incidents? Forget it. The only way to survive would be to be invisible and to avoid jail as a crime boss, he won't be so hands on. Evil Mastermind posted:It's also sorta funny that they picked such an apparently targeted way of getting Murphy into his robobody - one of the big things that underpinned the soulless hypercapitalist totalitarianism in Robocop was that Murphy was nobody in particular and nobody too much of a poo poo about him - Boddicker didn't hunt him down for foiling his latest scheme, he just tortured and killed him because he was there; OCP didn't single him out as the Best Cop Ever and thus a great candidate for their cutting-edge cyborg program, they encouraged random police casualties and then snatched up the first anonymous cooling body that came on hand because nobody'd miss him or raise a fuss. Lewis is his sole significant and enduring human relationship in the film and she knew the living Murphy for like an hour. Only the bad guys got to have specificity in Robocop (and IIRC Robocop 2), everyone else was a more or less interchangeable everyman, too small to matter. The thing that strikes me the most about the original film is that Verehoven makes Morton look kinda like this good guy even when he's doing these horrible things. Almost no one in the audience realizes that he's probably just as responsible for Murphy getting killed as Boddicker and is probably even as much as a corporate slimeball as Dick Jones. Gr3y posted:Depending on what themes they choose to address a carbomb could be thematically appropriate. In the 80s we were worried about drug fueled gangs in the city. Today we're worried about terrorists committing asymmetrical warfare on American soil. If they use Robocop as a stand in for drone warfare then a car bomb isn't an inappropriate way to kill him. There's been a lot of American soldiers maimed and killed by IEDs in cars, so it's not that far-fetched.
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Sep 13, 2013 19:47
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Young Freud posted:The closest I've heard that we'll get is Jackie Earle Haley's mercenary contractor character. Supposedly, he (re)trains Robocop with his new body and is brought in to deal with him when he starts resisting. I don't see why not. That the guys who own the biometric readers and face-recognition cameras et al. would in this case be the same guys who gave Boddicker his cover to run rampant in the original aside, he's an over-the-top 80s-cop-movie gangster. Dude doesn't need to exist in real life any more than those gangbangers who take over the whole city in Death Wish movies do; he is to the actual Crips with Tec-9s what those movie terrorists constantly nuking the entire West Coast are to some Afghan rewiring the dud mortar that fell in his backyard into a roadside bomb. You can still commit pretty heinous non-movie-level amounts of violence against not particularly important people in the modern day of security cameras and cellphone tracking and get away with it; drug lords and gang bosses are not on the road to extinction and there's a reason nobody was bitching about how implausible, say, Anton Chigurh was. One of the big things of the security state that've become especially apparent in the past decade is it doesn't actually make you substantially more secure. There's like a hundred different flavors of actual thug Clarence could be a cartoony exaggeration of and be no more or less unbelievable now than he was in the 80s. He's not meant to represent just ordinary crime anyway - he's a blackshirt, a personification of lawlessness and terror specifically fostered by the authority. If you want to update him with a government-is-still-relevant spin he'd be a high-level snitch or an undercover police provocateur. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 20:02
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Dickeye posted:Can we knock it off with this bullshit "Well the movie is OBVIOUSLY not going to do this because it wasn't in the sixty seconds of trailer" garbage? For gently caress's sake, people. I mentioned on that page or the one before that I've read an earlier draft of the script. Yes, there's plenty of room for changes from that version, but most of the major story beats look to be in what we've seen so far, either in the trailer or all of the pics from the shooting, look to be alive and well in the draft they filmed with. The plot, and its structure, is what I have issues with, regardless of what I think of the new suit or effects or rating.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:14
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I feel kind of bad that a generation of 10 year olds won't be able to be traumatized by the same horrific super violence that I was when I snuck our Robocop VHS to my friends house. Of course, kids these days have probably already blown up a million people playing Modern Explosive Combat Warfare 8 or something. 
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Sep 13, 2013 21:13
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All they needed to do in the trailer as Kevin Smith stated in one of his recent podcast's was to put the "I'll buy that for a dollar!" guy in the movie and have that shot of him saying the line at the end of the trailer. The whole of the internet would be there opening day...
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Sep 13, 2013 22:32
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SouthLAnd posted:I feel kind of bad that a generation of 10 year olds won't be able to be traumatized by the same horrific super violence that I was when I snuck our Robocop VHS to my friends house. Or watch real gore coming out of Chechnya, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, thanks to LiveLeak and even Youtube. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:I don't see why not. That the guys who own the biometric readers and face-recognition cameras et al. would in this case be the same guys who gave Boddicker his cover to run rampant in the original aside, he's an over-the-top 80s-cop-movie gangster. Dude doesn't need to exist in real life any more than those gangbangers who take over the whole city in Death Wish movies do; he is to the actual Crips with Tec-9s what those movie terrorists constantly nuking the entire West Coast are to some Afghan rewiring the dud mortar that fell in his backyard into a roadside bomb. You can still commit pretty heinous non-movie-level amounts of violence against not particularly important people in the modern day of security cameras and cellphone tracking and get away with it; drug lords and gang bosses are not on the road to extinction and there's a reason nobody was bitching about how implausible, say, Anton Chigurh was. One of the big things of the security state that've become especially apparent in the past decade is it doesn't actually make you substantially more secure. Except very little of the movie-paying audience believes North Korea is an actual threat, considering the box office returns for Olympus Has Fallen and the Red Dawn remake. There's a point to suspending disbelief, but nowadays, no one is going to believe some jihadist with suitcase nuke precisely because we've now become so exposed to the idea of Afghans living in caves and taking potshots and running away. Maybe ten years ago, when we believed Osama bin Laden was living in a James Bond supervillain hideout built out of Tora Bora, but after fighting them for so long, the public consciousness has dissuaded them of such notions. The thing is that more and more people are afraid of police and the government nowadays than criminals and terrorists. Look at the outrage at Zuccotti Park, Oakland, police militarization, the NSA, PRISM. There is a wave at backlash at the government's encroachment into private lives, mostly because we've allowed them to. Much like the remakes theme of Murphy's wife allowing Omnicorp to turn Murphy into Robocop to save his life at the cost of his being. Tubgirl Cosplay posted:There's like a hundred different flavors of actual thug Clarence could be a cartoony exaggeration of and be no more or less unbelievable now than he was in the 80s. He's not meant to represent just ordinary crime anyway - he's a blackshirt, a personification of lawlessness and terror specifically fostered by the authority. If you want to update him with a government-is-still-relevant spin he'd be a high-level snitch or an undercover police provocateur. Like I said, it's more likely Haley's character is the modern Boddicker, a private military thug who can run around blowing away people almost unquestioningly. Of course, there's probably a better example of this with Kruger from Elysium. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 22:51
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Gaz2k21 posted:All they needed to do in the trailer as Kevin Smith stated in one of his recent podcast's was to put the "I'll buy that for a dollar!" guy in the movie and have that shot of him saying the line at the end of the trailer. gently caress the internet.
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Sep 14, 2013 00:27
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On the topic of car bombs, cinematically they say to me "organized crime" or more specifically "the mob" more than "terrorism". When I see a car bomb exploding I see Robert DeNiro in Casino, or maybe Dolph Lundgren's partner in Punisher. I most definitely do not see a comment on terrorism, even though I know car bombs are a thing in the Middle East. That's because years and years of watching movies has taught me that if you piss off the mob, they will rig your car and blow you up. What I'm saying is, I can believe that the movie wants to make statements about terrorism. It just uses faulty language, unless the chief "terrorist" in the movie happens to be portrayed by Joe Pesci.
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Sep 14, 2013 01:41
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Efexeye posted:\The entire character arc changes when it's a car bomb and his wife (apparently) gets a say in what's done with the body instead of the embodiment of the big bad actually murdering Murphy. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps we should wait and see how it is actually handled before dismissing it as a bad thing!
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Sep 14, 2013 04:42
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Dickeye posted:This is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps we should wait and see how it is actually handled before dismissing it as a bad thing! Yeah, I mean, that's fair. But the overall tone of the trailer, the pieces of what we've seen so far, is adding up to be a lot more Total Recall than Batman Begins if you get my drift, also bear in mind these are just snarky comments based solely on impressions from a trailer. It's not really a big deal if the movie is terrible, either, it will just be the freshest entry in the long line of things that came after the original Robocop but were based on it that are terrible, it just remains to be seen in what way.
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Sep 14, 2013 05:25
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Gaz2k21 posted:All they needed to do in the trailer as Kevin Smith stated in one of his recent podcast's was to put the "I'll buy that for a dollar!" guy in the movie and have that shot of him saying the line at the end of the trailer.
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Sep 15, 2013 05:43
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If you haven't seen it already, this robocop rap is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Bk7EKLaus
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Sep 15, 2013 21:03
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Gaz2k21 posted:All they needed to do in the trailer as Kevin Smith stated in one of his recent podcast's was to put the "I'll buy that for a dollar!" guy in the movie and have that shot of him saying the line at the end of the trailer. This would be like when they put the triple-breasted hooker in the Total Recall remake: a pointless bit of pandering that not only contributes nothing to the film but actively works against the remake establishing its own identity in favor of making lazy references.
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Sep 16, 2013 00:01
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...of SCIENCE! posted:This would be like when they put the triple-breasted hooker in the Total Recall remake: a pointless bit of pandering that not only contributes nothing to the film but actively works against the remake establishing its own identity in favor of making lazy references. Every single reference or callback in Total Recall actively inhibited any enjoyment of an already lackluster film because it kept reminding me that those ideas have been done before and better. It was impossible to enjoy the movie because it kept reminding me of its mediocrity.
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Sep 16, 2013 00:12
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...of SCIENCE! posted:This would be like when they put the triple-breasted hooker in the Total Recall remake: a pointless bit of pandering that not only contributes nothing to the film but actively works against the remake establishing its own identity in favor of making lazy references. Also, Sam L. Jackson is pretty much playing the modern day version of Bixby Snyder. It's just that he's no longer Benny Hill but Glenn Beck. If Jackson plays the character like Andre Mattos' Fortunato in Padilha's Elite Squad sequel, then it would be a mix of comedic bravado and FYGM.
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Sep 16, 2013 00:56
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LeJackal posted:Every single reference or callback in Total Recall actively inhibited any enjoyment of an already lackluster film because it kept reminding me that those ideas have been done before and better. It was impossible to enjoy the movie because it kept reminding me of its mediocrity. It was a little like the Karate Kid in that sense: it just repeated the major story beats from the original and never did anything creative. Either out of fear of pissing off fans of the original or out of respect/homage to the original (either way, both films felt empty as a result). Watching both Karate Kid and Total Recall made me think "why don't I just watch the original instead of its story skeleton?". Then when I did I realized the splashes of creativity and unique artistic styles are why everyone remembered those films (I was surprised at how deep and complex Total Recall really was, rewatching it). It'll be the same with RoboCop, I think. The ultraviolence and cheesy dialogue and manic characters will not be in the remake and the film will feel empty as a result.
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Sep 16, 2013 01:40
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Dickeye posted:This is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps we should wait and see how it is actually handled before dismissing it as a bad thing! Problem being that Hollywood's recent history of remakes is pretty bad overall (I'm looking at you, Total Recall). Could RoboCop 2014 end up good, or even great? Sure, maybe. But the trailers I've seen seem to imply it's going to not have a lot of what made RoboCop 1987 so good, while not showing much of anything 'new' or 'different' to pick up the slack. The trailer really, really gave me Total Recall vibes. It's RoboCop, only he's modern! And here's some iconic scenes we redid shot-for-shot! But the underlying commentary doesn't seem to be there, and without that, I'm afraid it will be just another generic big-budget popcorn action flick.
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Sep 16, 2013 06:47
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WarLocke posted:But the underlying commentary doesn't seem to be there, and without that, I'm afraid it will be just another generic big-budget popcorn action flick. I don't think I can agree with that. Goons and goon-types aside, my experience with people and Robocop is that they aren't watching / enjoying it due to any underlying commentary.
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Sep 16, 2013 08:25
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WarLocke posted:Problem being that Hollywood's recent history of remakes is pretty bad overall (I'm looking at you, Total Recall). Tell me 2-3 other remakes released in the last, oh, four or five years that were completely and utterly terrible and I might believe you (although there will be just as many actually good remakes as well).
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Sep 16, 2013 13:14
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Arthur, Planet of the Apes, Poseidon, The Stepford Wives, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Psycho.
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Sep 16, 2013 15:48
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gently caress it. Time to watch Robocop again.
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Sep 16, 2013 15:50
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Efexeye posted:Arthur, Planet of the Apes, Poseidon, The Stepford Wives, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Psycho. I thought the last planet of the Apes film was better than it had any right to be v  v. If you add in remakes of old TV programs you get another slew of lovely films, i.e The lone ranger, Dark shadows, land of the lost and the last airbender.
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Sep 16, 2013 16:11
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khwarezm posted:I thought the last planet of the Apes film was better than it had any right to be v To be honest, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was originally conceived as a non-PotA film, it just happened to have similar themes. It was when 20th Century Fox came in that they changed it to as a reboot to the series.
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Sep 16, 2013 16:23
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Young Freud posted:To be honest, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was originally conceived as a non-PotA film, it just happened to have similar themes. It was when 20th Century Fox came in that they changed it to as a reboot to the series. I think he meant the Mark Wahlberg Planet of the Apes anyway. With the space station and Ape Washington DC and all.
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Sep 16, 2013 16:36
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