Lets talk about the RoboCop remake

You would be hard pressed to find two movies that captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s like RoboCop and Total Recall did. Why wouldn't some coked up movie execs think it was a good idea to remake them 30 years later? Of course we all know how Total Recall did last year. The word suckbomb gets thrown around a lot these days...

So that leads us to the RoboCop remake. At first glance RoboCop seems like a movie about a cyborg shooting bad guys in the face. Don't get me wrong, it totes is a movie about a cyborg shooting bad guys in the face, but it's also sooo much more. There's the obvious themes of humanity and post modern futurism. There's also some great commentary on consumerism, materialism and the embrace of excess so commonly found in the '80s. And Under all of that there's this subversive sort of commentary on the good old fashioned ultra violence and how quickly the viewer is ready to embrace it in the name of kicking bad guy ass.

It's kind of a perfect action movie. One that makes you think but not so hard that you forget you really want to see Dick Jones get pushed out a window.

There's pretty much zero chance of the RoboCop remake being more than a mindelss shoot-em-up. From what I saw last summer there were two movies that tried to be more than they were. The Lone Ranger attempted to be a commentary on Hollywood's obsession with origin movies by being sort of an Anti-origin movie and it tanked. Iron Man 3 was pretty much a love letter written to the buddy cop action films of the '80s and early '90s. It did pretty well for itself but it was written and directed by the guy that wrote a lot of those great buddy cop movies. At best we can hope for a RoboCop that is sort of an homage to the quasi-futuristic action films of the past but I'm afraid what we're more than likely to get is a paint by number remake that lacks anything beneath the surface.

At least with the Total Recall remake we got Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel.