Neill Blomkamp's new RoboCop will be using the clunky old suit, not another sleek update
Aux Features Film
The original RoboCop costume, with its black bodysuit and shiny grey armor, is iconic. It’s cold and emotionless, much like Peter Weller’s RoboCop himself and the vicious powers that birthed him, and it definitely looks well-suited to murdering criminals. For the 2014 remake, though, director José Padilha put star Joel Kinnaman in a sleek, all-black RoboCop suit that made him look like what an evil version of Apple would make if it were creating a robot cop. It was cool, but it was almost too cool. Nobody wants to actually think a cop looks badass. Luckily, the next attempt to revive the RoboCop series, which is coming from Chappie’s Neill Blomkamp, will be going back to the original design.
On Twitter, Blomkamp has claimed that his movie will be like “watching Verhoeven do a follow-up film.” Also, in response to a fan asking if that means he’ll be going back to the original suit, Blomkamp said: “1 million% original.” That’s relatively surprising from a guy like Blomkamp who so clearly loves mechanical designs and his own charming robots, but there’ll probably be other mech-things for classic RoboCop to fight.
We first heard that Blomkamp was making a new RoboCop last summer, along with the reveal that it would be based on a script that original RoboCop screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner put together for a sequel back in the ‘80s. Original director Paul Verhoeven didn’t like the “politics of a sequel” at the time and the project fell apart, but MGM reportedly decided to revive it after the 2016 election because the canned script involved a reality TV star becoming president. Oh, so that comes true but we still don’t have Back To The Future hoverboards? The ‘80s were a joke.
73 Comments
I saw the original Robocop at the theater on my 17th birthday. The woman selling tickets actually said ‘Happy Birthday’ when I handed over my ID.I couldn’t believe how good it was.
so, so good. i’ve never seen the remake, i want to keep the original pure in my head.
Coming from a diehard Robocop fan, I think you can watch the remake and enjoy it. It somewhat follows the original plot, but they changed enough stuff that it was more of an ode to the original than a remake. To put it another way, I think the “remake” of Robocop does more justice for the original than movies like die hard and fast and furious that keep the same cast but make the franchise completely absurd. Also the remake by far was better than the 2nd and 3rd Robocop
I saw the original during the best summer of my life visiting my uncle’s family in Fairfield, California. I was thirteen, but the theatre couldn’t be bothered to give a fuck that I was underage. Saw RoboCop, had my first kiss and discovered Dead Kennedys and punk rock all on the same day in July ‘87, so I’m willing to bet I got Bryan Adams’ summer beat.
Part man. Part machine. All excitement boner.
Ugh
I actually liked the remake and its depiction of 21st Century corporate excess. In fact the 11th hour making of Michael Keaton’s characters from corporate-focused excess to just plain evil was the worst part of the film.Why can’t more films be like Ant-Man & The Wasp in that there aren’t any real “bad” guys but various people with just aims in conflict with each other because of misunderstandings.
It’s Robocop. It’s always been a series with a pretty strong focus on political and corporate corruption, with a slushy of blood and guts to help the medicine go down.
As its own thing it would’ve been fine, I thought, but not as a remake.
Iagree. The first 10 minutes are amazing, really showing the terrible desperation that requires the decisions of suicide bombers.
I liked Robocop (2014) as Cyborg Police Officer Movie, but not as a Robocop remake.
I fell asleep watching this movie…..it just dragged on and on
Something something Die Antman something Chappie.There, brain, now everyone knows you were trying to think of a joke and you failed miserably. I hope you’re happy.
That’s the element of Ant-Man & the Wasp I liked the least. A more pronounced villain might have made the movie better. Imagine in Robocop if the OCP or Clarence Boddecker stuff was just a “misunderstanding.” Ew, no.
The remake was like RoboCop 2 all over again – had some great ideas early on, but it derped out into a merely serviceable smashy-smashy.
Because both those movies were mediocre and filled with cliches
Yeah but one featured videos of other Robocop attempts that were all hilarious. I love the one who just walks out and rips his own head off.
I hesitate to say that those failed proto-Robocops where the funniest part of the whole movie.
I’ve said multiple times that the 2014 remake is a fine movie as long as it wasn’t called Robocop. It fails at not being the amazing movie it shares a name with but it perfectly serviceable otherwise
They should have gone with ‘The Cop Who Couldn’t Slow Down’.
They could have made him Irish and named himRob O’Cop
In a more perfect world RoboCop would arrest Buckaroo Banzai for crimes against John Bigboote
this all feels too good to be true. i’m no blomkamp superfan, but he seems perfectly suited to robocop and it’s a franchise that hasn’t been done to death yet. hope they keep it R rated but still make kids toys.
It was done to death but it was done to death so badly nobody even remembers the sequels, live action and animated TV series or comic books.
i guess i meant more that it hasn’t been done to death recently. the franchise definitely had a long popularity streak for most of the 90s, but it’s not something like alien or terminator where there have been a steady few of each for the last decade.
Correct, a great argument for why they definitely should never make any more RoboCop anything, ever.
Pepperidge Farm remembers. Pepperidge Farm also remembers the video games, both mediocre and bad.
They had a Robocop video game *and* a knockoff one, too!
NARC: NO ONE HAD THE GUTS UNTIL NOW!That was the ad for the game, right? cuz it’s been in my head for decades.
…don’t be Chappie don’t be Chappie don’t be Chappie…
“That’s Chappie”
Fine, but the entire soundtrack is done by Die Antwoord.
It’s Blomkamp, so I’m looking forward to Robocop being reassigned from Detroit to Johannesburg for some reason. Also anticipating Robocop being violently transformed into a different kind of robot at some point, and a clumsy apartheid metaphor.
Sharlto Copley will be there too
as some kind of sexual criminal im sure. he scares the fuck out of me. blomkamps greatest feat is getting that guy to somehow be the protagonist of a movie.
I think casting Copley is a legal requirement demanded by the South African Film Commission — must be in every film.
Except if you listen to the guy talk about making movies he isn’t trying to make a metaphor. He wants to be the next Michael Bay; any social commentary in his movies are just an accident. He was super excited that a bunch of immigrant camps were brutally cleared out by the government so he didn’t have to make any sets for District 9.
Art imitating life…
The day is done
But I’m having funI think I’m dumb
So I’ll just watch Chappie
Big deal. I just want to know if Leeza Gibbons will be back.
Would buy that for a +1 dollar
“…all-black RoboCop suit that made him look like what an evil version of Apple would make if it were creating a robot cop.” *snort*
Huge fan of District 9, but Chappie was beyond awful. Hopefully he does a better job this time around.
They should just rename the 2014 movie “Robert-Cop” so it won’t be associated with the 80s classic. He’s the autobotic future of law enforcement.
I’ve never understood why people wouldn’t want a cyberpunk film of 2014 to reflect technology concerns and styles of the 20teens the way a cyberpunk film reflected the technology concerns and styles of the 80s…
Can it please please PLEASE have the original theme as well?
I’d buy that for two dollars and twenty five cents counting for inflation!
Neill Blomkamp: The human representative of deminishing returns on Earth.
I haven’t watched District 9 in a long time. Kinda scared it doesn’t hold up.
You skinny prawn!
We’ll see about this one. The remake was terrible, mostly because of Joel Kinneman’s terrible “white rapper” American accent that he uses all the time but also the fact the corporate guys were actually not nearly bad enough to deserve killing.Will be interesting to see how the take on technology changes. The first Robocop was about how the technology wasn’t good enough so we needed a human brain to run the thing. The remake said the technology was better than the human brain, but people wouldn’t stand for policing by algorithm so they had to have a less-perfect human. That was the height of Silicon Valley’s hype though.Society is back to the idea that AI algorithms are horrible and Silicon Valley is full of evil doers, so at least the take on technology will likely be closer to the original.
“the take”
In an of itself, the suit from the 2014 remake wasn’t too bad. When he’s finally put in silver at the end, he doesn’t look half bad. It was just a stupid choice to make it all black for 99% of the movie.
I liked the updated suit *minus which body part remained*, just didn’t like they painted it black.
I am sure this will be good since the guy has done half a good movie in his entire career.
I actually quite enjoyed Chappie. I didn’t see it until well after it was released, and had heard tons of negative reviews, so maybe going in with extremely low expectations helped.
“an evil version of Apple”As opposed to the one we have now?
I think we’re still on the “ruthlessly amoral” version of Apple currently.
That’s an iPaddling.
Fact: the best Robocop sequel was Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
sleek, all-black RoboCop suit that made him look like what an evil version of Apple would make
Evil Apple is a redundancy.
I should fucking hope so! Otherwise this is just a live-action Crysis.
You should fucking hope they remake Robocop twice? Huh?
“Luckily, the next attempt to revive the RoboCop series,”Does not compute.
They need to let Adam Reed reboot the animated series on Netflix.
Yeah, right, this is the decade where fucking Trump is president, but it’s the 80s that gets called a “joke” in the article. Whatever, man.
Aah Neil Blomkamp. Visionary director of District 9 and Ely…uhm, Chap, uuuh… I’ll see myself out.
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Will it also be as bad as his other non-District 9 works? Probably!
As someone who doesn’t know, when you’re “working” on a script or project, are you getting paid for that time? Like, was Blomkamp paid for working on his Alien movie idea?
is he really making this or is this gonna be like his alien movie
It’s no surprise Blomkamp is a Verhoeven fanboy.