It’s easy to give credit to Jole Kinnaman on this one since he did get it right, the Robocop remake simply didn’t have the same spark as the original, and more to the point, it wasn’t bound to be embraced right away since Robocop was something brand new and right out of the box, the remake felt like something that had been buffed out, given a fresh layer of paint, and updated just a bit for the current time period, but was otherwise the same old thing being marketed as new. In a sense, this was like getting a bargain basement knockoff toy from the dollar store instead of the officially licensed action figure from the big chain store. Did that make a little more sense? Robocop was one of those movies that, when looking at it now, is campy and definitely wouldn’t have flown as anything other than a cult classic in this day and age, but was still something that people fully embraced back in the day since it was new, exciting, and had a cyborg cop fighting crime and fending off a killer robot at one point. Plus, if a movie can inspire an action figure that’s been shot through the genitals, you know right then that you’ve got something special. The second movie was kind of ‘meh’ since it did have more robot fighting, and it even had a pretty killer brain smash at one point. But the original Robocop was the movie that people have spoken about more often than not.
As Kinnaman has said, via MovieWeb:
“What I feel like the whole movie didn’t take into account is what the fans loved about [the original [RoboCop]. And you have to pay homage to that. And I think the producers and the filmmakers and me included didn’t really understand how to do that in the right way. I think it’s a really solid movie, it just didn’t fit the RoboCop concept.”
Paying homage to an original is important after all since without giving some respect to the movie that helped the remake to even be thought up there really isn’t any purpose to making it in the first place. While the remake did have a lot of elements from the first movie that were updated and were actually kind of cool, too much was changed, and not enough was done to try and make it mirror the original. The whole idea of a company buying a cop once he’d expired was just as heinous, but there was even less of Murphy left this time around when it was revealed, and the fact that he was killed by a bombing was relevant to the time, but it didn’t have the same emotional punch to it since watching Murphy get blasted to pieces in the first movie was rough. In fact, it was rough enough that people were talking about it in all the gory detail they needed for a long time after.
While the remake had the star power to make it work it still didn’t take into consideration what was really need to make it resonate with the fans, and like it or not, that’s one of the most important things that need to be thought about when a remake is in progress. The fans have already spoken when it comes to the original, since love it or hate it, their reaction should be what’s fueling the whole idea of the remake in order to make it better or just as good as the original movie. But where the remake of Robocop failed is that it tried to take off in its own direction to such an extent that it started to mangle the original idea. There’s no need to go line for line, action for action between the original and the remake since that would be pointless. Updating the movie was necessary obviously, but keeping it grounded to fit with the original movie would have been the best idea that anyone could have had. Trying to make it into something else that was a sign of the times was just ridiculous since it killed a great deal of interest and left fans feeling as though they’d been handed a pile of rotten fruit and told to pick out the good parts. In other words, the remake was spoiled before it ever hit theaters, but the director, who was in charge of this heap, didn’t fight hard enough to remind the studio that people loved Robocop for a reason, and it wasn’t just the flash and technology that went into the character.
A cameo here or there would have been good, a mention of something from the first movie would have worked, just anything that was solid and concrete enough to make it feel like a worthy successor. It didn’t have to be a copy, but it needed to give a healthy nod to its creator.
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