Guardian film blog RoboCop remake
Gosh, but I love me some Paul Verhoeven. To my mind, the brilliantly perverse Dutch director is one of the greatest satirists in film history – certainly one of the finest ever to have worked within the Hollywood machine. He is consistently interested in wrongfooting audiences – challenging them to question their own engagement in spectacles of sex and violence, and their complicity in structural social injustices. Starship Troopers stands alongside Duck Soup and Dr Strangelove at the pinnacle of war-movie-making and the much-maligned Showgirls might be the best takedown of capitalism since the coming of colour.
It was a pleasure and almost a duty, then, to write this piece for the Guardian in response to the new remake of RoboCop, which I saw on Tuesday. It’s not an atrocious movie – not as bad as the 2012 remake of Total Recall, for instance – but it sure ain’t good. My piece is about how (in the well-chosen words of Guardian subeditors) the remakes of his classic SF actioners “don’t just miss the point of Paul Verhoeven’s films. They embody the things he satirised”.
That said, there are inevitably limitations to trying to write a broad auteur-based thesis and account for a new release in a relatively short article. Although, of course, I stand by the piece, if I’d had a bit more room I would have given a more nuanced take on the new film.
It does have satirical aspirations and the opening is genuinely impressive. After hearing nonsense noises like raspberries being blown over the snarling mouth of the MGM lion, we open on a TV studio where Samuel L Jackson’s Pat Novak is warming up his voice. Novak is a Fox News-style reactionary blowhard who, once his show has started, links to a reporter live in US-occupied Tehran, which is policed by militarised versions of the familiar RoboCop and ED-209 machines, seen keeping visibly fearful civilians in line with mechanised recitations of “Peace be upon you”. That’s the sort of thing you’d find in vintage Verhoeven. But from there on out, attempts at satire are basically limited to Jackson spouting ultra-conservative talking points (if the US Senate refuses to allow such technology on American streets, does that make it “pro-crime”?) to diminishing returns.
I also feel a bit bad about identifying the movie as “José Padilha’s film”, given how intense studio control is on a project like this, and the director’s apparent reports of how hard it was to get his own ideas onto the screen. But, hey, he left his name on it so it’s a fair cop.
And of course it’s too early to tell how a new Starship Troopers movie will actually look but, boy, does that tweet sound like something straight out of the Federation propaganda machine.
Anyway, this is the opening to my piece:
As a kid, I heard of Detroit by watching RoboCop, which portrayed the city as a disaster area marked by rampant street crime and corporate exploitation. I knew it was a fantasy, a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of Reagan-era social anxieties, but the associations lingered. Now reality is catching up: Detroit recently declared bankruptcy, with a judge noting that it “no longer has the resources to provide its residents with basic police, fire and medical services”. It’s a desperate situation for the city’s residents, but I thought it might at least lend the new remake of RoboCop the satirical urgency that Paul Verhoeven brought to his 1987 movie.
It is disappointing, then, to see that the Detroit in José Padilha’s film is in considerably better nick than the real thing, let alone the one in Verhoeven’s film – more bourgeois suburbia than urban dystopia. Disappointing, but not surprising. It’s almost impossible to imagine Verhoeven being allowed to make his movie today…
