RoboCop is, fundamentally, a motion picture about a robot who is also a cop. With a premise bordering on the downright ridiculous, then, it would have only ever worked as a movie with its tongue placed firmly inside its cheek. Which is why Paul Verhoven's 1987 science-fiction classic is exactly that - a classic. Verhoven knew how to render this insane premise as something more than the sum of its parts: a hilarious, bloody satire that set out to target capitalism, gentrification, authoritarianism, and privatisation, whilst remaining an absolute hoot from start to finish. And now they've remade RoboCop for "modern audiences" (a marketing term you often hear that makes absolutely zero sense). You can read our review of the flick here, but let's just say that if Paul Verhoven were dead, he'd probably be spinning in his grave right now. For all its attempts to re-brand and re-imagine a RoboCop in 2014, the results are surprisingly lame, watered-down and counter-progressive when compared to the original vision. Surely, in today's corporate-stained, media-obsessed world, a new RoboCop could have had something to say about the world? Usually, movie-goers complain about remakes when they stick too closely to the source material and don't dare to be different. With the RoboCop reboot, it's somewhat different, given that the filmmakers changed some of the most crucial aspects inherent to the character and franchise, whilst still also doing absolutely nothing to make their version stand-out as something special or unique. Join us, then, as we take a look at 10 aspects that RoboCop 2014 changed or threw out from its 1987 predecessor - and how doing so resulted in a bland, boring and inferior remake...
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
