The first trailer for the 'Robocop' remake is out now, and it looks pretty much as bad you'd expect. All the grit and satire looks to be gone, Robo himself has a new design that makes him look as though he's cosplaying as KITT from Knight Rider, and Joel Kinnaman is just...bad. I mean, really, really completely wrong for the part. I've got nothing against the guy personally or as an actor (I'm not familiar with his work), but judging by this trailer he's as bland as white rice, has absolutely none of Peter Weller's intimidating presence or voice, and his reading of the classic "dead or alive, you're coming with me" is about as impressive as your average middle-schooler quoting the line to his friends in the cafeteria. About the only good thing I can say about the movie is that 1. apart from Kinnaman, it has a pretty awesome cast, including Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Miguel Ferrer (who also co-starred in the original), Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Ehle (!), and Jackie Earl Haley (by the way, will someone please give this guy a good movie?) and 2. the ED-209 looks really cool, largely because they pretty much left the design exactly the same.
Seriously, what is the deal with all these generic, lame remakes of imaginative genre pics? This, Total Recall, A Nightmare On Elm Street, the upcoming Terminator 'reboot,' and I'm sure I'm missing some. Not to mention all the various lame horror films remade so as to suck any life or character that they might have had out of them (Amityville Horror, Friday 13th, My Bloody Valentine, etc.). I know Hollywood has always done remakes, but this crop seems much more, well, cynical than past years. For one thing, there are a lot of them. A lot. There are all the ones I noted above, plus Prom Night, Halloween and its sequel, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Footloose (?), The Karate Kid, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Omen, and that's just off the top of my head. For another, I don't think a single one of them has been widely praised; at their best these films are 'okay.' Compare this to the remakes of the 1980s like The Thing, or The Fly; striking, original takes done by master craftsmen.
To put it bluntly, past remakes at least had some reason for existing; that the filmmakers had some fresh take on the story (or even, in the days before home video, simply because people might want to see the story again), while today's are nakedly desperate efforts to tempt people into theaters with name recognition. Certainly all movies are money-making enterprises, and there's nothing wrong with that, but spending millions of dollars to make a lamer version of a story that you can get from Netflix for $7.50 a month rubs me the wrong way.
All that being said, the prospect of "Elizabeth Bennet meets Robocop" makes me almost tempted to see it; "My programming is insufficient; it will not do. I request permission to inform you how much I admire and love you."
