“Why we need another Robocop?”

Robocop is totally a Cinderella story—officer Kyle Murphy goes from DPD uniform rags to OCP robot body riches.  So if Robocop is a Cinderella story, and we already have thousands of those, why the heck do we need a new Robocop?  Can’t these Hollywood hacks come up with anything new?

These were the sorts of questions I asked myself Tuesday night as I sat down in front of Netflix to watch the Robocop remake.  Note that I had already decided to watch the film even as I was questioning the point in doing so.  I’m not one to normally get upset about adaptations or sequels or remakes.  I say, go ahead, see if you can top Verhoeven’s surprisingly clever satire of consumerism and privatization.  Padilha responded in a smart way.  He didn’t try to top Verhoeven.  Instead, he made an earnest examination of traumatic injury and PTSD.  I didn’t like it as much as the original, but I liked it more than I expected to, and exceeding my low expectations is a success, however small.

I think therein lies the answer to the question.  We do need another Robocop because there are other things one can say or do with the robot cop trope.  It’s no less timeless and no more fantastical than a princess and her fairy godmother, and it would not really matter if it was.  In less than thirty years, we’ve seen Robocop play allegory for the excesses of the 80s and the traumas of the 2000s.  What other purposes may he serve?  Why not one comedic?  Could he be she, Officer Kelly Murphy?

And that’s just looking at it from an intentional angle.  Even if Padilha had chosen to try and beat Verhoeven at his own game, even if he had gone all Gus Van Zandt and tried to recreate the original shot for bloody shot, his Robocop would have reflected symptoms of a different context.  Of course, he didn’t (and thankfully so—Vince Vaughn has become too jowly to be an action star), and so the intentional changes he made reveal so many more symptoms of his context.

So we need another Robocop, Cinderella, whatever, because there are infinite potential Cinderellas, Robocops, whatevers, and they can all show and tell us interesting things.