Robocop Remake Abandons Aronofsky, Will Still Have Evil Corporations
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It was hard to get a feel for just what kind of a performance he was giving, hidden underneath the metal armor of Robocop, but, Peter Weller was a better actor than any of us ever imagined. If you watched Dexter last year, you know what he’s talking about. Matched up against television’s champion serial killer he stole every scene.
So now they’re working on a Robocop remake and, my chief concern is that they’ll never be able to find anyone as good as Weller to play the character. It’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling something so fantastically difficult off. At least though, it seemed like they might be able to come up with something worthwhile when the redo was the brainchild of auteur Darren Aronofsky, but now they’re jettisoning all of his ideas.
In an interview with Crave Robocop director Jose Padilha revealed that they won’t be using the script Aronofsky wrote for the film. Instead they’ll be going with, whatever it is that he’s come up with. He explains:
I have my own take on Robocop. I know what his take was and it’s totally different. It’s a different thing, different kind of film, even different period in time so I haven’t read his previous work.
Padilha is no Aronofsky. He’s never made anything even close to as big as this Robocop remake will be. Mostly he’s been making Brazillian indie movies. That could either be good, or bad for Robocop.
It’ll be good if he ends up being forced to make Robocop on a shoestring budget. An independent filmmaker knows how to get the most out of a small amount of money, and Padihla seemed to be playing coy when asked about how much money he’ll have to spend on the film.
When asked what his reboot will be about, Padihla played coy, but he did offer these tidbits:
Listen, there are the constants and the variables in this world, right? Some things change and some things never change. Corporations controlling people are a constant. It’s the banks now, it’s going to be something else 30 years from now. It was something else before. This is the way economics works. So we’re not making a film about mortgage, that I can tell you.
That’s the greatness of the concept. That’s the concept of Robocop in a nutshell. That’s the heart and soul of the film. It’s that conflict between stuff trying to own you and you trying to persevere. That’s the heart of the story and it has to be. Any Robocop that’s worth that name has to talk about that.
