RoboCop Trailer Preview Takes A Sneak Peek At The Film’s Heavy Action

By Rudie Obias | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Tomorrow, Sony will release the new trailer for the RoboCop remake. The studio has been slow at teasing out images and footage to help build anticipation for its Thursday release. The quality of RoboCop remains to be seen, considering its status as a remake and its history of repeated release-date shifts. For now, Sony has released about 20 seconds of footage from the film’s new trailer.

Exclusive to Entertainment Tonight, the footage from the RoboCop trailer looks like the film will be action packed. It looks like the remake will focus more on RoboCop as a human than a robot (well, cyborg anyway). The original film’s director, Paul Verhoeven, used the material more as a metaphor for identity.

Gary Oldman’s character of Dr. Dennett Norton, the scientist who creates RoboCop, appears to be the protagonist’s mentor and guide through his human-to-cyborg transition. The remake also looks like it might tackle themes of free will and humanity. While Dr. Norton created RoboCop, he seems bewildered by Murphy taking over the system’s programming with human characteristics. Regardless, the new RoboCop looks like it will be a different beast than the original film.

A few days ago, Sony released four new portraits from RoboCop. The images feature characters who weren’t heavily featured in the remake’s first teaser trailer. We get a better look at Jackie Earle Haley as Maddox, the military tactician responsible for training RoboCop; and Jennifer Ehle as Liz Kline, the head of OmniCorp legal affairs. The new portraits also featured the aforementioned Gary Oldman as Dr. Norton and Samuel L. Jackson as Pat Novak, a prominent supporter of mechanized crime control and host of The Novak Element, which might be the new “I’ll Buy That for a Dollar” TV show.

Considering the expansion of Murphy’s family and the addition of Murphy’s former partner, Officer Jack Lewis, to the film, the RoboCop remake does look like it will take its characters and story in a different direction. The big question surrounding the film is whether it will be any good. Early test screenings suggest that the remake is just as good or better than its 1987 counterpart, but everything we’ve seen from the film looks like it might be like the Total Recall remake from 2012: that film also looked slick and glossy, but had no soul or personality. Hopefully the new RoboCop will not mistake references to the original as storytelling, a trap Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake fell into.

In the new RoboCop, the year is 2028. A large mega-corporation called OmniCorp is at the center of robot technology with drones that are winning wars around the world. OmniCorp now wants to bring their drone technology to the homefront. Alex Murphy is a loving husband, father, and an honest cop in Detroit, but after a car bomb leaves him critically injured, OmniCorp utilizes their robotics technology to save Murphy’s life by turning him into RoboCop.

RoboCop stars Joel Kinnaman, Michael Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Michael Kenneth Williams, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Miguel Ferrer, and Jay Baruchel. It will hit theaters everywhere on February 12, 2014, in 3D and IMAX.