Finally saw (2014) Robocop and really liked it. As far as back-to-back Verhoven remakes go, this one was surprisingly more satisfying. Not as crisp and breezily simple as the original plot, it took a more complex, and more genuinely sci-fi speculative approach to the original story. The writer did a brilliant job of incorporating all the specific features of Robocop into the scientific and philosophical examinations. Although several different sources of explanation are offered (all from Gary Oldmans character) they all orbit around the deeper reality of autonomous agency. There is even a scene re-playing the classic brain experiment with a conscious patient that convinced its original developer that materialism was false. That was also about autonomy. So the movie gets the metaphysics delightfully wrong. But it also shows that the original movie did too. On the political side, the movie made a great move on consolidating all the Verhoven Frankfurt School stuff into one character that combines the OReilly Factor with the Situation Room. Except the OReilly counterpart is less like the actual OReilly and more like the PR dept. of CSLewis N. I, C. E. The movie does its conspiratorial best to attribute crony capitalism to conservatives, just like the original film. It pokes fun at the claim that the media is the lapdog when in the film the media is the lapdog of the government. Another feature is that the characters have confused relationship with the actual robots and Robocop, who is not a robot. The idea that robots might be used in a police capacity is clouded over by the issue of the lack of emotions a priori in AIs (No looming singularity here.) but this makes them like any other piece of equipment. Consider the wide use of drones today. No matter how wide the scope of their independent operation there is always an operator/programmer to be held liable for what they do. But the real ethical occurs when the persuade his family to make him into Robocop in what is clearly a failure of informed consent. Further, is the suppression of Robocops agency without his consent. That dilemma between person and property is very interesting in the movie. Anyway - I enjoyed this more that the Total Recall remake. It turned out to be more Phillip K. Dick- like.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 14:58:37 +0000
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