R-rated RoboCop remake

12 December 2008

John Howell

While promoting his new movie The Wrestler , Darren Aronofsky, director of MGM's upcoming RoboCop remake, told reporters he is developing a hardcore version of the classic cyborg cyberpunk police movie. According to SCIFI Wire, he plans to return to the violent tone of the original Robocop , which its sequels Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 shied away from.

"If we do it, it [can] definitely be rated R," Aronofsky said.

Considering that the original 1987 R-rated Robocop directed by Paul Verhoeven was criticised for being an ultraviolent blood fest (Verhoeven's stock and trade), where rapid gory death, scolding toxic radioactive waste, and heavy machine gun fire are the norm, I would have expected him to take a different path. Perhaps though, it's wasn't his idea to begin with?

First Showing.Net reported that a fan attending the Licensing International Expo 2008 asked the MGM representative about RoboCop (before MGM had selected a director) and was told that it was going to be "rated R" and would "blow everyone away." So it appears MGM has been aiming for a violent RoboCop revival all along.

This will be the second major movie project after The Wrestler where Aronofsky isn't working mainly with his own material. In his previous hits, Pi , Requiem for a Dream, and the philosophical masterpiece The Fountain , he took dual writing and directing credits. Aronofsky is developing the RoboCop screenplay with writer David Self.

It will also be the first movie he's taken on that could be considered part of a Hollywood franchise. He has always wanted to make a big budget Hollywood franchise movie he told Slashfilm, and at one stage had been selected by Warner Bros. to direct The Dark Knight . That directing job fell through he believes because he was too obsessed with completing The Fountain , a film that eventually took him 6 years.

"I've always had an interest in doing big movies, and not just doing independent films. And that's why I've tried to get them going a lot," Aronofsky said.” The whole thing with The Dark Knight was that through that whole process I was always trying to make The Fountain and because I was on The Fountain for six years, they moved on."

Peter Weller stared as Officer Alex J. Murphy in the original RoboCop , a dark, satrical gory rampage that told the story of Murphy's transformation from a normal policeman killed while on duty, to a mechanically enhanced law enforcement super hero, haunted by memories of his former self. In a future Detroit the police department is owned and run by an amoral private company, Omni Consumer Products, who turn Murphy's corpse into a cyborg after a previous crime fighting robot they developed runs amok, killing indiscriminately and creating a public relations disaster. Frequent black humour takes the edge off the violence. When a news report happily announces the deaths of hundreds, for example, they immediately cut to a commercial for a battleship style game where you have to nuke your neighbour. When an employee is machine gunned to death by a malfunctioning robot, all the company boss can say is, "I'm very disappointed". Verhoeven used similar black humour in Starship Troopers.

The cyborg element, part man, part machine, is what attracted Aronofsky to RoboCop SCIFI Wire reported. Apparently a recent scan he had for a routine medical procedure was the catalyst.

"Before you get an MRI," he said," they give you a list of like 38 different things, how you can have metal in your body. From a shutter in your eyelid to a pacemaker, screws and all this stuff you can have in your system. I realized, 'Wow, we are cyborgs.' I mean, everything's not inside us, but the way we're connected to the technology and everything is right there."

"We are in a cyborg culture, we are part cyborg already," he recently told Slashfilm, "It's only a matter of time till we have the cell phones in our head and the mp3 players in our ears".

While I enjoyed the original RoboCop , even with its dark, violent tone, perhaps Aronofsky can take the franchise to another level just as Christopher Nolan did with Batman's The Dark Knight. If anyone can do it, the director of the sensational, multilayered, and frequently misunderstood cult classic, The Fountain , is just the director to make it work.

Speaking of The Fountain , Aronofsky recently completed an alternative version of this meditative science fiction movie, which he is pushing Warner Bros. to release. You can read about the reedited version of The Fountain here.

MGM aims to release Aronofsky’s new RoboCop movie in 2010.

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