RoboCop (2013)

[Lantyssa]

The wrong gal died in Starship Troopers.  I lost interest after that.

[TheWalrus]

Right? Diz was hot.

[Merusk]

They never realized until that moment...
 
...just how easy it is to accidentally cut someone in half.

[Ingmar]

She wasn't even supposed to be a girl.

[Abagadro]

It being "clean" and sanitized was part of the satire. ST is every bit as subversive (if not more) than Robocop.

[Teleku]

I bet they're remaking Starship Troopers next with no boobs, brain suckers or NPH next.

Was that extremely sublime snarkiness? Because the actual book didn't have any of those either if I remember right.

No, it's an understanding that what made the Veerhoven flick fun was almost entirely divorced from the book itself.

I hated the Starship Troopers movie because of the Veerhoven stuff. First, except for the names, there was no corrolation with the book, which was one of the few Heinlein books I actually liked. I can handle departure if you give me Hunt for Red October. But this felt more like I, Robot in departure, a label slapped on a CGI fest that itself looked low budget. Nothing there at all. And then layering in his schtick, it felt very forced.

The first Robocop worked really well because it was all dirt and grit and "real" and believable. Starship Trooper was way too clean and sanitized and the only "edgy humor" was what I was imagining in my head that could have made the movie better. Veerhoven's fun with all the commercials and the 6000 SUX and all that was just flavoring to an interesting near-future world, akin to a dark comedy version of Blade Runner. In Troopers, it was just forced, probably because he was told he was picked for it because they needed to add filler to a one-dimensional nothing.

So I'd take a Starship Troopers reboot that was actually a good movie over any of that bullshit faux edgy crap any day.

I wrote about this at length in the Cloud Atlas thread, but this right here is a good example of why I think its a good idea to see the movie version of something before reading a book.  I saw Starship Troopers before reading the book.  I saw it in theaters, and enjoyed the ever loving hell out of it for all the reasons everybody else has listed.  I then read the book afterwards, and it became one of my favorites, for totally different reasons.  Had I read the book first, I'm sure the whole movie would have been ruined by me putting on a beret and getting pissy about how different and non serious it was in a huge fit of nerd rage.

Also, while they did kill the wrong girl, they also showed the wrong girls tits.   

[Kitsune]

I'd imagine it was, since Starship Troopers was a book about a boy growing into a man while in military service during a war. The robot suits and bugs were nothing but props. It's considered a classic for a reason while Armor is considered about equal to an Honor Harrington novel. It does suprise me you didn't like it, you being a man who was in the military during a war and all.

I call bullcrap.  Starship Troopers (the novel) was altogether too squeaky clean to be showing any flavor of war.  It was a cartoon war with lots of zoom around in robot suits and oh hey things pretty much just worked out okay so let's keep fighting, yay! The end.

Armor was full of terror, senseless random deaths on the battlefield, an incompetent leadership who didn't give a fuck about the actual soldiers, and just how broken a human being can become while put through that sort of hell.

Of those two, I'm a bit more inclined to believe that the latter represents being a man in the military during a war.  For that matter, the movie did a better job, even if it veered into a distinct lack of realism in how overblown it became.

[Venkman]

I agree with all of that.

@Teleku: Yea, I probably would have had the same reaction. But then, I go to something like Lord of the Rings. Altogether very enjoyable series that well captured the feel of the world and covered well enough the major plot points. If I hated how the world looked and the actors acted, I might have then been bothered by the deviations from the source. But because those were so well done, the for-movies deviations were fine. Like Red October, or even Sum of All Fears, or the fourth Harry Potter.

[Trippy]

Stop the Twitter crap.

[Teleku]

He's really not joking about that, btw.  

In the case of adaptations like LoTR, I think it can work the other way around because it tried really hard to adhere to the books.  Fellowship did this the best, and was the most loved.   Almost all of the parts that everybody hated about the movies were things changed by or added in by Jackson.

When you run into a book adaptation that makes a huge change to the story, narrative style, or both, then the nerd rage comes out.  However, such as in the case of Starship Troopers, these movies really can be awesome in their own right.  Reading the book first just seems to ruin that.

[Samwise]

I think with Starship Troopers I read the book first and still enjoyed the movie for what it was.  It was SO different from the book that it didn't even register as being the same story.  It's like if you made a documentary about winemaking and called it The Grapes of Wrath.  Nobody's going to get on your case for deviating from Steinbeck's vision.

[TheWalrus]

It's like if you made a documentary about winemaking and called it The Grapes of Wrath.  Nobody's going to get on your case for deviating from Steinbeck's vision.

HAHA...ooh boy. Have you been following the hobbit/lotr threads at all? Somebody here would fuck you up. In the alley. With a blunt instrument.

[Samwise]

The LotR movies would be the counter-example, where they were close enough to the books that the deviations really grated.  It's sort of like the "uncanny valley" effect.  Starship Troopers is like a completely unrealistic cartoon, LotR is like an animated corpse.

[Chimpy]

Also, while they did kill the wrong girl, they also showed the wrong girls tits.   

While I agree on principle, I did not mind seeing what I saw. I just wanted "more".

[Venkman]

The LotR movies would be the counter-example, where they were close enough to the books that the deviations really grated.  It's sort of like the "uncanny valley" effect.  Starship Troopers is like a completely unrealistic cartoon, LotR is like an animated corpse.

Hmm, so for some reason I don't really nerd rage when a movie deviates from the script of a book. Reading this thread, I'm getting a better sense of myself. What I really don't like is when a movie departs from the "feel" of a book, I guess what could be called the emotional setting of the world.

LoTR was set against an epic backdrop with an ominous all-or-nothing overtone. Starship Troopers was (iirc) was a gritty nobody-knows-nothing in the trenches boot camp to front lines marine war story. The movie version of LoTR captured that really well, down to the voices. The movie version of Troopers was more like a 40s-era recruitment flick, and that happy go lucky ending with the three of them walking away from the captured beast, gods they might have just as well been skipping arm in arm with Neil Patrick Harris leading in song. Gah I still can't get that travesty out of my brain.

[Malakili]

gods they might have just as well been skipping arm in arm with Neil Patrick Harris leading in song.

I'd watch this.

[Riggswolfe]

I bet they're remaking Starship Troopers next with no boobs, brain suckers or NPH next.

Was that extremely sublime snarkiness? Because the actual book didn't have any of those either if I remember right.

No, it's an understanding that what made the Veerhoven flick fun was almost entirely divorced from the book itself.

I hated the Starship Troopers movie because of the Veerhoven stuff. First, except for the names, there was no corrolation with the book, which was one of the few Heinlein books I actually liked. I can handle departure if you give me Hunt for Red October. But this felt more like I, Robot in departure, a label slapped on a CGI fest that itself looked low budget. Nothing there at all. And then layering in his schtick, it felt very forced.

The first Robocop worked really well because it was all dirt and grit and "real" and believable. Starship Trooper was way too clean and sanitized and the only "edgy humor" was what I was imagining in my head that could have made the movie better. Veerhoven's fun with all the commercials and the 6000 SUX and all that was just flavoring to an interesting near-future world, akin to a dark comedy version of Blade Runner. In Troopers, it was just forced, probably because he was told he was picked for it because they needed to add filler to a one-dimensional nothing.

So I'd take a Starship Troopers reboot that was actually a good movie over any of that bullshit faux edgy crap any day.

Starship Troopers would've been 100X better if Denise Richards character had died instead of Dina Meyers (I think that's her name). I quite enjoyed it for what it was. That said, ironically, one of the few Heinlein novels I've never read is Starship Troopers so that probably helps.

[Khaldun]

Problem with Verhoeven is always that he wants to have his postmodern cake and eat it too, to basically suggest that if you're enjoying his film for its surface content, you're actually a part of the empty bread-and-circuses mob, but at the same time, he's really very in to the surface content himself and wants us to be. I get a bit tired of that kind of ironic ouroborous in general and somehow particularly with him, even when I actually like the film (the original Robocop, for example). But it's a sure bet that these films can't be made as straight SF action and stand up to that extra element that Verhoeven worked into his best-known pictures.

[sickrubik]

Trailer.

Blech.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=108578

[Lakov_Sanite]

Rated R or fuck it.

[sickrubik]

They are making it to get PG-13, apparently. So... yeah. No.

[MahrinSkel]

The book also didn't have anything the least bit interesting.  The two are likely not related.  

John Steakley's Armor is a considerably better book about people in robot suits fighting bugs.

I'd imagine it was, since Starship Troopers was a book about a boy growing into a man while in military service during a war. The robot suits and bugs were nothing but props. It's considered a classic for a reason while Armor is considered about equal to an Honor Harrington novel. It does suprise me you didn't like it, you being a man who was in the military during a war and all.

I like both Armor and Starship Troopers, but Armor is in many ways the better written of the two.  Both pound you over the head with the message (War is honorable sacrifice/War is pointless sacrifice), both can really only be fully appreciated by someone who has 'seen the elephant', but at the end both viewpoint characters have been used up, something you don't appreciate about Troopers until you have your nose rubbed in it by Armor.

--Dave

[Evildrider]

Trailer.

Blech.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=108578

I love the original and I'm not super psyched about this one.  Although it'll still be better than the sequels most likely. 

I don't feel as pissed off about the suit as I did when the early images popped up though.  I still would have liked if they would have kept the look in the trailer before they said to "make it black."

[Merusk]

Too positive, not bleak enough.

I bet his wife doesn't even leave him and he resolves his dad-son issues.

[Ironwood]

That looks bad.

[jakonovski]

More like CGIcop amirite?

Also, fuck PG-13. Hollywoold is truly fucked.

[Lakov_Sanite]

It's not that a pg-13 movies can't be good it's just that robocop was always a darker tone than most super hero movies, hell robocop was NOT a super hero. He was a cyborg abomination against god    There is such opportunity in this IP to tell heavy hitting scifi stories and seeing it squandered and hampered by trying to make a summer blockbuster is saddening.

[Xuri]

What the shit? No Robocop theme music? 

[Cyrrex]

It's not that a pg-13 movies can't be good it's just that robocop was always a darker tone than most super hero movies, hell robocop was NOT a super hero. He was a cyborg abomination against god   

For me...this is also what is wrong with the suit.  The original Robocop actually gave you a feeling of being some kind of creepy abomination.  Because he looked like an actual robot grafted over the corpse of a human being (or the other way around).  Just looking at him and the way he was created made you slightly ill, and it made you feel terrible for the human left inside.  This new guy looks like some dude in armor.  ME3 armor, as someone pointed out.  Half the point of the movie is already gone unless they make us feel sympathetic and slightly grossed out.  That is why the original was good.  That and the sick violence.  So this appears to be 0 for 2.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I realize in the original, Murphy was dead.  He was a re-animated corpse in a metal shell and this guy is just a dude wearing power armor.

[Riggswolfe]

This trailer made me feel worse about the suit. As others have said, he doesn't look like a cyborg. He looks like a dude in power armor. Also, his voice and movements are too fluid. I don't know if any of you have seen that recent thing Peter Weller did in Austin where he talked to a crowd after a screening of an original but he talked about how he got the walk and movement down and that is what sold the character. This guy doesn't move like a robot and they changed his voice in post to have a mechanical sound to it but the actor isn't speaking in a mechanical way so it just sounds like a guy whose voice is slightly off.

[HaemishM]

That looks bad.

This. I'm not even remotely excited about that trailer.

[Mrbloodworth]

I like this quite from the trailer site:

Batman and Gordon created Robocop and Nick Fury want's him for the Avengers,nice

[sickrubik]

I'm not going to worry about how the voice sounds until the movie is out. There's enough you can do with dub work and effects that I'm just.. not worried about that.

The suit doesn't bother me either. Those robots that DARPA are working on move pretty fluid at this point, so seeing someone move like they're dancing to electro might just look silly at this point.

But, the movie just doesn't seem to have... teeth. It just seems generic. It could be an absolutely fine action movie, but won't have any of the satire of the original.

[Merusk]

This trailer made me feel worse about the suit. As others have said, he doesn't look like a cyborg. He looks like a dude in power armor. Also, his voice and movements are too fluid. I don't know if any of you have seen that recent thing Peter Weller did in Austin where he talked to a crowd after a screening of an original but he talked about how he got the walk and movement down and that is what sold the character. This guy doesn't move like a robot and they changed his voice in post to have a mechanical sound to it but the actor isn't speaking in a mechanical way so it just sounds like a guy whose voice is slightly off.

Yeah, I remember seeing some interview in the early 90's where he said the same thing. I recall Weller being really lauded in '87 for exactly how INTO the role he got, and the way he sold it. He won a Saturn award for it, no less, which was about as big a deal as you could get for Sci-Fi acting in '88.

Just looked him up on Wikipedia and he's really interesting.  He got a Masters in Roman and Renaissance art in 2004 and is now doing a PHD in Italian Ren. art history.