| Title | Qt3 Movie Podcast: Robocop |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Movie podcasts |
| When | February 17, 2014 |
Apologies for the epic length podcast this week, but we have a lot to hash out about the Robocop remake/reboot. So the 3x3, which is about oceans, doesn't start until the 1:27 mark..
Read the full articleApparently part of the reason Gravity qualifies as British is that Alfonso Cuarón lives in London...
Edit: here's a link http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ente...
In addition to Tabitha King being a writer, their son is a writer, too, and a good one. He writes under a not very hidden pseudonym, though.
Hey! We talk about Locke & Key! Give us some credit.
Yeah, I wrote that before you reached that point. Post in haste...
I am disappointed that Kelly thought I wasn't taking his topic seriously. I was trying to!
You three should totally do a podcast where Kelly Wand hosts, Tom writes the Opsis, and Murawski breaks down the numbers.
That's kind of hilarious. The article didn't mention that Gravity was actually shot in England, and I do believe at least some of the effects studios were also in England. Frankly, until the UK gets its own space program, it really should just admit that Gravity is a testament to the can-do heroism of America, like Armageddon, Batman, and Lone Survivor.
I'd still be the weak link.
No, you did great as always. I just always feel like I'm somehow losing whenever I have to read anything Star Wars-related. I view the onset of Episode VII in much the same spirit as the ancient Mayans would have viewed the Woody Harrelson scenes in Emmerich's 2012.
Kelly, the ancient Greeks had a word for the color blue, they just didn't think the ocean was blue. They saw it as a reddish black, hence the "wine-dark sea".
Also, thank you, as always!
Yw. Yeah, I'm curious what color they considered the sky, or whether they just didn't see it. But in English we have the term "blue," even though England's sky's usually grayer than Greece's. Full disclosure: I learned all my meteorology from Bai Ling. :(
This movie ends the way I thought the original flick ended after I played the NES game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.... What I thought happened was Murphy's human side asserted itself and overrode the machine. The fact that that's the ending I thought of shows how corny it is. I think the abruptness and lack of context in that crappy game's ending also aided my confusion. A friend who had seen the film(I hadn't watched it because of it's ultraviolent reputation) had to explain the joke to me.
Anyways, I think when Murphy/Robocop blows Keaton away it's supposed to be a triumph of humanity over machine, because while a cop can be prejudiced and/or bribed, Murphy can't be completely subverted the way the machine is. There's also supposed to be irony in Keaton being hoisted by his own petard. Probably was unintentional, but Robocop wasn't tackling the biggest problem in Detroit, the corrupt police and criminal ringleader, until Murphy's personality started to come back. Or maybe not, the only message I could discern in Elite Squad 1 & 2 was that the authorities were just attacking the symptoms.
Actually, he was addressing the ringleader, even if he hadn't gotten around to the corrupt cops (yet?)! There's a scene before the blacked out warehouse shootout when the main bad guy, Vallen, explains that he can't move any product because of Robocop. It seems to me that while Murphy's personality was suppressed, he was successfully shutting down crime on the streets and thereby undercutting the bigger criminals. A sort of reverse trickle down theory of law enforcement.
Again, I'm open to the possibility that I'm misreading what the movie was getting at, but I'm still wondering if I didn't see a movie that suggests we'd all be better off if we let robots handle overseas occupations and domestic law enforcement.
The crime fighting and city pacification robots certainly were efficient and effective. It was outweighed by the tone of the movie putting forth a hefty undercurrent of fear and dread re the clinically murderous potential of the dronebots.
This was a hilarious part of the podcast. Murawski's math was excellent, and compelling.
Blockbuster movies started to suck ever since they started trying to be plausible and grappling with "real" themes. But they're also supposed to be feel-good popcorn visual spectacles. So everything now sucks in the same muddled, robots-sumthin-Middle-East way. Instead of the good ole robots-sumthin-Tatooine like back in my day.
So RoboCop subscribes to the broken windows theory?
Well, if its any consolation, I think the "Opsis" you will eventually do of Episode VII will take the sting out of watching it. For me, anyway. ;)
My overall interpretation, especially as Sam L. beat everyone over the head with it at the film's conclusion, was generally the "cost" of this safety. In order for Alex Murphy to be efficient, he had to lose his free will. In order for society to be safe and, therefore, efficient, you have to sacrifice your own free will to an extent. This was the purpose to the introduction, where Novak is telling everyone how wonderful and happy the citizens are, yet they all look miserable as they're forced to go through inspection. It's like having the TSA come by on a random Tuesday afternoon because you might be a terrorist that's planning on flying at some point.
I do feel that the film was a bit muddled and never really measured up to its plethora of ideas, but on the whole a decent enough job was done. That ending, though, was pretty weak, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was focus-tested or rewritten several times due to studio interference. It's so much weaker than anything else in the film.
That final segment at The Novak Effect was pretty hammy. Funny though, with him screaming "Mother*****" at the screen. My sense is that would have served better as a button at the end of the credits.
