As you will have heard by now, or if you haven’t heard, just gathered from the above image, Robocop is back.
And excitingly, we were not so long ago given the chance to go to see the rebirth.
For much of our 24 hours on the set of José Padilha’s huge-budget remake, we were miserable. Robocop is a god of our adolescence – it’s like trying to remake the SNES. However, at around 2am, in a Canadian field made to resemble Detroit, Michael Keaton appeared in front of us wearing black Ray-Bans, black denim and a leather jacket. He was shortly followed by Robocop, like the Eighties never died. It was a moment sizeable enough to win us over.
“I never saw the first Robocop, never will, so this didn’t feel like a project I’d do,” the semi-retired Keaton told us. “But José [Padilha] called, we discussed the villain he wanted, and it felt so relevant to what I see in the news today. My dude’s the bad guy, but I don’t even know if his evilness is incorrect, he’s not flat-out wrong. This is a thinking man’s action movie. It’s intelligent.”
Along with an impressive cast, including Keaton, Gary Oldman, Samuel L Jackson, Michael K Williams, Abbie Cornish and The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman as Robocop, Padilha has piqued even more interest.
“José is why I am here,” says Kinnaman (pictured bottom right). “Everyone on this set will tell you the same. I had no real interest in this movie until I knew he was involved. Once I knew that, I had to have this role. Had to.”
This is Padilha’s first English-language film, and many who have seen his Elite Squad (if you haven’t, you should) will consider him a brave and – hopefully – inspired choice to handle this classic.
“It’s a character piece,” explains Cornish. “We have tried to handle it like a man going to war and coming back quadriplegic. It’s about how a family handles that.”
Padilha’s Robocop may reinstate our belief in the power of the reboot or shatter our teenage memories – either way, we can’t wait to find out.
Robocop is at cinemas nationwide from 7 February
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