A-Z Challenge: Robocop and Ridiculous Remakes

Robocop is a great movie.  The thing that struck me most when I first saw it at the tender age of 16 was the lack of opening credits.  The movie title comes up and then right into the film, and if there are any dull moments I don't remember them.  It's mayhem and violence and retribution silly commercials for futuristic games and guys mutated by enormous vats of toxic sludge, and then it ends like a splurt of blood from Red Foremen's jugular (Watching this movie now, I would keep expecting him to call Robocop "dumbass."  I'd buy that for a dollar!).

Word on the street is they are planning to remake this movie.  Why?  The original was great.  The effects were award-winning and still hold up, in my opinion.  The acting was superb.  Red Foreman was a great villain, and his crew were chilling in the way the laughed and joked while blowing the limbs off of Murphy.  And there was a bad guy named Dick, and everyone said his name with the right-but-wrong inflection, because he was one.

There's no need to re-make this movie.  There's a new Spider-Man movie coming out, too, and that also screams needless remake to me.  Who knows, maybe they will have some magic formula that makes it great, like Batman Begins had in rebooting the caped crusader.  I kind of doubt it, but time will tell. 

I guess my frustration stems from the knowledge that this is lazy story-telling, demanded by lazy marketing.  There are better movies that can be made without relying on a re-hash of old material.  We don't need to keep going back to TV shows (Rockford Files starring Vince Vaughn!) and movies that aren't even ten years old yet. 

That being said, I am very excited to see Prometheus, Ridley Scott's prequel to the Alien franchise.  But the excitement comes from knowing that Alien has very little to do with Prometheus, it has its own plot and story and the Alien references are more like Easter Eggs than a central plot.

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