RoboCop | Official Movie Site | Sony Pictures Story In RoboCop, the year is 2028 and multinational conglomerate OmniCorp is at the center of robot technology. Overseas, their drones have been used by the military for years, but have been forbidden for law enforcement in America. Now OmniCorp wants to bring their controversial technology to the home front, and they see a golden opportunity to do it. When Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) – a loving husband, father and good cop doing his best to stem the tide of crime and corruption in Detroit – is critically injured, OmniCorp sees their chance to build a part-man, part-robot police officer. OmniCorp envisions a RoboCop in every city and even more billions for their shareholders, but they never counted on one thing: there is still a man inside the machine. RoboCop (2014) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends.

Error From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC In 2028 Detroit, when Alex Murphy - a loving husband, father and good cop - is critically injured in the line of duty, the multinational conglomerate OmniCorp sees their chance for a part-man, part-robot police officer. Director: Famous Directors: From Sundance to Prominence From Christopher Nolan to Quentin Tarantino and every Coen brother in between, many of today's most popular directors got their start at the Sundance Film Festival . Here's a list of some of the biggest names to go from Sundance to Hollywood prominence. a list of 22 titles created 14 Jul 2012 a list of 42 titles created 18 Dec 2013 a list of 43 titles created 31 Jan 2014 a list of 33 titles created 09 Jul 2014 a list of 38 titles created 4 days ago Search for " RoboCop " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin.

4 wins & 1 nomination. See more awards » Videos In a dystopic and crime-ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg haunted by submerged memories. Director: Paul Verhoeven The world is beset by the appearance of monstrous creatures, but one of them may be the only one who can save humanity. Director: Gareth Edwards Cyborg law enforcer RoboCop returns to protect the citizens of old Detroit but faces a deadly challenge when a rogue OCP member secretly creates a new, evil RoboCop 2. Director: Irvin Kershner As a war between humankind and monstrous sea creatures wages on, a former pilot and a trainee are paired up to drive a seemingly obsolete special weapon in a desperate effort to save the world from the apocalypse. Director: Guillermo del Toro Left for dead on a sun-scorched planet, Riddick finds himself up against an alien race of predators. Activating an emergency beacon alerts two ships: one carrying a new breed of mercenary, the other captained by a man from Riddick's past.

Director: David Twohy Young Ender Wiggin is recruited by the International Military to lead the fight against the Formics, a genocidal alien race which nearly annihilated the human race in a previous invasion. Director: Gavin Hood 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 6.3/10 X A factory worker, Douglas Quaid, begins to suspect that he is a spy after visiting Rekall - a company that provides its clients with implanted fake memories of a life they would like to have led - goes wrong and he finds himself on the run. Director: Len Wiseman A teenager with teleportation abilities suddenly finds himself in the middle of an ancient war between those like him and their sworn annihilators. Director: Doug Liman A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. Director: Matt Reeves Autobots must escape sight from a bounty hunter who has taken control of the human serendipity: Unexpectedly, Optimus Prime and his remaining gang turn to a mechanic, his daughter, and her back street racing boyfriend for help.

Director: Michael Bay Edit Storyline The year is 2028 and multinational conglomerate OmniCorp is at the center of robot technology. Overseas, their drones have been used by the military for years - and it's meant billions for OmniCorp's bottom line. Now OmniCorp wants to bring their controversial technology to the home front, and they see a golden opportunity to do it. When Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) - a loving husband, father and good cop doing his best to stem the tide of crime and corruption in Detroit - is critically injured in the line of duty, OmniCorp sees their chance for a part-man, part-robot police officer. OmniCorp envisions a RoboCop in every city and even more billions for their shareholders, but they never counted on one thing: there is still a man inside the machine pursuing justice.

Written by Sony Pictures Entertainment Action | Crime | Sci-Fi | Thriller Motion Picture Rating ( MPAA ) Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action including frenetic gun violence throughout, brief strong language, sensuality and some drug material | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 12 February 2014 (USA) See more » Also Known As: $25,061,581 (USA) (14 February 2014) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia The face off between Mattox and Robocop ocurrs at the R.L Hearn Generating plant in the Toronto Portlands. It was decomisioned in 1983 and has been used for numerous film shoots. The exterior shot of the plant was digitally altered to show buildings and fields surrounding it when in actuality it sits in the middle of an industrial area close to the Keating channel railways and the elevated highway Gardiner Expressway. This location is popular with urban explorers but it should be noted due to the degradation and age of the plant is quite dangerous to explore. At 250,000 sq ft and 20 stories high it remains one of the largest abounded properties in Toronto.

See more » Goofs Takes place in Detroit, Michigan but Toronto's CN Tower and Canadian flags are visible when RoboCop is on his motorcycle on the highway. See more » Quotes See more » Crazy Credits The audio of the MGM logo is replaced by vocal effects generated by Samuel L. Jackson before the film begins with him exercising his voice before going on air. See more » Connections What movie did those guys watch? 9 February 2014 | by v-bach-of (Germany) – See all my reviews I really don't understand all the hate this movie gets. Yeah, I get it, it's a reboot of a perfectly good 80s movie that nobody really wanted, but it's a really good one! I expected a mindless Micheal Bayian action movie and what I got was a really smart, interesting and entertaining look at trans-humanism, the freedom of choice, politics and recklessness in corporate leaders. This movie really dives into the question of how a person could live his day to day live with almost all of his body amputated and stuck inside of a machine.

So when people complain about the uncomfortable scenes between Murphy and his wife, I can only imagine they mean what happened after his transformation, and that felt exactly the way it was supposed to! So yes, the original is way more graphic and still holds up to this day as a gruesome action flick, but this one is smart and interesting and really is a good movie in it's own right. And by no means is it as bad as people say it is! 697 of 976 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes The New <em>RoboCop</em> Is What <em>RoboCop</em> Meant to Kill the Machines This new RoboCop movie does not care that anyone might compare it unfavorably to the original 1987 RoboCop movie. It has been programmed not to care about these things. The most readily available metaphor, which is also true, is that the new movie has killed the human mind and guts of its predecessor and kept the cold mechanical body. The whole thing is flat and obvious; even its musical cues land with the clanking unsubtlety of its protagonist's metallic footsteps. Most importantly, though, it is not funny.

At the screening I attended, there were two lines that drew real laughs, both of which referred to something outside the world of the movie proper. One was simply that the filmmakers had decided to create an arbitrary opportunity for Samuel L. Jackson to say "motherfucker," because Samuel L. Jackson is all about saying "motherfucker" in movies, dig? Motherfucker! The other one was when one of the characters supplied a winking paraphrase of a line from the original RoboCop, "I'd buy that for a dollar!" In the old RoboCop, this was a dumb catchphrase delivered by a sweaty TV host as he leered at large-breasted women, to the idiotic delight of the cretins watching his show in the broken hellscape of Old Detroit. Now it is a dumb catchphrase delivered to ... the audience watching RoboCop. There's a basic confusion about genre at work here. The original RoboCop was a brilliant comedy operating in the guise of an ultraviolent action movie, or rather, it was a scathing jeremiad operating as a comedy operating in action-movie guise.

It was—and remains—a masterpiece of a specific kind of speculative fiction: tales of a world that is recognizably descended from our own, but which has collapsed under the weight of stupidity, consumerism, violence, and vulgarity. To put a name on this not-quite-imaginary culture, it is a defining vision of Idiotopia—a vision RoboCop shares with works including The Running Man, Max Headroom, and (most explicitly) Idiocracy. These are tales of a particular sort of future that awaits us, the future of "I'd buy that for a dollar!" and Idiocracy's "Oww! My Balls!" and the sketch show Time Trumpet's "Rape an Ape." It is the ironic frame around Quentin Tarantino's movies, artifacts of an alternative Idiotopian universe where entertainment is a bit more brutal and trashy than our own. (There's a reason "Kill Bill" is syntactically identical to "Rape an Ape.") But the curse and the genius of the great Idiotopian stories is that their warnings come true.

Max Headroom—introductory chyron: " 20 Minutes Into the Future "—described a world where televisions couldn't be turned off and where journalists were driven by real-time ratings, forced to change programming on the fly to chase traffic. Right now, you probably have an always-on media-delivery device in your pocket, and if enough of you are reading this story, the count will appear on a big screen inside the doorway of Gawker Media. Here, then, is a sinister corporate monologue from the first RoboCop: "We have gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit—hospitals, prisons, space exploration. I say good business is where you find it." Today, that's a straightforward business prospectus. Likewise the movie's great symbol of excess, the 6000 SUX sedan —"An American Tradition / 8.2 mpg"—was four years and two clicks of the alphabet away from the rise of the SUVs. Some of the best visual jokes in the original RoboCop aren't even necessarily recognizable as jokes anymore: The embattled Detroit police wear riot armor as their standard uniform; a news ticker scrolls at eye level above the corporate office urinals.

The cops drive beat-up Taurus LXs—a sly gag about the short distance between novelty and decay, replacing the dowdy, square-cornered cop car silhouette of 1987 with the sleek, desirable new jellybean shape. Soon enough, real cops were driving Tauruses, and they looked as dowdy as Dodge Diplomats. Idiotopian satires can't help but undermine themselves. Their existence is a tribute to the attractiveness of what's being parodied: It's fun to be stupid and violent and to buy stuff. We can dread where our civilization is headed because we understand the reasons it will go there. The process of rebooting RoboCop wiped all of this away—the anger, the comedy, and the underlying self-awareness. A movie about our world going to hell is now a movie about a cop who is part robot. A "robo-cop," if you will. Nothing more. This time around, Detroit somehow looks bland and nice. The villainous corporation in the original RoboCop, Omni Consumer Products, schemed about pacifying Old Detroit to raze it and develop a new metropolis, Delta City, on the site.

The new RoboCop has abandoned that plot line; it already appears to be set in Delta City, anyway. There are some dilapidated parts, the way there are shabby items for sale in Restoration Hardware, but the terror of a city in collapse is gone. The police force is only corrupt in the usual old-fashioned way, rather than being torn apart by privatization and civic unraveling. Headquarters seems decent, morale appears to be fine, and wounded officers end up in a hospital that resembles a high-end birthing center. The smooth functioning extends even to the robots. The new movie's idea of a capitalist conspiracy is this: RoboCop, as a cyborg with a human face and brain, is intended to soften the American public's resistance to automated policing, so that his manufacturer, OmniCorp, can sell its existing models of war-bots on the domestic market. In an off-key preamble to the movie, we see these fully automated machines patrolling the streets of American-occupied Tehran. Iranians desperately hate the robots, but it's not because of any defect in their operating. They're only oppressive because they carry out their orders so well.

The filmmakers have borrowed the name and basic design of the bigger war-bot, the towering bipedal ED-209 , from the original movie. In the imagination of 1987, though, the ED-209 was dangerously incompetent, built with the goal of winning defense contracts whether it worked or not. That was the cynical state of the military-industrial complex then. Now we get a robot that is able to correctly and instantaneously distinguish between hostile parties and noncombatants—a peculiar thing to extrapolate from the drone technology and tactics we're using in 2014. It feels less like an indictment of our current condition than an evasion. RoboCop's own weapon of first resort this time is a supercharged taser gun , so it's usually unclear, as he blasts away and bodies go flying, whether we're supposed to be watching death or mere incapacitation. The audience isn't there to ask questions. The story has a supposedly political frame around it, in which Jackson, as a grandstanding Bill O'Reilly-type TV talker, uses his program segments to crusade for repeal of a domestic ban against OmniCorp's robots.

The American people and their principled representatives in the Senate, you see, are against the automation of police work, unwilling to trust their own liberty to the shiny hands of the machines. The movie treats this as a real and significant conflict, without noticing that the technophobes and techophiles alike are missing the point. This RoboCop's real superpower isn't mechanical speed or strength or precision; it's that he has real-time access to the entire police database and the networked feed from every surveillance camera in the city. He interrupts his own public unveiling because his facial-recognition software has identified a wanted criminal in the crowd—immediate proof of cyborg superiority. Is it, though? The same automated surveillance-and-processing chain could just as easily have relayed its findings to a human officer. Versions of such systems are currently in place, scanning faces and tracking suspicious patterns of movement, for humans to act on. While the movie frets over drones, our real-world security apparatus has already gone cyborg. In another moment that acts like commentary but isn't, the head of OmniCorp—Michael Keaton, playing the role as Steve Jobs—overrules a focus group that had liked the silver body the company had initially given RoboCop.

Borrowing directly from Jobs , he declares that the consumers do not know what they want until you show it to them. This RoboCop should be a menacing tactical black. What's truly funny—and not funny at all—about the scene is that presumably some version of this conversation actually did take place, at MGM. The real product the bad guys at OmniCorp are marketing isn't RoboCop; it's RoboCop. We're not looking ahead to our idiot dystopia. We're living in it. [Image by Jim Cooke; photos via MGM] RoboCop and the surveillance state | SocialistWorker.org RoboCop and the surveillance state Craig Johnson reviews the latest RoboCop movie and compares it to its predecessors. February 21, 2014 From the remake of RoboCop Warning: This review contains spoilers. WHEN I first saw the original RoboCop (1987) and RoboCop 2 (1990) movies starring Peter Weller, robotics and cybernetics were two of my main interests. It wasn't until I grew up that I recognized the deeper themes in the movies, and I realized that they were decidedly anti-capitalist.

They tell the story of a city ravaged by crime, a decaying infrastructure and a polluted environment, brought about by a system that benefits a select few. There are odd satirical commercials throughout the original movies featuring a "nuclear strike" family game, a car anti-theft system that electrocutes the attempted thief, and a sunbathing woman who has to cover herself in blue-green goop in order to avoid skin cancer "ever since we lost the ozone layer." The auto industry was issued repeated beatings by the oversized, gas-guzzling 6000 SUX car. Considering that the movies take place in Detroit, that should have been a real shot across the bow. The original RoboCop series puts privatization and corporate greed center stage, showing what could happen if law enforcement was taken over by a major corporation, Omni Consumer Products (OCP). It showcases the high-tech solutions that deep pockets can offer side-by-side with the lethal working conditions of RoboCop's human colleagues. In typical fashion, the company puts profits before people, and the outnumbered and outgunned police force threatens a strike in the first movie, and actually does it in the second.

RoboCop is nearly undone in the first movie as his corrupt creators turn on him, revealing that he is unable to take action against company executives engaged in criminal activities. Review: Movies RoboCop , directed by Jose Padilha, written by Joshua Zetumer, starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton. In the second movie, OCP attempts a complete takeover of city government, claiming that since anyone can buy the company stock, "What could be more democratic than that?" In their attempt to replicate their success with RoboCop, they feel the need to outdo themselves with RoboCop 2. (In capitalism, all companies are in constant battle to make their own products obsolete as quickly as possible in order to sell the next ones.) Eventually, they lose control of their new creation, and countless people are killed before RoboCop can bring it down. A corporation is an entity that cheapens human life, making it a variable in an equation rather than an end in itself.

Aside from examples I've mentioned already, one can point to the callous "very disappointed" response of the CEO when the malfunctioning ED-209 fills a man full of holes in the OCP board room or the commercial where a businessman shoots himself because he "lost the account," among other things. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE RE-BOOTED RoboCop film, released in February, takes a different approach to its critiques, but it still sends strong messages. The surreal commercials that broke up the earlier movies are replaced by clips of Samuel L. Jackson's character "Pat Novak," starring in The Novak Element, a spoof of today's news shows that would fit well on the Fox News [sic] Network. The corporation at the heart of the movie is called "Omnicorp" this time around, and their biggest products are walking "security" robots like ED-209, called "drones." The movie begins with a demonstration of these machines on patrol through a neighborhood in Tehran, where they call everyone out of their homes to be identified to ensure they belong.

This police state environment is championed as the model for a secure and peaceful country, and Novak repeatedly makes Omnicorp's arguments to deploy these drones on U.S. soil, an untapped "market" for their products that would mean billions in new revenue for the company. The use of the term "drones" for these heavily armed and threatening robots on foreign soil calls to mind the Predator drones used by the U.S. to assassinate people in the Middle East. The struggle of freedom against a surveillance state is one of the strongest themes in the film. The entire criminal database of the Detroit Police Department, as well as closed-circuit television footage covering several years, is downloaded into RoboCop's memory. He also can access closed-circuit cameras and locate cell phone signals wirelessly at any time. In this movie, RoboCop's awareness encompasses the entire digital footprint of the city, so he can witness crimes via camera and apprehend (or interrogate) suspects within minutes. As the revelations continue regarding foreign and domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies, especially those stemming from Edward Snowden's leaks, this film is very timely.

Although RoboCop uses this technology for the greater good, witnessing how it could work and the abuses that could take place paints an eerie picture. Proponents might believe that if you've done nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide, but a long history of martyred innocents puts the lie to it, and the presumption of guilt rather than innocence at the heart of a surveillance apparatus inevitably leads to corruption and abuses of power. Unfortunately, the new movie comes up weak in the economics department. Despite having smorgasbord of possible material from recent corporate bailouts, a recession and the bankruptcy of Detroit (where the movie is set), the story takes a pass on each one. The most it mobilizes are a few protests against RoboCop, where some people are holding signs that read, "People need jobs, not robots!" The new movie is a solid action film (and much less gory than the earlier ones) that should appeal to a large audience, and it's impressive that a mainstream Hollywood film took such strong swings at U.S. militarism and encroachment on civil liberties.

RoboCop forum: Satire, violence, and state-of-the-art bang-bang / The Dissolve RoboCop forum: Satire, violence, and state-of-the-art bang-bang by Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson, Matt Singer, and Scott Tobias Each week, The Dissolve designates a Movie Of The Week for staffers and readers to watch and discuss together. Feel free to pitch in or suggest your own discussion points. Style/Storytelling Tasha: Part of what sets RoboCop apart from other 1980s action movies is its puckish humor, which comes across more via style and storytelling choices than actual gags. In outline, this is a standard revenge thriller—criminals and a corporation take everything from a man, who strikes back—and those films tend to be a dour, glowering breed. But while director Paul Verhoeven and writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner don’t compromise their story’s grimness, they liven it up with ridiculous fake commercials and artificially upbeat news broadcasts.

And they find innovative ways to get across crucial information without exposition, like the way the characters and audience learn a wounded cop has died when his sergeant wordlessly slides his nameplate off his locker. (Then Verhoeven cuts to the similar nameplate on the locker of protagonist Alex Murphy, pointedly suggesting Murphy’s incipient fate. Not subtle, but telling.) Another example: the ridiculous cowboy-cop methods Murphy (Peter Weller) and his partner, Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), use when first going after Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his crew. No one has to explain that we’re in a lawless, desperate future: Just watching a car chase that starts with Murphy leaning out of his police cruiser to empty his pistols into a van, without warning or dialogue, makes it clear that this isn’t our world. But my favorite storytelling sequence in the film is the montage of Officer Murphy becoming RoboCop, as seen from his intermittently activated POV. That sequence communicates so much: The months going by, Murphy’s helplessness and lack of functionality, the tech team’s indifference to him as a person, their delight and nervousness over him as a project.

The moment where project leader Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer, such a perfect sub-villain) casually tells them to further mutilate poor Murphy (“Lose the other arm.”) is brilliantly complicated as a way of communicating his callousness and ambition, while openly equating him with the giggling criminals who blew off Murphy’s first missing arm. RoboCop is visceral revenge-film fun, but its storytelling choices are also tremendously clever. Scott: Part of the stylistic genius of RoboCop is how the film’s world is abstracted like a comic book, yet primed for maximum visceral impact. Today, starting a movie with the title alone and waiting until the end for a full credit roll has become commonplace, but in 1987, it felt bold of Verhoeven to put the title up there and immediately get into the action. The culture’s venality is comprehensive: In the callousness of corporate board meetings, in the inanity of local TV news broadcasts and shows, in a dog-eat-dog crime syndicate where wounded henchmen are used as projectiles, in a police station where justice is overseen and second-guessed by suit-wearing goons from the private sector.

Verhoeven brings real sharpness to RoboCop, extending the cutting-edge action of James Cameron’s The Terminator into the realm of politics, and turning the 1980s action movie on its head. Just the TV segments alone—so crucial to Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, also scripted by Neumeier—bring a satirical context to RoboCop’s mayhem that’s entirely absent from other action movies, which are more interested in crime and punishment than in savaging the culture that not only nourishes it, but makes a business out of it. Tasha: Speaking of comic-book abstraction, I’m convinced that part of RoboCop’s style was a conscious attempt to make the story more like the comic books of the time, with short, punchy dialogue written for quotability, and delivered as though each line happens in isolation. The characters rarely seem to be talking directly to each other: The lines are delivered emphatically and separately, as if each one takes place in its own panel. The separation helps punch up quotable lines like “Bitches leave!” and “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me!” and “Old Detroit has a cancer.

That cancer is crime.” One notable exception: When head villain Dick Jones, played by Ronny Cox, confronts Bob in the executive washroom, he delivers an actual speech instead of a one-liner, in a smooth, intimate cadence that’s unusual for the rest of the film. Part of what makes that moment so squirmy, besides the hair-touching, is that sense of unwarranted, unnatural intimacy in a movie that’s more about individual comics panels than film scenes. Keith: Yet for all the satirical, punchy, comic elements, I appreciate that Verhoeven keeps the violence real and ugly. That late scene where one of the baddies gets doused in toxic waste aside, RoboCop is believably visceral. Murphy’s death at the hands of the thugs, the poor Omnicorp schlub’s encounter with ED-209, and other moments are scary, bloody visions that keep the action from feeling jokey. The media within RoboCop tries to put a smiley face on the turmoil, but the movie never does. Matt: RoboCop often gets lumped in with The Terminator, another franchise-launching 1980s science-fiction action movie about a futuristic cyborg.

They’re very different films, but the one thing they do share stylistically are those POV shots from the perspective of their respective robots. The Terminator’s are tinted red, while RoboCop’s feature green lettering and grids, but they both serve the same function: giving the audience the chance to look at reality as an artificial intelligence might. I always love these shots, especially when they include long scrolls of blocky text that pass too quick for the human eye to read, showing just how inferior our minds are to those of our computerized counterparts. These images are particularly effective in RoboCop because the title character begins the movie as a flesh-and-blood man who becomes a robot(-cop). The POV shots let us experience a small sample of that transformation for ourselves. Violence and dark comedy Nathan: Since we all watched Los Angeles Plays Itself, I’ve seen a lot of films through that film’s filter, particularly Dan Aykroyd’s adaptation of Dragnet, and RoboCop, which almost plays like a parody of Dragnet taken to its satirical ends.

RoboCop’s hero doesn’t just act robotic and stiff: He literally is a robot, and before he reconnects with his humanity, he behaves like a machine built to serve a specific commercial function. RoboCop gets a lot of big, dark laughs out of the disconnect between the icy formality of RoboCop’s simple directives and the brutality of his actions. The film’s violence is often exaggerated for maximum impact, and played for laughs of squirming discomfort, like the scared-shitless executive who’s obliterated due to a glitch in his company’s new product. RoboCop isn’t a subtle movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feature some wonderfully subtle gags, like the hulking death-robot stumbling to its doom, because while it can deliver death in great volume, it’s incapable of negotiating stairs. RoboCop is gloriously, deliberately excessive, but there’s a moral component to the excess. Verhoeven wants us to laugh grimly at the hyperbolic violence, but there’s something incriminating about that laughter as well.

As in his subsequent satires, Verhoeven makes viewers complicit in the hyperbolic action, so the laughter has a tricky aftertaste, The film may be stylized like a comic book, but morally, it’s anything but simple. Tasha: I’m often dubious about the lurid violence in Verhoeven films. In interviews, he constantly returns to variations on the old “I’m just reflecting society” / “I’m just portraying reality” chestnut, but frankly, that’s hypocritical baloney. There’s nothing realistic about the cartoon violence in RoboCop, which features a man being shot such that his arm leaps away from his shoulder, with a velocity that suggests an offscreen stagehand tugging overenthusiastically at a prosthetic. It also features a man driving into a vat of toxic waste, emerging as a hideously melting mutant, then getting hit by a car in a way that turns his body into goo and makes his head pop off.

There are some giggles in all this, but they’re the mildly discomfited, disbelieving giggles of “This is so over-the-top.” What bothers me about Verhoeven and violence, though, is that he talks a lot about morality and responsibility and exploring the issues violence raises, but in the end, he always seems to be enjoying his gore too much. The way the camera lingers on Murphy screaming, and being shot, and screaming, and being shot, and exploding in gouts of blood, and screaming some more, and being shot some more… that isn’t sober, responsible exploration of the themes and consequences of violence, that’s death-porn. Scott: A couple of things on Verhoeven’s quote, Tasha: 1. What a director says about his own work isn’t terribly relevant to my mind—that’s the fallacy of intent, and his actual work should not be considered “hypocritical" because of something he said. 2. Even if you look at what Verhoeven is saying about violence “reflecting society,” should we really take that so literally?

When a heavy comes crawling out of toxic sludge like Lloyd Kaufman’s famous avenger, is it really fair to knock Verhoeven for not being more realistic with his violence? As it happens, RoboCop does reflect the world in which we live—or the world that he perceives, anyway—but more in the sense of violence as a threat that not only comes from the criminal kind, but from the militaristic institutions that are supposed to keep us safe. To me, RoboCop is extravagantly violent in the comic-book mode, and Verhoeven often employs that excess to comic effect, like when ED-209’s programming glitch leads to a bloodbath of hilariously absurd proportions. That’s the sort of strategy the film employs throughout, and I think Verhoeven’s instincts with regard to violence and comedy are dead on. Tasha: We’ve had the “Extratextuals: Do they matter?” conversation many times before, most recently on the Dissolve podcast , and we probably won’t ever fully come to terms on that question. But I’m getting at something different here.

To clarify, I’m not suggesting we should analyze the film’s violence by way of Verhoeven’s quotes about it, I’m suggesting analyzing Verhoeven by what he says about the film’s violence. Frankly, I like the movie’s go-for-broke, over-the-top aesthetic more than I like Verhoeven’s wishy-washy responsibility-dodging. I’m uncomfortable with the film’s gleeful lingering over Murphy’s protracted shooting death, and I feel that overall, Verhoeven loves his squibs and arterial sprays too much. But I’m more pointing out that I don’t buy what Verhoeven’s peddling offscreen, because the violence in RoboCop is so happily, goofily absurd. I laughed at the monumental overkill of ED-209 blowing Kinney away, and at Emil exploding into a shower of mutant goo with a head bouncing away over the car that kills him. There’s nothing inherently wrong with comedic cartoon violence. I just think it’s silly to pretend that cartoon violence is somehow teaching us something about society and ourselves. Matt: I just want to disagree with one point.

There are not “some” giggles in the sight of a toxic-waste-spawned mutant exploding into goo upon impact with a speeding car. There are, in fact, many giggles. Many, many giggles. Paul Verhoeven Keith: Paul Verhoeven was a director with something to prove when he took on RoboCop. He was successful in his native Netherlands, making a series of acclaimed films with Rutger Hauer, and closing out his time there with the nastily entertaining thriller The Fourth Man. But his first film for a Hollywood studio, the unpleasant medieval action film Flesh + Blood, barely got a release. With RoboCop, he had to make something that satisfied all the requirements of a summer action movie while still making the sort of artistically fulfilling, boundary-pushing film he liked to make. It still looks like mission accomplished to me, and the best of Verhoeven’s American films. Though I find a lot to like about Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and especially Starship Troopers (with some qualifications on all of the others), RoboCop is so brilliant as both an action film and a subversive satire that it’s proven tough to top.

He got the balance right with this one. Tasha: Verhoeven has openly called RoboCop “the American Jesus,” which makes symbolic sense: He’s murdered, he spends some time being dead while his friends try to carry on without him, he’s resurrected, and from there, his legend just keeps growing. Also, the movie’s climactic battle literally features him walking around on water. (Granted, it’s extremely shallow water, and the villain is walking on it too, but that’s what happens when symbolism gets literalized.) This isn’t a one-off case of Verhoeven borrowing Christian imagery for impact, either. Plenty of people have noted the Christ imagery in his work—Johnny Rico being scourged in Starship Troopers leaps to mind, or the Virgin Mary showing up with a warning in The Fourth Man—though I’m not sold on some of the arguments, like Showgirls essentially being an extended riff on Mary Magdalene, and on not judging whores.

Regardless, RoboCop is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Verhoeven’s fascination with Christianity and religious history: He’s authored a respected scholarly book about Jesus , he’s spent years trying to fund his own film about Jesus , he’s a member of the Jesus Seminar, and he often talks about his interest in religion and religious interpretation. It makes me want to revisit his films solely with that in mind as one of the Rosetta stones for understanding his work. Matt: If you’re feeling auteur-y, there are a lot of similarities between RoboCop and Total Recall. Both are dystopian science-fiction, and both focus on heroes who are taken from their families. In each, the protagonists’ memories are erased and their personalities rewritten, and both must eventually go on the run from corrupt government forces who abuse their power and blur the lines between civil servants and corporate executives. Both also feature excellent bad-guy performances from Ronny Cox, and both eventually got remade. We already know how the Total Recall remake worked out (badly and blandly). I’m hopeful, though not hugely optimistic, that things will turn out better for RoboCop.

Scott: I’m always fascinated by filmmakers from other countries who make movies in (or about) America, and Verhoeven is among the most intriguing, because he’s been able to square a strong point of view about the country with the violence and spectacle expected of Hollywood entertainment. The word “subversive” comes to mind in relation to movies like Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls, which all double as wicked pieces of social commentary, and the same holds true of RoboCop, with its assessment of capitalist greed and exploitation, and the military-industrial complex that sustains a cozy, profitable relationship between the government and Big Business, with violence as a natural consequence. Verhoeven has also been on the cutting-edge of special effects, too: The years haven’t dated RoboCop or the Starship Troopers beasties, and the decision to let Phil Tippett loose on the stop-motion ED-209 remains an evergreen delight. 1980s crime and punishment Matt: By sheer coincidence, I happened to rewatch RoboCop just days after I rewatched another iconic 1980s cop movie, Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon.

Both movies—which were were released four months apart in the spring and summer of 1987—contain similarly paranoid visions of crime and the future of law enforcement. In each case, a new breed of criminals—vicious, relentless, with no respect for anyone or anything—seems to demand a new breed of cop. In each movie, voices that want to do things by the book are ultimately silenced, and police officers who can take the law into their own hands are celebrated. Lethal Weapon’s Roger Murtaugh is initially unnerved by the reckless war on crime launched by his new partner, Martin Riggs. But after drug dealers kidnap Murtaugh’s daughter, he changes his tune; at the end of the film, he guns down the kingpin while muttering, “No way you live.” Meanwhile, in RoboCop, straitlaced Alex Murphy is transformed by into a one-man robot war on crime. His programming instructs him to protect the innocent and uphold the law, but he’s also capable of playing judge, jury, and executioner when necessary.

In the film’s final scene, he doesn’t arrest OCP mastermind Dick Jones for murder; he shoots him about a dozen times and sends him falling to his death out of a skyscraper window. In these and other 1980s cop movies (Cobra, Beverly Hills Cop, Die Hard), the rule-breakers are the explicit heroes and saviors of society. Even if their Miranda-abusing actions are slightly regrettable, they’re also seen as entirely necessary, and the message seems to be that if criminals aren’t going to follow the rules, the cops shouldn’t have to, either. We’ve already talked about Paul Verhoeven and RoboCop’s dark sense of humor, so I’m curious whether you guys see the movie’s depiction of RoboCop as yet another remorseless killing machine as part of its satire or not. Is Verhoeven sending up the idea of the 1980s supercop, or reveling in it? Keith: I think it’s rather brilliantly both. The film portrays the bad guys and their state-of-the-art bang-bang as a force no conventional police department could stand up against.

But it also suggests that the thinning of police resources and the privatization of law enforcement has allowed crime to get out of hand. (Note that the pre-robo Murphy and his partner engage in their cowboy tactics because they know backup will be a long time coming, and they don’t want the villains to get away.) RoboCop is a solution to a problem that should never have been created in the first place. And at least he’s better than ED-209. There’s humanity in him somewhere, and in some ways, the film’s real triumph isn’t when he blows the bad guy away, but when he gets the Old Man to ask him his name. Scott: It does more than suggest “the privatization of law enforcement that’s allowed crime to get out of hand”—it establishes a direct collaboration between OCP (which needs a crime-ridden city for ED-209 to clean up in order to further its gentrification agenda) and Clarence Boddicker, the crime boss who benefits financially from all this lawlessness and carnage.

But back to Matt’s main point, I think part of the genius of RoboCop is how it satisfies the requirements of popular action movies like The Terminator or Lethal Weapon while expanding it into the realms of science fiction, dark comedy, comic books, and social satire. It’s a movie entirely of its time—the criminal “scum” could be out of a Death Wish sequel if they weren’t so colorfully cast—but also bold and forward-thinking. Final thoughts Tasha: One thing we haven’t discussed at all about RoboCop: Nancy Allen’s lady-cop character, Officer Anne Lewis. She’s the romantic interest for a man who isn’t capable of romance anymore. Her face is soft and feminine, but her haircut is butch—or at least as butch as 1980s movie-punks got. (Verhoeven was supposedly trying to desexualize her with that hair, but she looks like a perky, flirty new-wave rocker, not like one of the guys.) She’s introduced casually beating down a perp who’s already taken out several burly policemen, so she’s obviously meant as a bad-ass, but she’s also constantly blowing cutesy pink bubbles with her ever-present gum.

(She apparently came to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and she isn’t running short on either. Actually, that iconic line is a Rowdy Roddy Piper ad-lib from They Live, which came out one year after RoboCop. Any chance that Officer Lewis in RoboCop inspired it?) In short, she’s meant to be a woman of contradictions. Mostly, though, I think she just comes across as kind of blandly adorable. Keith: I like that character a lot, and it’s a shame the sequels didn’t do more with her or her relationship with Murphy, which always seemed more chummy than potentially romantic to me. (And no, I don’t really want to ponder what RoboCop has going on below the belt.) One of the sequels’ many mistakes is the way Lewis doesn’t get much to do. And now that I’ve opened that can of worms, does anyone have any thoughts on the sequels? Both are scripted by Frank Miller, who seemed like the right man for the job. His Dark Knight Returns and the first RoboCop share the same satirical spirit, particularly in their reliance on newsbreaks to offer glimpses of a world gone mad.

But—and I’ll admit my memory is hazy—I remember RoboCop 2 having some good ideas, but being kind of repellent, and RoboCop 3 feeling like a TV movie. (Readers, am I remembering correctly?) Scott: Speaking of gender issues, RoboCop and Starship Troopers both take place in largely dystopian futures, but Verhoeven (and/or Neumeier) seems convinced that men and women in uniformed combat—whether they’re fighting perps or space bugs—will be on equal footing. That doesn’t eliminate all distinctions between the sexes, since Officer Lewis does feel something for Murphy, and the young officers in Starship Troopers are embroiled in a love triangle. However, the two films share one notable thing in common: co-ed showers. Presented without comment. So in a fascist future, there’s that little bit of sudsy progression. Don’t miss yesterday’s Keynote on how RoboCop’s hero reflects its Detroit setting. Tomorrow, Scott Tobias talks to the film’s writer, Ed Neumeier, about RoboCop’s origins and prescient themes.

At Long Last, Detroit Gets Its RoboCop Statue « Print More than a year after crowd-sourcing raised $67,436 on Kickstarter (on a $50,000 goal), Detroit’s 10-foot bronze monument to RoboCop is being unveiled. It’s part of an entire RoboCop Day in the city, which comes in tandem with the DVD release of the not-bad RoboCop remake — although the statue is definitively modeled after Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 badass. “The effort to build a Robocop statue in Detroit, led by the arts-focused nonprofit Imagination Station, began about three years ago,” writes Michigan’s Mlive.com , “when a Massachusetts resident posted a Twitter message to Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, saying that ‘Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.'” Bing responded : “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.” There were plans, but they were happening without him, on the Internet. The monument dedication will take place today at the Detroit Police Department and Public Safety Headquarters.

(If you’re at this ceremony, I need you to directly tweet me everything any city employee says about this fictional robotic police officer, please.) Later in the day there’ll be photo opportunities, a “RoboCop and Detroit Police Department departure to protect the city of Detroit,” and a first pitch from RoboCop at tonight’s Tigers/Blue Jays game at Comerica Park. After the busy day, RoboCop will retire to a still-to-be-determined location in Detroit. Probably because someone’s secretly putting together another Kickstarter, one that’ll give the statue actual powers of motion and civilian protection. We’re close. Update: A press release from Fox (the RoboCop movie studio) announces that, while tonight’s opening pitch is still happening, RoboCop’s “prime directives have changed and today’s scheduled presentation and statue announcement at the Detroit Police Department has been cancelled.

We know that fans have been eagerly awaiting news on the effigy honoring one of Detroit’s finest and we look forward to sharing those details in the near future.” Also, from the RoboCop statue’s Kickstarter page : “To be clear: the RoboCop statue is still on track to be finished later this year, and is still in the hands of Giorgio Gikas at Venus Bronze Works in Detroit, but news reports about it being unveiled today are incorrect.” RoboCop redux: inside the film’s biggest scenes | fxguide RoboCop redux: inside the film’s biggest scenes By Ian Failes Share5 In 1987, director Paul Verhoeven brought the near-future RoboCop to the big screen, a satirical romp highlighting issues of media, capitalism and cyborg identity. Groundbreaking in its practical and digital effects, the '87 film has now been re-booted with José Padilha's take on the Alex Murphy/RoboCop character.

With designs inspired by the original, the 2014 pic presents the threat of law-fighting cyborgs in a somewhat more menacing and realistic way, an aspect that the film's visual effects teams sought to capitalize on with the latest tools and techniques. In doing so, they also ensured that Padilha could draw on his significant experience in documentaries in order to bring a future Detroit - controlled mostly by the OmniCorp corporation - to life. "We had to work out," recalls overall visual effects supervisor James. E. Price, "how do we allow this filmmaker, who likes to keep things very loose, do long takes, move the camera a lot? How do we give him freedom, so he’s not held back by the visual effects? We settled on brute force techniques, like putting in these rigs and rods and knowing we would be painting them out later, and being comfortable augmenting suits and environments." We take a look at just some of the major visual effects shots and sequences in the new RoboCop with the film's lead vendors. Above: Mike Seymour looks into the suit creation VFX in RoboCop, thanks to our media partners at WIRED. The future of news Samuel L. Jackson plays Pay Novak.

The action: Throughout the film, the action occasionally cuts to a news programme called 'The Novak Element' hosted by Patrick ‘Pat’ Novak (Samuel L. Jackson) deploring the US government’s opposition against the use of robot soldier tech domestically. The effects: Novak utilizes a series of high-tech holograms and projections to communicate his message, effects delivered by Method Studios. /wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Method_Novak.mp4 Watch Method's breakdown of the Novak broadcast sequences. On set, Jackson performed against greenscreen heavily markered and complimented with c-stands for eyeline matching. “It certainly didn’t hurt that we had such an engaging and effects-savvy performer in Sam Jackson,” says Price. “When we shooting the scene, he just technically was perfect - he would hit his marks and get the looks perfect every time.” The idea for the holograms and projections was that they would be ‘live’ in the television studio with Novak - they were not chromakeyed in like a weather map may be today. For this reason the graphics would be seen both in shots indicating the broadcast as well as those showing cameras pointing at Jackson. “A lot of concept work was done,” notes Price.

“We knew we wanted this to be an immersive environment.” Original plate. Final shot. Method Design, a creative group that is part of Method Studios, set about organizing the data and graphics to display as Novak talks and gesticulates. “It was actually quite a challenging project as there wasn’t a lot of time to pull it together,” says Method Studios visual effects supervisor Nordin Rahhali. “There were also sometimes multiple vendors working on shots, so we’d get some of the military content, then we were doing all the panels, and then other shots. So we had to find the screen content and make the interactions make sense.” Live from Tehran Framestore created the ED-209s, EM-208s and views of Tehran. The action: During The Novak Element broadcast, the host crosses live to Tehran where OmniCorp’s robots are in use by the US Military. Here, insurgents attempt to blow themselves up on television but are foiled by the robot soldiers and drones. The effects: A location in Toronto served for plate photography, with set extensions and digital ED-208, ED-209s and flying drones created by Framestore under visual effects supervisor Rob Duncan.

“We built just the lower two stories of each building on a backlot set in Toronto,” recounts Price. “So Framestore had to extend the buildings and added most of the tops except where the insurgents appear. They also extended streets and created the landscape beyond.” Original plate. CG robot. Final shot. The ED-208s - human-looking robots - were completely digital creations. On set, production utilized a full-size photo-ready ED-208 created by Legacy for reference, while performers in gray suits stood in and would later be replaced. “We didn’t do any motion capture for the 208s per se,” notes Price, “but we did set up witness cameras and we did photograph them in the plate. They also worked with a motion coach to perform in a robotic way. But part of the reason we didn’t do live mocap, was that the 208s are robots and all manufactured the exact same way. And we knew that our stunt people weren’t going to do that, although they gave a great approximation.” The bi-pedal 209s were not built for on-set use, although a full-sized aluminum bar frame on wheels served as reference.

“We could drag it through the frame and had people operating it in the shots,” says Price. “It gave the camera operators, the directors and the actors something to focus on. We did create a sixth or quarter of the head of the ED 209 which had two different angled surfaces. We nicknamed it the ‘car door’ and then we pulled that through the scenes for lighting reference also. /wp-content/uploads/2014/02/em-208_reference.mp4 See a walk around of Legacy's full-scale EM-208. Framestore utilized a cyberscan of Legacy’s ED-208 as well as extensive photogrammetry to model the digital equivalent. As it did for other sequences in the filming involving a CG RoboCop, the studio then employed its physically plausible lighting and rendering pipeline built around Arnold to complete the robots for the Tehran sequence. “It really allowed us to push the envelope because the renders gave us such a great start,” states Duncan. Suit-up RoboCop's trademark silver suit. The action: RoboCop’s trademark suit - seen in both silver and black form - was of course a key design element in the film.

The effects: Legacy Effects used art department designs to construct several suits and suit pieces, with an early decision made for various digital effects vendors to augment or render RoboCop completely in CG. “From a technical standpoint we looked at all different options,” recalls Price. “We looked at no suit, we looked at a torso suit as they had done when shooting Iron Man, and then all the way to a full suit. At the end of the day we decided to go with the suit with CG augmentation. Jose our director is a documentary filmmaker and he wanted to bring that doco style and energy. And that meant for us a lot of long takes, a lot of different cameras, a lot of framing changes in the same shot. We might start tight and then go wide, or vice versa. We thought that no matter what, if we do have a suit, there will be pieces of it we can use.” /wp-content/uploads/2014/02/RoboCop_Suit_Up_FINAL_Txt_Stereo_h264_hd.mp4 Watch a featurette about RoboCop's suit, including a look at Legacy Effects' work on the practical build.

Legacy built a hero and stunt suit that could be worn by the actor playing Alex Murphy/RoboCop (Joel Kinnaman) and stunt performers. “In most cases, we would shoot it pretty much as is,” says Price. “If there were scenes where we knew the augmentation would be particularly tricky, we would put markers on the suits, but our hope was that if we left the suit on there would be some angles and moments where we would get away with a practical suit. Those ended up being few and far between but we always had a full practical suit to start with.” Framestore’s new digs RoboCop represented Framestore’s first complete collaboration between its London and new Montreal offices. For the studio it was important operations ran smoothly between both locations. “We approached it from the point of view that everything had to be the same between sites,” says Duncan. “I supervised work across both offices and in many ways it didn’t matter where it was being done. It went incredibly well.” Digital augmentation took two forms. The first was what Price referred to as ‘slimming’.

“It was really important for us to not look like a guy in a suit,” he says (in the film it is ultimately revealed that the only remaining body parts of Murphy are his head, breathing tract and lungs). “And even when you’ve got an actor who’s as slender and fit as Joel, you put them in a suit and it still adds bulk that tells the audience it’s a performer in a suit. So we would do things like tapering the left and right, and front to back to give him proportions that couldn’t possibly be a performer in a suit.” In some cases this could be achieved by rotoscoping RoboCop’s outline and stretching and tweaking the suit before restoring the background. Other times it involved varying degrees of CG additions or complete replacement. “When we were on set,” says Price, “you saw into the rubber black undersuit that Joel was wearing under the hard shell. We wanted mechanical moving pieces under the shoulders, in the arms, under the torso area, hips and thighs and knees. And we also wanted negative space, again to show it was not a guy in a suit.” Framestore was one of several vendors responsible for crafting CG suit augmentations (as well as delivering many full-CG shots of RoboCop).

“In doing that,” notes Duncan, “we didn’t throw away the practical suits or practical photography at all. We were very respectful of Joel’s performance. That’s why when we replaced him we matched him 100 per cent, because we didn’t want to make different choices than were made on the day.” Duncan considers the studio’s move to Arnold a major factor in just how many shots involved full CG suit augmentation. “It meant we could replace more parts,” he says. “Otherwise we would have to be doing some very labour-intensive body tracking. Quite often we went down the route of lighting a CG suit - I think that’s really because of Arnold.” Key moments for Framestore’s digital RoboCop replacements take place in Dr. Norton’s (Gary Oldman) lab. Shots include Murphy storming out as well as having his brain further tampered with. A key sequence also includes the stunning brain and lungs reveal, as RoboCop’s suit parts are disassembled. “It’s one of the scenes that made me most want to work on the movie,” comments Price. “It does force you to ask all those questions that the movie asks - who are we? It’s really a chilling scene.” Original plate. CG pass. Final shot.

To create the sequence, Kinnaman was filmed wearing most of the practical suit. “It had to be real and intimate,” says Price, “so we just put Joel in the scene with Gary Oldman. We put his boots on for the right height - and left helmet on - left his body out of suit so we could photograph his breathing and his throat, so when we created his lungs and heart and windpipe digitally, we could match to his performance.” Framestore then worked closely on the metal suit piece removals, reconstructing parts of the lab behind RoboCop, as well as the organic body parts. “We researched what human organs looked like out in the open, and threw all of it together. It was a long process, but the first time I saw the brain and the lungs and heart, they looked real already.” At one point, RoboCop returns to his home - the scene of his murder - to carry out a 3D reconstruction of the location. Soho VFX worked on suit augmentations and replacements for his arrival there and his motorcycle ride through the city. Soho's digital suit work.

“Our original task was going to be to patch the suit, move the shoulders, clean up the reflections on the visor, narrow the waist, etc,” says Soho visual effects supervisor Berj Bannayan. “But it was a real challenge to try to track on all those little pieces and get that feel of one piece. After a week or so of attacking the shots, we decided to take another tact and replace the suit entirely.” “When he’s on the bike,” adds Bannayan, “we replaced him from the waist up, but in the rest of that sequence he’s entirely CG. We had incredible lighting reference from on set. We took the model that came from production and re-rigged him and used our own shaders and rendering pipeline. It made the task much easier because we could just roto-mate on top of him and make sure we had his mass and motion working well. It also had the added advantage of being to change his motion and expose any gears or robotic elements - again trying to sell that he wasn’t a guy in a suit.” Soho carried out CG suit work for the riding RoboCop. Other vendors, too, delivered CG suit enhancements, including Cinesite and Mr. X.

Dream state Murphy dreams of his wife before realizing he has become RoboCop. The action: As Murphy, now RoboCop, awakens he dreams of being at a backyard party with his wife, but soon realizes he is attached to medical apparatus in Dr. Norton’s lab. The effects: The moment of realization comes with a circular move around Murphy that pixelates from the backyard to the lab in one shot. Method Studios married two separate plates and achieved the transition effect. “It’s one of the first moments where RoboCop realizes who he is - it’s the idea that his dream is being invaded by the reality,” says Rahhali. The two separate plates were filmed without the use of motion control, although a similar dolly move around the actor was performed for both. Method decided to take over the camera move from the ‘A’ backyard plate as it becomes the much more brightly lit ‘B’ lab side. The backyard set. Transitioning into the lab setting.

“Once we were able to take over the camera and come up with a seamless move,” explains Rahhali, “we were then able to focus in on transitional elements and effects to help bridge the gap between one plate and the other.” The move evolved into a 2000 frame shot. For the correct look of the computerized transition, Method developed concept art based on four key frames and then carried out a test on just 250 frames in the middle. Effects for the transition were created in Houdini while some elements of the backyard and lab were re-built and re-projected to match the shot. “Ultimately it involved a lot of tracking love and compositing love to marry those plates in place,” says Rahhali. Guitar hero Visual effects by Soho. The action: OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars visits Dr. Norton in a rehabilitation ward where men and women learn to use their advanced robotic prosthetic limbs. The effects: Soho VFX created various CG limbs, including hands and arms for a scene in which a man plays a guitar.

“The guitar player was a real concert guitar player,” advises Soho visual effects supervisor Berj Bannayan, who also acted as the production’s second unit VFX supe on the film. “He played the guitar as if he was struggling with it in places and then we replaced him basically from the elbows down.” A breakdown of Soho's work for the guitar player sequence. Using a preliminary model of how Padilha wanted the arms to appear, Soho refined the look so that the fingers and hands would physically work, had the appropriate weight and have a correct range of motion. “Early on, too,” adds Bannayan, “we decided to do the guitar in full CG, since his robot hands were much thinner than his real hands, and we didn’t want to do clean-up on the whole guitar and have to paint back in reflections.” Animators followed the actor’s musical performance, carefully ensuring the correct notes were hit and string bending and vibrations occurred. The CG toolkit included Maya for animation, modeling and rigging, 3Delight for rendering and NUKE for compositing. “Importantly, it had to look like a combination of plastics and metal,” says Bannayan, “and it had to feel a little like brushed metal.

We re-built our metal shaders and did physically real metal from measured indexes of refraction, for example. We rendered it as if it had been made out of titanium, but still as a prototype prosthetic that included a few machine marks on it.” Field test RoboCop takes on EM-208s in the field. The action: In order to test RoboCop’s abilities in the field, he takes on several EM-208s in a training area. The effects: Mr. X created digital EM-208s, plus a digital and augmented RoboCop for the skirmish. The sequence was filmed in an abandoned power plant in Toronto. “It’s huge,” exclaims Price, “which means we didn’t actually need to do any extensions. The effects involved replacing the gray suited performers standing in for EM-208s and then augmenting RoboCop or making him completely CG. Then there were also the displays of the bunker and Robo’s HUD in the shots.” Graphics on black. Final shot. The 3D simulation was realized in Cinema 4D, with the point clouds produced inside NUKE and final compositing in After Effects.

"What we did was take the roll footage and convert it into 3D space," says Kizilay. "Once we were in 3D, we were in our own world, so we animated the camera and showed various angles. Then we could come back to the starting point once RoboCop has done his assessment." RoboCop vs the ED-209s An ED-209 battles RoboCop. The action: Murphy learns of Sellars’ plan to destroy him, and heads to the OmniCorp building in search of the CEO. Here he encounters several ED-209s in the lobby. The effects: Production filmed the action-filled sequence at the Vancouver Convention Center with minimal robot interaction or practical effects, necessitating significant digital work by Framestore. “OmniCorp is a big company and we were searching for a location that would suit,” says Price. “We found that in the VCC. What we actually did was make the Center the lobby, so in exteriors of the OmniCorp building if you look closely you’ll see an accurate model of if at the base.” Effects added. Final shot.

VCC plates were filmed at night, sometimes shot with Kinnaman or a stunt double in frame, and sometimes as clean plates. Since the production could obviously not damage the Convention Centre, only minor practical effects, including an exploding dummy column rigged to fire, were filmed. This meant that that Framestore was tasked with orchestrating the digital ED-209s and a digi-RoboCop for most of the shots, plus a high degree of destruction featuring glass, metal, concrete, dust and fiery explosions owing to laser fire. “The challenge was to keep continuity between shots, once the sequence edit had been turned over,” says Duncan. “We needed to know what destruction happened at each point. You needed to see the aftermath of it, or you needed a pre-roll in each shot to get to where you were.” To help with continuity, Framestore blocked out the action, destruction, explosions and gunfire only roughly at first and also developed a special ‘bullet system’. “What we would do,” outlines Duncan, “is put either RoboCop or the ED-209 in the shot, and animation would put some locators in terms of when a robot would be firing.

That would then trace a line from the muzzle of what gun it was and determine where the bullet would hit in the set, and it would trigger an explosion or a puff of dust. So it let us get a sense of how chaotic it might be.” “It also allowed us to not go too far down the animation route before realizing the robot was shooting too much or not enough or aiming in the wrong direction,” adds Duncan. “These were things we wanted to solve before lighting and comp happened too. It also meant we didn’t have these magic bullets that could curve around corners - we couldn’t cheat the fight.” As it had done for other sequences, yU+co contributed key POV graphics for the RoboCop vs. ED-209 fight, including imagery of Robo calculating his trajectory when jumping. The studio also created views as seen from the ED-209s which had a green tinge attached to them. Plate. Robo re-built RoboCop mid-regeneration. The action: After his vicious showdown against the 209s, Murphy is next scene in Dr. Norton’s lab in his only remaining human form - notably his head and lungs - before being reassembled in the classic silver suit.

The effects: Matching to the earlier similar sequence completed by Framestore, Method Studios handled the reassemble, as well as extending the space and adding background ED-209s to the lengthy shots. Additional modeling, rigging and texturing went into the RoboCop CG model which Method received from Framestore. Kinnanman was filmed wearing the full practical suit which then needed to be selectively removed. “That meant we could use all of his natural motion,” states Rahhali, “and get a reading on his chest and throat movements for our lung animation.” The re-building stages involved many moving parts that were modeled and rigged by Method with extensive texturing done in MARI and Photoshop. “Since some shots were so long - more than 600 frames - we had to come up with a concept of how it would all move so it didn’t become boring,” says Rahhali. Original plate. Final shot. Images and clips copyright © 2014 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved. Thanks so much for reading our article. We've been a free service since 1999 and now rely on the generous contributions of readers like you.

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Question: In what city does the movie "Robocop" take place?
Answer: Detroit