1. It's Directed By Somebody Who Doesn't "Get It"
I don't mean to to say that director José Padilha doesn't get the original RoboCop, and has made a movie unlike that one as a result of some misunderstanding (though that might well be true). What I'm suggesting otherwise, is that Padilha opted to go down another route, and doesn't really seem to have understood what he wanted to get out of the picture. It's a movie packed with lots of seeds of potentially interesting ideas, but no sunlight to allow them to grow: the resulting remake is a sci-fi movie that feels muddled at the core, like twenty studio executives wrote the script all at once. There was the feeling that José Padilha's previous films, the far better - but certainly flawed - Elite Squad 1 & 2 had a fascist sensibility about them, whereas his RoboCop goes in the complete opposite direction and, amongst other ideas, seems to repel such ideologies. Is it possible that this movie clashes with the director's own personal views on politics, therefore resulting in a picture that lacks any sense of identity? Or maybe it's that this movie has been tinkered with to such an extent that, just like the Alex Murphy of RoboCop 2014, it left Padilha feeling confused... and maybe even betrayed.
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