Jose Padilha‘s first Hollywood feature appears to be off to a rocky start. The director of the two internationally loved films Elite Squad and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is in charge of the RoboCop remake over at Sony and as issues were recently brought up by the online geek set when Joshua Zetumer and Nick Schenk’s script was leaked it sounded like just the normal complaining, but now it sounds as if Padilha may be second-guessing himself and the film hasn’t even started shooting yet.
We’ll begin with the comments on the script that were made on Twitter via Drew McWeeny from HitFix.com. To give you a sense of where McWeeny approached the screenplay from, he says, “Robocop was already perfect.” So he’s against a remake from the start, not exactly a good place to be when commenting on the script, but at least he puts it out there for context.
He comments on the suit, upset how the 1.0 version is described as “a high-tech version of the ’80s suit” and how after that they actually have a focus group scene where criminals laugh at the design, saying, “He looks like a toy from the ’80s!” McWeeny’s frustration here is the suggestion the original Robocop design is dated and stupid and grows frustrated with the suggestion the department “outsource[s] [the Robocop] construction to China.”
The design goes through upwards of four variations until he looks like a “cop on steroids painted metallic blue.” There’s word Robocop is tested in an Al Queda training camp, which makes me think they are mimicking a similar scene from Iron Man and at one point McWeeny compares him to a Transformer because he goes from “social mode” to “combat mode”.
To relate it to a recent remake, McWeeny adds, “When this thing hits theaters, people are going to call up Len Wiseman’s Total Recall on the phone and apologize for being so mean.”
Bleeding Cool to a full compilation of the tweets and I personally don’t see what is so wrong with most of McWeeny’s complaints. Then again, I didn’t read it in context with the story and I don’t feel any great compassion for the original. However, McWeeny’s commentary begins to take on a little more weight when you consider some words relayed by a friend of Padilha’s, director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener).
A translation of an interview with Meirelles from Cinemacom Rapadura (via The Playlist) was run through Google Translate and he says, “I talked to Jose Padilha for a week by phone. He will begin filming Robocop. He is saying that it is the worst experience. For every 10 ideas he has, 9 are cut. Whatever he wants, he has to fight.”
It gets worse.
“‘This is hell here,’ he told me. ‘The film will be good, but I never suffered so much and do not want to do it again.’ He is bitter, but [he’s] a fighter,” Meirelles added.
While the film can certainly come out the other side unscathed, this isn’t a pretty picture when you consider it sounds like they are aiming to make another PG-13 remake of an R-rated film and already only negativity seems to be surrounding the production.
The film is already slated for an August 9, 2013 release with Joel Kinnaman in the title role, joined by Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Ehle, Michael Kenneth Williams and Marianne Jean-Baptiste
