It almost goes without saying a lot of the time, but it’s never a surprise when a filmmaker isn’t a fan of someone else remaking their work. Obviously, some of that is tied to the ego, as creative folks don’t want other people tinkering with their art. But in the case of Paul Verhoeven, when he’s talking about two high-profile remakes of his films, “Total Recall” and “RoboCop,” his issues are less about the idea of someone else taking a shot at the same subject matter and more about people missing the point.
Speaking to Metrograph, Paul Verhoeven talked quite a bit about two of his most beloved films, “Total Recall” and “RoboCop.” And as you might expect, eventually the conversation came around to the respective remakes of each. You could already guess that Verhoeven, one of the great auteurs of the past several decades, wouldn’t be a huge fan of the remakes, he doesn’t just trash them on principle. He actually has really solid reasons why he feels these two remakes fail to live up to the original.
In the case of “RoboCop,” perhaps his most beloved work, Verhoeven feels the 2014 remake (directed by José Padilha) failed to understand the very basic foundations of the title character. And because of that, the “RoboCop” reimagining just fell flat.
“The problem there, I felt, was that he was really aware that he lost all his legs and arms. He knows it from the very beginning,” explained Verhoeven. “The beautiful thing about the original ‘RoboCop,’ what makes it not just pure tragedy or whatever, is that he really does not know anymore. He gets a couple of vague flashes of memory when he goes to his old house, but RoboCop is not a tragic figure. Yes, he’s killed in the most horrible way in the beginning. But when we see him again as a robot, he doesn’t feel that.”
He continued, “In the new one, because he remembers everything, he’s much more tragic. We wanted you to accept him at the beginning as a robotic cop. That’s what they did to him. In my opinion, I thought it was a problem to make him more tragic.”
As for the 2012 remake of “Total Recall” (directed by Len Wiseman), Verhoeven believes the new film lost the central mystery, which made the original so unique and fun. And when you lose that mystery, it’s just “a lot of special effects.”
“I felt it had a lot of special effects, but this mystery—is it true or is it not true?—I just didn’t feel that anymore,” the filmmaker said. “The interesting thing about the original movie is that at the end, when Rachel Ticotin says, ‘Well, kiss me quick before you wake up,’ you still don’t really know if it’s real. Also, we had a wonderful composer, Jerry Goldsmith. I was so pleased with the piano motifs. Without all that, what do you have?”
Clearly, there are no sour grapes present in those dissections. Verhoeven has some really basic and understandable issues with these two remakes. And as a diehard fan of “RoboCop,” I wholeheartedly agree with his verdict on the remake. For all of its issues (and there are plenty), the 2014 “RoboCop” just completely altered the story of Murphy, and when you do that, you shake up the foundation of the film. Forget the satire, which is a huge part of both versions (though the remake wasn’t as clever), you have to nail the character of Murphy for the film to work. The remake just didn’t do that. As for “Total Recall,” the less said about the remake, the better. I feel like we can all agree about that.
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