[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0kWgcIlWn0]

They’re going to remake Robocop.

This is a fucking sacrilege.

Robocop is the finest science fiction movie ever made. In comparison to Robocop, Bladerunner, Metropolis, Brazil and 2001 are just so much dreary garbage; Planet of the Apes is a suckfest and Star Wars is boring. There is only one truly great science fiction movie. It’s Robocop, stupid.

Directed by Paul Verhoven, who brought us Basic Instinct and Showgirls, Robocop is funny, frightening, violent and satirical. It’s about manufacturing crises to privatize social services, corruption and crime, the 80s autoworker’s fear of robotics and so forth. And so on.

It is science fiction’s bleakest assessment of society and the people who run it.

But, often overlooked, is its questions about what it means to be human. Robocop struggles with memories of a humanity he has lost. He sees his former life as what he has become. A killing machine. And he answers these questions as a killing machine would. This movie is honest. Brutally so.

Although it could be argued that Robocop is a celebration of fascism, it evinces more empathy with the little guy than Bladerunner, with its aryan-super-androids, Star Wars, with its feudal defense of slavery, and 2001 with its whitecoated, eggheaded technocrats who improve humanity. It understands fear.

Our fear. Waking up without a job, being pawns in corporate power struggles, random violence on the street and of the machines. They might kill us. They might replace us. We might become them. And they’d never even really think about it. Robocop understands. And it makes no apologies.

And now they’re going to remake it.

It won’t work. They’ll soften it, dillute it and fuck it up. None of the Robocop sequels were any good, the television show was awful and the video game was no Contra. There is only one Robocop.

A movie like this requires Verhoven’s unique style. As in Showgirls, one is never quite sure if he’s kidding. After a while you give up trying to figure it out and just enjoy the ride. Without Verhoven, Robocop is nothing but a bad action movie. With him it becomes a satire of society, action movies and newsreel terror.

As when they remade Psycho, I’m not going to see the new version. The old one –the real one, the only one– is as close to perfect as you can get. If you haven’t seen it, go rent/buy the unrated original. I’d buy that for a dollar! And, actually, I did.