Paul Verhoeven has seen the remakes of Total Recall and RoboCop that came out in the 2010s, and he’s not happy about them.
In a recent interview with Metrograph (reported by World of Reel), the director spoke about the remakes and gave his candid takes on what they got wrong about his original work.
Verhoeven starts with RoboCop, the 2014 remake starring Joel Kinnaman. The filmmaker goes into detail about the issues with the character:
“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. 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.”
He continues, “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. 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.”
Verhoeven moves to another remake of his iconic work, 2012’s Total Recall. He notes, “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 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.”
Verhoeven is coming off 2021’s Benedetta and is set to return for his first American feature of the 21st century, the erotic thriller Young Sinner.
