RoboCop: PD - What went wrong?

[vegasrobo]

They made it..That was the main problem...It only crapped on our Hero.

[Joined]

They made it..That was the main problem...It only crapped on our Hero.

[Post Count]

They made it..That was the main problem...It only crapped on our Hero.

[Comment]

They made it..That was the main problem...It only crapped on our Hero.

[RoboTrap]

Oh God, so much wrong...

I just re-watched it the day before yesterday to remind myself how much it sucked. I have an incomplete list thus far, and I tried to avoid comparing it to the previous films and just viewing it as its own entity:

• Page Fletcher: terrible look, terrible delivery, terrible movement.
  
• Maurice Dean Wint(sp?): Bad delivery and expression inside the suit, not one of the other actors (aside from flashback Murphy) had a clue how to interact with him, making him look like an overacting jackass compared to their underacting lameness.
  
• Ann R. Key: WTF? Not only is having another character named Ann (albeit spelled differently) fucking lazy and awkward to hear Robo say when not referring to Lewis, but everything about her from concept to actress to execution is eye-rolling. Lightsabers and '90s Flash TV series quality "super speed" effects? Shameful.
  
• Pretty much every actor. They should have cut down on the speaking roles, gotten a stronger core cast and went for aspiring actors with something to prove instead of Canadian television standbys.
  
• Visual effects: Holy hell, these were bad. Badly roto-scoped stock explosions and sparks terribly blurred from resizing, giving Robo bullet selection options, adding muzzle flashes to the fronts of bikes that have no guns on them, Predator cloaking BS...
  
• Pacing: Interrupting action scenes for intense OCP boardroom action??? Count me in, who doesn't want to see scenes chopped to bits so they can insert some pointless chatter about banal OCP BS?
  
• Editing: Yes, separate from pacing because... wow. The constant Awesome Slow-Motion (tm) stretching out action to three times their optimal running time is just too much. Having characters repeat the same line four times because they need to fill their 90 minute running time with only 35 pages of actual script... blech. If this thing falls apart during casual viewing, watching it under a microscope is an excercise in pure frustration because it fails on so many levels.
  
• SFX: Robo sounds like he's got crumpled garbage cans on his feet, dragging and clanking without any change throughout the film, regardless of how damaged he is. Annoying audio whenever computer's being used, which is standard, but not when these damned things are so prevalent in the program.
  
• Direction: Julian Grant has no clue how to do his job beyond the technicalities. He got hired because he had a history of delivering on time and without budget overruns. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought people got hired to do jobs because they were good, not because they were "good enough". CompUSA just went out of business because they went for the "good enough" strategy. You have one chance to make a film good or bad. You don't hire people who are "good enough" because in doing so you have squandered your chance, and ruined all the other possibly creative efforts focused at the project. You are only as strong as your weakest link.
  
• Plot: Big one here. "Bio-tech virus" that infects both electronics and organics? Okay, throw me some techno babble to explain it away and you've got yourself a deal. Oh, couldn't bother to try and give an explanation because even you guys thought it was the stupidest fucking idea in the world? Kaydick? Random bleached blond mad scientist dude. Alrighty, what's his motivation, why does he want to destroy the world? "It's sick". Wow, that was a cop out. Why were you hired again? Oh, it was thrown into the submission pile as a joke? That makes sense. It reads like slash fiction without the sex. Moving on, this doesn't deserve serious critical thought.
  
• Writing: Some people liked the writing. I thought it was plotting and banal. There was two film's worth material in the script, possibly three depending on the director. Not that it mattered, the entire thing came off like it was written by the resident high-schooler/aspiring writer the day before shooting onto cue cards held off screen, which might explain why the entire damned thing is disjointed. And why "What are you prepared to do?" pops up a half dozen times in each film. RoboCop's signature line, "Dead or alive, you're coming with me", shows up twice in RC1. Twice. How many times down Arnold say "I'll be back" in Term1? Once. When you shove catchphrases down our throats we will choke and despise you for it.

I would have mentioned budget, but I don't think that was as big an issue as most make it. They had $12 mil (the original had $13 mil, which was a low-budget film itself, I don't know why it's referenced as a high-budget film in press-related shit) and didn't have the costs of designing and creating the suits, merely pulling some new casts from the old molds, which Hansing could do for less than 2k a set back in the day. They didn't have to spend cash on ED-209 or his effects, nor waste money on a RoboCar that never even made it on screen. Digital effects all but eliminated the overhead for RoboVision shots, they didn't blow up any buildings (aside from stock from The Series) though they did have explosions, I'll give them that.

But I'll also give them a bitch slap for thinking that anything they did was even remotely close to cool/thought provoking/critically sound/endearing/enjoyable. When the only decent things in six hours of "entertainment" can be summed up in individual shots amidst entire other scenes you've got a pile of shit on your hands. Their hands were stained with it by the time this thing hti the airwaves.
_________________

[Joined]

Oh God, so much wrong...

I just re-watched it the day before yesterday to remind myself how much it sucked. I have an incomplete list thus far, and I tried to avoid comparing it to the previous films and just viewing it as its own entity:

• Page Fletcher: terrible look, terrible delivery, terrible movement.
  
• Maurice Dean Wint(sp?): Bad delivery and expression inside the suit, not one of the other actors (aside from flashback Murphy) had a clue how to interact with him, making him look like an overacting jackass compared to their underacting lameness.
  
• Ann R. Key: WTF? Not only is having another character named Ann (albeit spelled differently) fucking lazy and awkward to hear Robo say when not referring to Lewis, but everything about her from concept to actress to execution is eye-rolling. Lightsabers and '90s Flash TV series quality "super speed" effects? Shameful.
  
• Pretty much every actor. They should have cut down on the speaking roles, gotten a stronger core cast and went for aspiring actors with something to prove instead of Canadian television standbys.
  
• Visual effects: Holy hell, these were bad. Badly roto-scoped stock explosions and sparks terribly blurred from resizing, giving Robo bullet selection options, adding muzzle flashes to the fronts of bikes that have no guns on them, Predator cloaking BS...
  
• Pacing: Interrupting action scenes for intense OCP boardroom action??? Count me in, who doesn't want to see scenes chopped to bits so they can insert some pointless chatter about banal OCP BS?
  
• Editing: Yes, separate from pacing because... wow. The constant Awesome Slow-Motion (tm) stretching out action to three times their optimal running time is just too much. Having characters repeat the same line four times because they need to fill their 90 minute running time with only 35 pages of actual script... blech. If this thing falls apart during casual viewing, watching it under a microscope is an excercise in pure frustration because it fails on so many levels.
  
• SFX: Robo sounds like he's got crumpled garbage cans on his feet, dragging and clanking without any change throughout the film, regardless of how damaged he is. Annoying audio whenever computer's being used, which is standard, but not when these damned things are so prevalent in the program.
  
• Direction: Julian Grant has no clue how to do his job beyond the technicalities. He got hired because he had a history of delivering on time and without budget overruns. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought people got hired to do jobs because they were good, not because they were "good enough". CompUSA just went out of business because they went for the "good enough" strategy. You have one chance to make a film good or bad. You don't hire people who are "good enough" because in doing so you have squandered your chance, and ruined all the other possibly creative efforts focused at the project. You are only as strong as your weakest link.
  
• Plot: Big one here. "Bio-tech virus" that infects both electronics and organics? Okay, throw me some techno babble to explain it away and you've got yourself a deal. Oh, couldn't bother to try and give an explanation because even you guys thought it was the stupidest fucking idea in the world? Kaydick? Random bleached blond mad scientist dude. Alrighty, what's his motivation, why does he want to destroy the world? "It's sick". Wow, that was a cop out. Why were you hired again? Oh, it was thrown into the submission pile as a joke? That makes sense. It reads like slash fiction without the sex. Moving on, this doesn't deserve serious critical thought.
  
• Writing: Some people liked the writing. I thought it was plotting and banal. There was two film's worth material in the script, possibly three depending on the director. Not that it mattered, the entire thing came off like it was written by the resident high-schooler/aspiring writer the day before shooting onto cue cards held off screen, which might explain why the entire damned thing is disjointed. And why "What are you prepared to do?" pops up a half dozen times in each film. RoboCop's signature line, "Dead or alive, you're coming with me", shows up twice in RC1. Twice. How many times down Arnold say "I'll be back" in Term1? Once. When you shove catchphrases down our throats we will choke and despise you for it.

I would have mentioned budget, but I don't think that was as big an issue as most make it. They had $12 mil (the original had $13 mil, which was a low-budget film itself, I don't know why it's referenced as a high-budget film in press-related shit) and didn't have the costs of designing and creating the suits, merely pulling some new casts from the old molds, which Hansing could do for less than 2k a set back in the day. They didn't have to spend cash on ED-209 or his effects, nor waste money on a RoboCar that never even made it on screen. Digital effects all but eliminated the overhead for RoboVision shots, they didn't blow up any buildings (aside from stock from The Series) though they did have explosions, I'll give them that.

But I'll also give them a bitch slap for thinking that anything they did was even remotely close to cool/thought provoking/critically sound/endearing/enjoyable. When the only decent things in six hours of "entertainment" can be summed up in individual shots amidst entire other scenes you've got a pile of shit on your hands. Their hands were stained with it by the time this thing hti the airwaves.
_________________

[Post Count]

Oh God, so much wrong...

I just re-watched it the day before yesterday to remind myself how much it sucked. I have an incomplete list thus far, and I tried to avoid comparing it to the previous films and just viewing it as its own entity:

• Page Fletcher: terrible look, terrible delivery, terrible movement.
  
• Maurice Dean Wint(sp?): Bad delivery and expression inside the suit, not one of the other actors (aside from flashback Murphy) had a clue how to interact with him, making him look like an overacting jackass compared to their underacting lameness.
  
• Ann R. Key: WTF? Not only is having another character named Ann (albeit spelled differently) fucking lazy and awkward to hear Robo say when not referring to Lewis, but everything about her from concept to actress to execution is eye-rolling. Lightsabers and '90s Flash TV series quality "super speed" effects? Shameful.
  
• Pretty much every actor. They should have cut down on the speaking roles, gotten a stronger core cast and went for aspiring actors with something to prove instead of Canadian television standbys.
  
• Visual effects: Holy hell, these were bad. Badly roto-scoped stock explosions and sparks terribly blurred from resizing, giving Robo bullet selection options, adding muzzle flashes to the fronts of bikes that have no guns on them, Predator cloaking BS...
  
• Pacing: Interrupting action scenes for intense OCP boardroom action??? Count me in, who doesn't want to see scenes chopped to bits so they can insert some pointless chatter about banal OCP BS?
  
• Editing: Yes, separate from pacing because... wow. The constant Awesome Slow-Motion (tm) stretching out action to three times their optimal running time is just too much. Having characters repeat the same line four times because they need to fill their 90 minute running time with only 35 pages of actual script... blech. If this thing falls apart during casual viewing, watching it under a microscope is an excercise in pure frustration because it fails on so many levels.
  
• SFX: Robo sounds like he's got crumpled garbage cans on his feet, dragging and clanking without any change throughout the film, regardless of how damaged he is. Annoying audio whenever computer's being used, which is standard, but not when these damned things are so prevalent in the program.
  
• Direction: Julian Grant has no clue how to do his job beyond the technicalities. He got hired because he had a history of delivering on time and without budget overruns. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought people got hired to do jobs because they were good, not because they were "good enough". CompUSA just went out of business because they went for the "good enough" strategy. You have one chance to make a film good or bad. You don't hire people who are "good enough" because in doing so you have squandered your chance, and ruined all the other possibly creative efforts focused at the project. You are only as strong as your weakest link.
  
• Plot: Big one here. "Bio-tech virus" that infects both electronics and organics? Okay, throw me some techno babble to explain it away and you've got yourself a deal. Oh, couldn't bother to try and give an explanation because even you guys thought it was the stupidest fucking idea in the world? Kaydick? Random bleached blond mad scientist dude. Alrighty, what's his motivation, why does he want to destroy the world? "It's sick". Wow, that was a cop out. Why were you hired again? Oh, it was thrown into the submission pile as a joke? That makes sense. It reads like slash fiction without the sex. Moving on, this doesn't deserve serious critical thought.
  
• Writing: Some people liked the writing. I thought it was plotting and banal. There was two film's worth material in the script, possibly three depending on the director. Not that it mattered, the entire thing came off like it was written by the resident high-schooler/aspiring writer the day before shooting onto cue cards held off screen, which might explain why the entire damned thing is disjointed. And why "What are you prepared to do?" pops up a half dozen times in each film. RoboCop's signature line, "Dead or alive, you're coming with me", shows up twice in RC1. Twice. How many times down Arnold say "I'll be back" in Term1? Once. When you shove catchphrases down our throats we will choke and despise you for it.

I would have mentioned budget, but I don't think that was as big an issue as most make it. They had $12 mil (the original had $13 mil, which was a low-budget film itself, I don't know why it's referenced as a high-budget film in press-related shit) and didn't have the costs of designing and creating the suits, merely pulling some new casts from the old molds, which Hansing could do for less than 2k a set back in the day. They didn't have to spend cash on ED-209 or his effects, nor waste money on a RoboCar that never even made it on screen. Digital effects all but eliminated the overhead for RoboVision shots, they didn't blow up any buildings (aside from stock from The Series) though they did have explosions, I'll give them that.

But I'll also give them a bitch slap for thinking that anything they did was even remotely close to cool/thought provoking/critically sound/endearing/enjoyable. When the only decent things in six hours of "entertainment" can be summed up in individual shots amidst entire other scenes you've got a pile of shit on your hands. Their hands were stained with it by the time this thing hti the airwaves.
_________________

[Comment]

Oh God, so much wrong...

I just re-watched it the day before yesterday to remind myself how much it sucked. I have an incomplete list thus far, and I tried to avoid comparing it to the previous films and just viewing it as its own entity:

• Page Fletcher: terrible look, terrible delivery, terrible movement.
  
• Maurice Dean Wint(sp?): Bad delivery and expression inside the suit, not one of the other actors (aside from flashback Murphy) had a clue how to interact with him, making him look like an overacting jackass compared to their underacting lameness.
  
• Ann R. Key: WTF? Not only is having another character named Ann (albeit spelled differently) fucking lazy and awkward to hear Robo say when not referring to Lewis, but everything about her from concept to actress to execution is eye-rolling. Lightsabers and '90s Flash TV series quality "super speed" effects? Shameful.
  
• Pretty much every actor. They should have cut down on the speaking roles, gotten a stronger core cast and went for aspiring actors with something to prove instead of Canadian television standbys.
  
• Visual effects: Holy hell, these were bad. Badly roto-scoped stock explosions and sparks terribly blurred from resizing, giving Robo bullet selection options, adding muzzle flashes to the fronts of bikes that have no guns on them, Predator cloaking BS...
  
• Pacing: Interrupting action scenes for intense OCP boardroom action??? Count me in, who doesn't want to see scenes chopped to bits so they can insert some pointless chatter about banal OCP BS?
  
• Editing: Yes, separate from pacing because... wow. The constant Awesome Slow-Motion (tm) stretching out action to three times their optimal running time is just too much. Having characters repeat the same line four times because they need to fill their 90 minute running time with only 35 pages of actual script... blech. If this thing falls apart during casual viewing, watching it under a microscope is an excercise in pure frustration because it fails on so many levels.
  
• SFX: Robo sounds like he's got crumpled garbage cans on his feet, dragging and clanking without any change throughout the film, regardless of how damaged he is. Annoying audio whenever computer's being used, which is standard, but not when these damned things are so prevalent in the program.
  
• Direction: Julian Grant has no clue how to do his job beyond the technicalities. He got hired because he had a history of delivering on time and without budget overruns. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought people got hired to do jobs because they were good, not because they were "good enough". CompUSA just went out of business because they went for the "good enough" strategy. You have one chance to make a film good or bad. You don't hire people who are "good enough" because in doing so you have squandered your chance, and ruined all the other possibly creative efforts focused at the project. You are only as strong as your weakest link.
  
• Plot: Big one here. "Bio-tech virus" that infects both electronics and organics? Okay, throw me some techno babble to explain it away and you've got yourself a deal. Oh, couldn't bother to try and give an explanation because even you guys thought it was the stupidest fucking idea in the world? Kaydick? Random bleached blond mad scientist dude. Alrighty, what's his motivation, why does he want to destroy the world? "It's sick". Wow, that was a cop out. Why were you hired again? Oh, it was thrown into the submission pile as a joke? That makes sense. It reads like slash fiction without the sex. Moving on, this doesn't deserve serious critical thought.
  
• Writing: Some people liked the writing. I thought it was plotting and banal. There was two film's worth material in the script, possibly three depending on the director. Not that it mattered, the entire thing came off like it was written by the resident high-schooler/aspiring writer the day before shooting onto cue cards held off screen, which might explain why the entire damned thing is disjointed. And why "What are you prepared to do?" pops up a half dozen times in each film. RoboCop's signature line, "Dead or alive, you're coming with me", shows up twice in RC1. Twice. How many times down Arnold say "I'll be back" in Term1? Once. When you shove catchphrases down our throats we will choke and despise you for it.

I would have mentioned budget, but I don't think that was as big an issue as most make it. They had $12 mil (the original had $13 mil, which was a low-budget film itself, I don't know why it's referenced as a high-budget film in press-related shit) and didn't have the costs of designing and creating the suits, merely pulling some new casts from the old molds, which Hansing could do for less than 2k a set back in the day. They didn't have to spend cash on ED-209 or his effects, nor waste money on a RoboCar that never even made it on screen. Digital effects all but eliminated the overhead for RoboVision shots, they didn't blow up any buildings (aside from stock from The Series) though they did have explosions, I'll give them that.

But I'll also give them a bitch slap for thinking that anything they did was even remotely close to cool/thought provoking/critically sound/endearing/enjoyable. When the only decent things in six hours of "entertainment" can be summed up in individual shots amidst entire other scenes you've got a pile of shit on your hands. Their hands were stained with it by the time this thing hti the airwaves.
_________________

[RoboPimp]

That's quite a big post...with lots of good points.

[Joined]

That's quite a big post...with lots of good points.

[Post Count]

That's quite a big post...with lots of good points.

[Comment]

That's quite a big post...with lots of good points.

[RoboHell]

Um....... i was going to give my thought's on how bad P.D. sucked but RoboTrap got it all and then some.

[Joined]

Um....... i was going to give my thought's on how bad P.D. sucked but RoboTrap got it all and then some.

[Post Count]

Um....... i was going to give my thought's on how bad P.D. sucked but RoboTrap got it all and then some.

[Comment]

Um....... i was going to give my thought's on how bad P.D. sucked but RoboTrap got it all and then some.

[RoboTrap]

Thanks, guys.

Actually, I totally forgot to even mention the music. A few bits, like the music used when Cable was chasing down Robo in the car (before Robo went into the water) were cool, but the western thing they used most of the time was horribly misplaced. I don't even know what they were thinking with that one. It wasn't dramatic or cool or memorable, but it should have at least fit.

And I didn't think I really needed to expound upon Bone Machine. I don't think I'm the only one who found it awkward for an old bald man to be some supposed nemesis seemingly named after a porn star.
_________________

[Joined]

Thanks, guys.

Actually, I totally forgot to even mention the music. A few bits, like the music used when Cable was chasing down Robo in the car (before Robo went into the water) were cool, but the western thing they used most of the time was horribly misplaced. I don't even know what they were thinking with that one. It wasn't dramatic or cool or memorable, but it should have at least fit.

And I didn't think I really needed to expound upon Bone Machine. I don't think I'm the only one who found it awkward for an old bald man to be some supposed nemesis seemingly named after a porn star.
_________________

[Post Count]

Thanks, guys.

Actually, I totally forgot to even mention the music. A few bits, like the music used when Cable was chasing down Robo in the car (before Robo went into the water) were cool, but the western thing they used most of the time was horribly misplaced. I don't even know what they were thinking with that one. It wasn't dramatic or cool or memorable, but it should have at least fit.

And I didn't think I really needed to expound upon Bone Machine. I don't think I'm the only one who found it awkward for an old bald man to be some supposed nemesis seemingly named after a porn star.
_________________

[Comment]

Thanks, guys.

Actually, I totally forgot to even mention the music. A few bits, like the music used when Cable was chasing down Robo in the car (before Robo went into the water) were cool, but the western thing they used most of the time was horribly misplaced. I don't even know what they were thinking with that one. It wasn't dramatic or cool or memorable, but it should have at least fit.

And I didn't think I really needed to expound upon Bone Machine. I don't think I'm the only one who found it awkward for an old bald man to be some supposed nemesis seemingly named after a porn star.
_________________

[Mephisto]

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[Josh]

Trap.

A brilliant post...

[Joined]

Trap.

A brilliant post...

[Post Count]

Trap.

A brilliant post...

[Nika Silwerra]

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[paul]

the only good thing about robocop pd was that they came out with toys(which still sorta sucked because they were based on the characters from the show , but still gives me more crap to buy to put on my shelf.!

[Joined]

the only good thing about robocop pd was that they came out with toys(which still sorta sucked because they were based on the characters from the show , but still gives me more crap to buy to put on my shelf.!

[Post Count]

the only good thing about robocop pd was that they came out with toys(which still sorta sucked because they were based on the characters from the show , but still gives me more crap to buy to put on my shelf.!

[Comment]

the only good thing about robocop pd was that they came out with toys(which still sorta sucked because they were based on the characters from the show , but still gives me more crap to buy to put on my shelf.!

[RoboPimp]

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[Philip17]

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[paul]

funny , i could have sworn there was a bone-(crusher?) what ever it's name was toy! (sorry, it';s been a wierd night, I'm tired and I've had a little to drink!!) i saw some toys, and i thought it was at walmart , but you guys are the experts, should i stand corrected, than so be it. but i could have sworn i saw these toys, i thought that was where the robo , with the removable helmet , and chest plate came from , because they didn't come from the movies..like i said, If i am wrong , so be it, let me know. i just could have SWORN i saw these toys!!! there was a robo cable and every thing !!!!! maybe it was regional? i don't know , maybe someone with access to more knowledge could look into it.

Paul

[Joined]

funny , i could have sworn there was a bone-(crusher?) what ever it's name was toy! (sorry, it';s been a wierd night, I'm tired and I've had a little to drink!!) i saw some toys, and i thought it was at walmart , but you guys are the experts, should i stand corrected, than so be it. but i could have sworn i saw these toys, i thought that was where the robo , with the removable helmet , and chest plate came from , because they didn't come from the movies..like i said, If i am wrong , so be it, let me know. i just could have SWORN i saw these toys!!! there was a robo cable and every thing !!!!! maybe it was regional? i don't know , maybe someone with access to more knowledge could look into it.

Paul

[Post Count]

funny , i could have sworn there was a bone-(crusher?) what ever it's name was toy! (sorry, it';s been a wierd night, I'm tired and I've had a little to drink!!) i saw some toys, and i thought it was at walmart , but you guys are the experts, should i stand corrected, than so be it. but i could have sworn i saw these toys, i thought that was where the robo , with the removable helmet , and chest plate came from , because they didn't come from the movies..like i said, If i am wrong , so be it, let me know. i just could have SWORN i saw these toys!!! there was a robo cable and every thing !!!!! maybe it was regional? i don't know , maybe someone with access to more knowledge could look into it.

Paul

[Comment]

funny , i could have sworn there was a bone-(crusher?) what ever it's name was toy! (sorry, it';s been a wierd night, I'm tired and I've had a little to drink!!) i saw some toys, and i thought it was at walmart , but you guys are the experts, should i stand corrected, than so be it. but i could have sworn i saw these toys, i thought that was where the robo , with the removable helmet , and chest plate came from , because they didn't come from the movies..like i said, If i am wrong , so be it, let me know. i just could have SWORN i saw these toys!!! there was a robo cable and every thing !!!!! maybe it was regional? i don't know , maybe someone with access to more knowledge could look into it.

Paul

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