Remake Face-Off: Will 'Red Dawn' Outsuckify 'Robocop'?

Another day, another remake. Or in this case, remakes. The Hollywood Reporter sayeth that MGM announced at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend that it will refashion two very 80s 80s movies. The first title that catches your eye is RoboCop, which has been in a perpetual Pong contest between getting remade and standing still for about two years. The second movie MGM will dig up is Red Dawn, the John Milius agitprop flick about fighting the Commies on American soil. It's also one of the rare breed of movies that's memorable simply for being forgettable. Red Dawn is also the second iconic Patrick Swayze moment to hit the headlines this week; the first was Point Break II. That puts him one ahead of Peter Weller, so please keep your fingers crossed for a Buckaroo Banzai reboot. The RoboCop thing at least makes some sense. You can go cheese-tronic with it, making fun of the concept, or you can go almost full-bore Terminator with it and try to make it cool. Either way, the line "I'd buy that for a dollar" must remain intact or I'm getting up and walking out. Red Dawn, on the other hand, only works if you put it under a contemporary microscope and make it about the war on terror. Fighting the Soviets...well, it's not as scary as it used to be. Perhaps because we know how it ended. But there are problems with giving it a modern setting. For starters, nobody seems to like movies about this war. Then you've got to contend with how much of a remake would it actually be if you change that aspect. It wouldn't be called Red Dawn anymore - how could it be? - and if you're just fighting terrorists, why bother to "remake" the orginal at all? Just do your own thing. I'll leave it up to you, though: Which remake is a worse proposition? Neither one is ideal, but I can at least see some merit to a RoboCop redux. That's my opinion, so what's yours?

Comments

[Will]

I have no opinion on Red Dawn, other than Mark Wahlberg needs a job in another forgettable movie, so to producers this seemed like the perfect fit.

As for RoboCop, I have been thinking about it, and it could be (but won't) be done right. I'd like to see a theme loosely based on 9/11, where a bunch of cops and firefighters rushed the scene of a major terrorist attack on the homeland. Of course, everyone ends up dead and dismembered, including one of Ocean City's best most heroic cops: Richard Clayton (played by Mark Wahlberg, preferably).

A weapons manufacturing company owned in part by the Vice President of the United States that also happens to be on the forefront of Bio-engineering takes advantage of America's grief and announces plans to resurrect many of it's fallen "heroes" as virtually indestructible Super-Cops and Super Fire-Fighters.

The public buys it, and as time goes by, more and more of their freedoms start disappearing.

Then one day, as the former Richard Clayton is rounding up Skateboarders on the street a crack on the back of the head by an empty can of RockStar Energy Drink (movies like this need product placement) jars memories of happier times ...

Ah hell, I'm giving you my whole treatment. I gotta call MGM before it's too late!