Brian Azzarello, David Finch and DC's Wonder Woman Problem

It was announced yesterday, June 30 for those in the mysterious future, that that the current run of DC Comics Wonder Woman, written by famed comic book scribe Brian Azzarello, would be ending with the October issue. Beginning in November, the book would be written by Meredith Finch, and drawn by her more well known artist husband, David Finch.

Now, on the surface this is the sort of thing that happens all the time, one creative team leaves, another takes over. Normally a book changes direction slightly under the new team, growing more divergent the longer the new team in in charge of the book. Occasionally, normally due to lagging sales, a book will immediately distance itself from the prior creative team and stories will immediately go off in a very different direction.

 

For those of you who haven't been reading the current run of Wonder Woman (boy have you been missing out), the current run has focused heavily on Diana's (Wonder Woman's real name) mythic roots. In his 3 years on the title Brian Azzarello has made large swaths of the Greek pantheon (or their proxies) major supporting characters, but he's also retconned Diana's origin to make her the bastard daughter of Zeus himself and (this one counts as a spoiler) made her the God of War after killing off the old God of War during a confrontation with Zeus's first bastard son. The run has consistently found ways to keep Diana out of the standard superhero game, and focused on keeping Zeus's final illegitimate child (Zeus has vanished and is presumed dead) from falling into the hands of Zeus's First Born or the other Greek gods who would wish him ill. 

This take on Wonder Woman has drawn both acclaim and scorn from various groups of readers. While some fans have praised Azzarello's take for getting Diana back to her mythic roots, and its consistently engaging plot twists, others have been up in arms over the retcons to Diana's origins as well as the implication that the Amazons could be called rapists and murderers for how they continue to propagate their ranks. Some have championed the fact that the book has kept Diana out of the way of contradictions with her appearances in Justice League and Superman/Wonder Woman, while others cry for Diana to get back to being a superhero. 

For the former, the announcement of Azzarello's exit and Meredith Finch's take was met with sadness and anger. For the latter, it was met with excitement. 

 

In the initial announcement, in USA Today, for the Finches run of Wonder Woman we're told that "The Finches want to branch off and focus on who she is — her interpersonal relationships and her responsibilities to the Amazons and her fellow heroes in the Justice League." While this doesn't come out and say it, the implication is very strong that Wonder Woman is going right back to her status quo before Azarello's New 52 reboot of the character. Gone will be Hera, Hephaestus and Hermes, and instead we'll get a regular old round of Wonder Woman battling people like The Cheetah with the help of people like The Flash or Green Lantern. 

Fans of Pre-New 52 Wonder Woman appear to be happy about this new direction, to the dismay of fans of the current run, but there appears to be some fairly substantial potential problems with directing Diana right back to the old status quo. 

SALES WOES

Before the sales of Wonder Woman from March of 2010 (this is before the book began it's high profile but fan loathed Odyssey storyline, which gave it a noticeable sales bump) the book sold 25,239 units. In March of 2014, the current run sold 32,035 units. While this is down from 51,402 books the title was selling 6 months after DC's New 52 sales bump (which bolstered sales on almost every title from the publisher) it's still nearly a 25% sales increase over 2010 sales. (For comparison, Superman sold 33,337 in March 2010, 35,266 in March 2014 and 66,588 in March 2012).

It would appear that the current run of Wonder Woman is clearly attracting readers who were not reading/interested in reading Wonder Woman prior to her more mythic reboot. While its undeniable that there are readers who abandoned the current run who may have read it prior to the New 52 reboot, the fact that the current run has maintained a higher number of readers (and unlike Superman hasn't nearly fallen back its pre-New 52 sales numbers) indicates that the current run is attracting a significant number of new readers. 

Now, it is impossible to say how many of those readers will abandon the title after the focus shifts versus the number that return to the title, however it seems likely that the title will take a hit in readership when it returns to it's old status quo. In order to theorize that the book won't lose a significant number of readers, the question must be answered "Why weren't they reading Wonder Woman the last time this was her status quo?" Now there are a theoretically infinite number of answers to that question, but one of the chief answers is likely to be that the character wasn't that interesting.

This brings me to the next problem

WONDER WOMAN IS WHO, EXACTLY?

Wonder Woman is clearly one of DC's most iconic characters. Everyone knows her on sight, though she's still less recognizable than Superman or Batman (but more recognizable than, say Green Lantern). Despite this, Wonder Woman having much less of a developed world around her, and suffering through numerous attempted reinventions that never worked to attract readers. 

Lets try something...

Think about Batman. What do we know about him, his persona and his rogues gallery? A heck of a lot. We know he's dark and brooding. We know that he's a creation of vengeance, but that he doesn't kill (and hates guns). We can rattle off villains like Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, Penguin, Bane, Poison Ivy, etc. 

Think about Superman. What so you know about him and his rogues gallery? He's an alien, who was raised to be a wholesome farm boy. He's honest and upstanding. He's a "big blue boyscout", who must protect his secret identity from Lois Lane, who's in love with Superman but doesn't think a whole lot of his bumbling secret identity Clark Kent. You think of Lex Luthor, Bizarro, Doomsday, Brainiac, etc. 

Now, not all of those things may be 100% accurate. But, you had a fairly good idea of the character and his world. That's probably informed by the various movies and cartoons of the last 60 years, but even those were at least partly informed by the actual comic books. 

Now, think about Wonder Woman. What can you remember about her? She's an Amazon. She has (or had) a relationship with a pilot named Steve Trevor. She has a lasso of truth. Maybe that she was made out of clay, and brought to life by her mothers wish (though that's stretching it for someone who hasn't been reading the books). Her villains include Cheetah, Giganta and....

Notice there's not a whole lot there that's actually about her character. Now, you may be tempted to say that she's a feminist, and you'd be half right. Wonder Woman has never backed down, nor bowed to a man in any sort of modern version of the character (though she started out as secretary of the Justice League), but it's hard not to really apply that to most modern female characters. Yes, the feminist movement really latched onto Wonder Woman, but that doesn't necessarily make her more or less feminist than, say, Batwoman or Captain Marvel. 

The fact is that most people remember Wonder Woman as either Lynda Carter, or as a cartoon character with an invisible jet. Neither was a faithful depiction of the character. 

As far as the comics go, there's not a whole lot about Wonder Woman that's instantly iconic other than her appearance. So, what is the status quo really going back to?

Worse, in current New 52 canon, Wonder Woman has already been cast as Superman's girlfriend (something that's barely even been mentioned in Azzarello's run). That implication is bound to taint any run of the character that is more focused on her interactions with the core DCU, especially how heavy the focus has been in the other books she appears in (Justice League and Superman/Wonder Woman). So, the status quo Wonder Woman is devolving back into a role carved out for her in Justice League rather than her own solo title. 

The fact that Azzarello took Diana back to her mythic roots in order to define her plays into a similar, and very successful, strategy that Marvel implemented for Thor. In the modern stories about the character, his alter ego Dr. Donald Blake is gone, leaving only the god who tackles godly problems. This sort of take on the character fits the general tone of DCU characters, who are gods among men (as opposed to Marvel where most heroes, save Thor, are average people with powers). It seems almost backward to revert Diana into a character dealing with potential "real world" issues rather than the god among men she literally is. 

MOVIE MANIA

There's been a lot of implication among fans the reverting Wonder Woman back to her general superhero status is a result of DC's anticipation of Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice, and that may be partly to blame. It's not at all unusual for comic book publishers to put a character back in a position that mirrors the movie being released featuring them. Spider-man 3 comes out with the black costume, Spidey is suddenly wearing it in the comics. Captain America gets a movie, Steve Rogers returns from the dead and picks up the shield. Bane is in Dark Knight Rises, suddenly Bane is fighting Batman in the comics. 

It's a fact of life. 

The problems with a hard refocusing of the character to suit the upcoming film are two fold. 

First, the film isn't coming out until May of 2016, that's a year and a half from the change in creative teams, which is more than enough time to ease the focus back toward super heroics, without making it seem forced. Moreover, most comics tend to link into their films with a storyline or two, not by completely refocusing the character. It seems overkill to ignore the currently improved sales in anticipation of increased sales 18 months later, which leads me to...

Secondly, comic books rarely take much of a bump from comic book movies. It's a sad fact. Given the difficulty of the average person getting their hands on a comic book, sales simply don't increase dramatically when a comic book movie is released. Most people don't know where their local comic shop is, so they don't go there after saying "Man that Thor movie was awesome!" If any sales do increase, it tends to be trades, which are widely available in bookstores and on Amazon. By the time the movie hits, fans are likely going to be buying trades of the Azzarello run, as they were buying Winter Soldier trades when the new Captain America was released. 

In Conclusion

If nothing else, numbers do not lie. While comic book sales have declined since 2010, with bumps for events such as the New 52, the current sales of Wonder Woman are above what they were prior to the relaunch. Combine that with the fact that the current run has taken great pains to define the character and her surroundings in a memorable way that is able to stand independent of the various cross-overs (or ill conceived events such as Forever Evil) and provide potential story material for years to come, and the notion of redirecting Wonder Woman back into her pre-New 52 groove simply seems like an ill advised decision. 

I don't say any of this to insult the Finches, who I'm sure are fine people and have a lot of ideas for the character that excite them, or DC comics. I'm simply saying it as a geek who looks at the numbers and the information available to him and sees the current move as a bad one. 

While the public has clamored for a Wonder Woman film for years, they do so without a firm grasp on the character. While it's not impossible to reestablish a character in a very different direction after a strong creative run, it isn't an easy task and more well known and well regarded writers than Meredith Finch have failed at it. 

I'm sure Ms. Finch will give the book 110%, but that doesn't necessarily mean that her creative course for the character is the right one. It entirely possible, probable in fact, that the decision to redirect Diana back to normal superherodom is an editorial mandate (similar to the one that made Spider-man sell his marriage to the devil), and that Ms. Finch was chosen because her take simply fit what the editors were looking for. 

Still, I can't help but be wary of such a decision, and I think other readers should be took. Given that there are numerous, more well established and lauded female writers who, I'm sure, have their own takes on Wonder Woman, it seems odd that a relative unknown such as Meredith Finch would be handed the book as opposed to, say, Gail Simone or Kelly Sue Deconnick.

This isn't helped by the fact that, while generally acclaimed by readers, David Finch tends to draw female characters in a fairly waify and sexualized way, which runs counter to what most Wonder Woman fans desire out of the character. The released artwork, posted above, seems to confirm that Diana will not be drawn as athletic, but as thin and youthful looking. 

I'm not completely writing the series off, because I do want Wonder Woman to succeed and grow in readership. However, I'm not going to continue to buy a book I'm not enjoying. I'll give the Finches till the end of the year, perhaps even January, to convince me the new direction is one worth going in. If they can't do that, I'll have to part ways with Diana until I see a change in the book that draws me back.

In the mean time, can we rally DC to get the artist who did this picture of Diana onto the book? Unlike in Finch's style, this WW looks like a realistically proportioned Amazon. I would believe she could take Superman in a fight. 

DC Comics - Back to the Future Past

I've been a big DC comics fan for a long time. Batman is clearly my favorite character, but I read and have read numerous other books DC publishes (or has published in the New 52) like Flash, Constantine, Justice League Dark, Red Hood and the Outlaws, Animal Man, Amethyst, Earth 2, Dial H, etc. Now, not all these books were great, and I've dropped several titles in the New 52, and lately even found myself buying quite a large number of Marvel books, which I hadn't really done in years (save books like X-Factor, which was brilliant).

I couldn't quite put my finger on why I found myself growingly frustrated with the DC books, sometimes reading a title out of habit, or because I kept feeling like it was going to get good, instead of it simply being good. It seemed intangible, but it seemed a problem that was going on line wide. I just couldn't quite figure out why I was growing increasingly frustrated, and even enjoying the marvel books more.

Then I read Forever Evil # 7.

Now, let me back up for a second. Back in 2011, DC comics announced that they were effectively rebooting their entire universe following an event called Flashpoint. The reasoning for this was the perennial DC belief that their continuity was bogging them down, and holding back fresh story ideas because the current confines and histories of certain characters made reduced the possibilities available. Moreover, DC is perpetually afraid of aging their characters.

So starting in August 2011, the entire DCU rebooted with 52 first issues, and the belief that characters had only been active for 5 years. This arbitrary time frame allowed writers to keep certain events an canon, while others simply never happened. This created problems in establishing exactly how certain events and plotlines happened within such a short time. How did Batman have 4 Robins in 5 years? How long was Barbara Gordon Batgirl before she was shot, and how long had she been Oracle before she was able to walk again? Did things like Knightfall ever happen? How did certain events happen if characters integral to them don't exist in the New 52?

 Still, the New 52 did open up possibilities on books like Wonder Woman and Flash, while Batman and Green Lantern virtually ignored the entire reboot. Every few months, the lowest selling books were canceled, and new books were maintained in an attempt to keep 52 titles. And this process allowed titles that hadn't been tried before or in a long time, to have a change to get a following.

Now, there has been a lot of criticism of the New 52, including the fact that very soon DC will have canceled 52 series since launching the new 52 and that some readers feel that their favorite characters (like Wally West) have been ruined by the reboot. There's not a whole lot that can be said about either of these points. The first is a fact of business, and while DC can be criticized for a harsh editorial mandate, they've at least given certain books, like All-Star Western, a chance. The second is really a matter of personal taste and individual connection to a specific version of a character.

Anyway, I've been pretty much behind the New 52 since it happened. It helped that I'm primarily a Batman fan, and not much changed on the Batbooks. It also helped that I got interested in books that hadn't really existed before like Justice League Dark, and the new takes on characters like Wonder Woman and the Flash.

I even bought into last years first big DC event Trinity War, and this is where the problem with DC started to become evident.

The premise of Trinity War was simple, Superman kills Doctor Light. This throws the Justice League, the JLA and the Justice League Dark into conflict which is made worse by the enigmatic character Pandora and her, you guessed it, box. We're lead to believe that if this box can be opened, that perhaps whatever is wrong with Superman can be fixed, and the ills of the world might be removed. Sure, the last part is never gonna happen in comics, but the set up is fun.

Ultimately, we got a terrible bait and switch. When the box is opened, we don't get a fixed Superman, or an end to the ills of the world. We only get...

The Crime Syndicate, the evil Justice League of Earth 3.

Realistically what we got was the demand to buy the next DC event, Forever Evil. Yes, another event series with a slew of tie ins that only tie into the regular titles of the DCU in the most tangental way. Most books ignored the event entirely for the bulk of its run, and only acknowledged that it happened after it was over. Still, if you want to know why Dick Grayson is suddenly presumed to be dead, you have to read Forever Evil.

So, this week, after 6 issues of setup with the Crime Syndicate running the world, the Justice Leagues (except Batman and Catwoman) missing and villains trying to fight back, Forever Evil 7 ties up most of the loose ends (though apparently, like Amazons Attack, several MAJOR plot points happened in tie ins), in the most rushed manner, but also ham-handedly paves the way toward the next DCU event. by revealing that Crime Syndicate fled Earth 3 to escape (SPOILER WARNING) ....

The Anti-Monitor!

That's right kiddies, after we got done a very pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths story, we get a reveal of the big bad of COIE.

Someone at DC thought this was a shocking reveal.Someone at DC also thought that building last summers event Trinity War into another event, Forever Evil, was a fantastic idea. This brings me to the point of this post, and the reason I think DC comics is headed down a very bad path at the moment.

As I said earlier, the New 52 was built on the premise of "We have awesome new stories to tell, but we're having a hard time telling them because of the continuity that other people built decades ago". That's a fair enough statement, and it's the statement that the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths was built on. Reduce continuity and confusing elements in order to bring in new readers and increase sales.

But here we are 3 years into this grand endeavor and what we're getting from the the company is mega-event after mega-event (a criticism of the pre New 52 DC) that serve as little more than a teaser for the next mega-event. Worse still, these mega-events are just culling 70's and 80's throwbacks. That's not "new" or "fresh", that's just rehashing things we've already seen and enjoyed.

It's not to say that rebooting a character can't have great results, even if the reboot was terribly handled. Over at Marvel a ham-handed editorial mandate forced a very sloppy and harebrained Spider-man reboot. Like the New 52 there was a huge fan outcry, and like the New 52, fans boycotted (myself included). Unlike the New 52, the reboot has actually allowed Spider-man to shift it's focus and actually tell new and fresh stories. Characters who had been hastily killed off were back, and became vital pieces of the story being told. They had character growth, and made you care that they were back.

The New 52, for the most part, has just shown itself to be the result of lazy storytelling. Like Spider-man's reboot, the New 52 allegedly stemmed from a conversation about how to un-marry Superman. Unlike Spider-man, this didn't result in taking characters back to their core, while largely preserving storylines people liked. It just allowed the DC brain-trust to strip away stories in order to tell them again.

For example, for nearly a year now Batman, the book not the character, has been taken over by telling an extended origin story called Year Zero. This storyline was fine when it seemed like a diversion for a few issues, but after showing Bruce decide to be Batman and battle a reimagined Red Hood, the story continues in order to show Batman's first encounter with the Riddler who somehow managed to take total control of Gotham and shunt it back to the stone age through dictatorial rule.

I would never deny that Scott Snyder is a fine writer, and his writing on Batman up to Year Zero was fantastic. I'm not even opposed to touching back on Batman's origins just to clearly establish which of the multitude of versions is actually canon this time around. But a year long retelling of his backstory, including a major event which seems to chew up a disproportionate amount of the limited 5 year window the character has existed just seems ridiculous.

DC did a Batman origin reboot with Frank Millers Batman: Year One, and in 4 issues told a story with such intimacy and depth that what was intended as a elseworlds story was made canon through the sheer force of fan love. Moreover, elsewhere in the Batman line, a character from Batman Year One has shown up bearing a reminder of the events of Year One. How can this be if Year One is now replaced with Year Zero?

It feels very much like the editorial top brass at DC is stuck in a mentality of being risk averse. This mentality has lead them to harken back to their greatest successes in an attempt to relive their glory days. This isn't necessarily a new problem, after all when DC's readership started to flag 10 years ago they mirrored Crisis on Infinite Earths with Infinite Crisis (another story which features Superboy, Alexander Luthor and Earth 2 Superman... with a special appearance by the Anti-Monitor). The event was supposed to provide something of a fresh start again, and when it failed to do so, DC launched Final Crisis 2 years later (which was far from the event story DC envisioned, but for my money a much better story than Infinite Crisis).

Moreover, even when DC has maintained an ongoing new series, this fear if commitment to new directions has caused the tone to be wildly inconsistent. Red Hood and the Outlaws is a series that was pitched as watching characters who were the outsiders of the DCU get things done in more roguish ways than the normal heroes would handle. It seemed like perhaps DC's answer to Guardians of the Galaxy, or even things like the A-Team. A bunch of rogues who do the right thing. Instead the book has swerved wildly between being an space book, a supernatural book, and a crime book. The characters have been inconsistent, and the pacing has been sluggish. It's also bounced through 3 writers in 30 issues, each with a drastically different focus.

On a side note, this risk averse mentality is what has long held DC back at the movies while Marvel has built a universe. Similarly, when DC had a creative mind making a DC film, the made that filmmaker the ONLY voice of the DCCU, for better or worse (First Nolan, now Snyder. All while David Goyer drafts scripts) . It seems there is absolutely no fresh input cinematically for DC.

Notwithstanding, this risk averse mentality has begun to make the "fresh" New 52 feel stale after only two years. Worse yet, DC's sales continue to decline based on this strategy. Despite the bump the entire line got from the launch of the New 52, sales have largely returned to normal if not declined. Batman has taken a sales bump since the New 52, but Green Lantern has dropped down by almost half. Similarly in July of 2011, DC has only 16 comics in the top 50 books selling books for the month. This past March DC only had 12.

Fewer people are reading the "new", "fresh" DC comics than were reading the "old" DC comics. Clearly I'm not alone in believeing that, even after giving the New 52 my adamant support, DC comics is lost and has no real concept of how to pull itself out of the slow inevitable decline. Harkening back to the 80's will not help.

This is not helped by DC taking lessons from the 90's by doing lots of cross-over stories. Only read Superman/Wonder Woman cause you like Wonder Woman? You have to go buy a bunch of Superman books because now the series is part of the Superman:Doomed crossover. Only like reading Justice League Dark or Constantine? For 6 months you need to buy both of those books plus Pandora and Phantom Stranger or you will have no idea what is going on in those books. It's almost as bad as 90's X-Men where there were 6 titles, and if you didn't read all of them, you might as well not read any of them because it was a constant cross-over. If you don't want to read Superman or Phantom Stranger, you're not going to go out and buy the other 6 books in order to keep reading Superman/Wonder Woman or Justice League Dark, you're simply going to stop reading Superman/Wonder Woman or Justice League Dark.

So, what can DC do to fix this downward trend?

Well, in my opinion, they need a hard course correct. They need to focus more on characters and less on events. Part of what has made the Brian Azzarello's Wonder Woman run so great is that is focuses on a group of characters and lets them lead the story. The book has given only passing mentions to the big events of the New 52, but in the meantime, we actually care when a character in Wonder Woman dies. Or when a character reveals a new side. Or when they become something more.

They also need to dump any hard nostalgia for the glory days. If you're dumping your continuity from the 80's, you must also dump the desire to retell those stories. You can't have a fresh start if you're just going to have your current writers give their take on stories that have already been told. Move forward. We don't need more Anti-Monitor or Batman Origin. We need a new character who is more interesting than the Anti-Monitor, and a new Batman story that takes him down a road he's never traveled before.

The core of story isn't in plot, it's in character, and if DC doesn't realize that, I can't help but see them continuing to decline due to editorial mismanagement and reader apathy.

I love Batman, and Wonder Woman and Flash. I don't want to see them disappear or be marginalized. But unless a course correction is taken, I'm not sure how the company will fair in another 15 years or so.

Less nostalgia. New stories. Less time on crossovers and mega-events. More time on character. 

Selling things that don't exist

     In the early 20th century, there was a con man named George C. Parker who specialized in selling New York landmarks to gullible tourists. He sold Madison Square Garden, Grants Tomb, and the Statue of Liberty. He apparently sold the Brooklyn Bridge numerous times, and lead to that particular con becoming famous. Parker, of course, never had a bridge to sell, nor did he have the Statue of Liberty, but people saw something that they liked and decided they'd be fools to pass up buying something so amazing.

     We look back at those people and we wonder how they could have been so gullible, but we still make those mistakes today. People have bought blocks of wood in parking lots because it looked, on a quick glance, to be an iPad at a price that was too good to be true. The stories pop up in the news a few times a year, and we laugh at someones foolishness. But we all make this mistake to a lesser degree all the time. Sure, we're not buying landmarks or wooden iPads, but we still buy things that turn out to be a bit of a fraud all the time. Why, you ask? Because the entertainment industry sells them to us.

Let me start with a small example:

 

This is the cover to Nightwing issue #29, released this past March. Looking at this cover, we see Nightwing surrounded by his foes. In fact, this cover features almost every, if not every, antagonist that Nightwing has faced since this series launched under the New 52 banner in 2011.  You've got the Joker, the Trickster, Saiko, Tony Zucco and many others. The cover also exclaims "Ambushed!". 

This cover is clearly selling us a thrilling issue of Nightwing in which all of the adversaries he's faced to date team up and attack him. This sort of ambush isn't new. The dogpile of villains is something that happens to every hero now and again, and it's a great thing to show how on top of their game the hero is. Batman #1 of the New 52 started with Batman in a similar situation. 

I would buy this issue, and I'm pretty sure you would too.

But guess what? This cover has absolutely nothing do with this issue.

"Robocop" review (yes the quotes denote irony) * SPOILERS*

Let me start out by saying that I love Robocop, and I have since I was a kid. The original came out when I was 6 and I nearly convinced my mom to take me to see it in the theater (after all, how terrible could a movie with a goofy name like “Robocop” be, even though it was rated “R”). The following year the animated series premiered. I watched every episode faithfully and collected the toys (except for ED-260, which we could never seem to find). I sat through two sequels of declining quality, a television show produced for a budget what seemed like $5 an episode, and a miniseries made for pocket change. I’ve read the comics from Marvel to Dark Horse, to Dynamite to Boom.

I know Robocop, and I love Robocop.

That said, the new Robocop isn’t Robocop. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not “not Robocop” because the design changed, or because it’s not Peter Weller. It’s not “not Robocop” because Lewis is a man, or because Media Break has been replaced with the Novak Element. It’s not even “not Robocop” because he’s fast and rides a motor cycle. It’s not Robocop because, quite frankly, the movie lacks almost every element that made the original film so good (and was reflected in ever decreasing ways in its sequels and spin-offs.)

The new Robocop starts promisingly enough with Samuel L. Jackson as Pat Novak giving a Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck inspired rant about “robophobia” in America. He talks about legislation which outlaws drones and military/police robots on American soil. To highlight the success of these drones, he shows a live feed with one of his reporters from Tehran where ED-209’s (which look fantastic) and human-like drones are doing a random security sweep. Knowing the Robocop franchise, I suspected where this scene was going. I had a strong suspicion that one of the droids would mistake the reporter’s microphone or camera for a weapon and they’d be gunned down on television. The new film is PG-13, so it wouldn’t be ultra graphic, but would still make a point. It would perfectly illustrate problems with letting machines loose with weapons, machines that could not make judgment calls and instead were subject to program glitches that could prove fatal. Instead, we just get a rather unexciting confrontation between suicide bombers and the robots which leads to a boy being gunned down for brandishing a knife at one of the ED-209’s.

So, instead of something that may be a bit surprising while highlighting a legitimate problem, we get a pretty by the numbers “oh no, the robot killed a kid, how could he” scene. Except, that a real soldier would likely have shot the boy too, since he had a weapon and intended to attack, so how is this really an issue of a robot being bad because it can’t feel? The movie hammers on the issue robots not feeling, telling us that it’s a terrible thing and that Robocop is different, but at the same time it offers no good reason for its argument and doesn’t make us care enough to side with its premise. This is really a critical problem with the film, and it keeps popping up. When Murphy feels, and discovers his humanity, he’s an equally effective Robocop as to when he’s adjusted not to be emotional. There’s no critical moment where we see Robocop’s emotions doing something that saves the day in a way an emotionless Robocop, like the one in the original, wouldn’t. The film spends so much time and energy on this single argument, but fails to support it, leaving the audience without a reason to champion its central figure, which is built as an example of why the human factor is necessary. The absence of this strong central argument leaves the entire movie feeling like the emotionless robots it wants us to believe are so terrible.

You don’t cheer, you don’t cry and you only laugh a handful of times.

The movie introduces Alex Murphy and portrays him as someone who doesn’t necessarily play by the rules, but who has good intentions and does what he feels is right. He’s the stereotypical action movie cop. He sees corruption in his department (strangely, instead of the original series police division with multiple departments, [Metro South, Metro West], Detroit in the new film only seems to have one police department) and so he goes off book to try and get the bad guy, resulting in his partner being shot. There’s no real purpose behind this turn of events, it doesn’t make us like Murphy more and it certainly doesn’t establish any real connection with Lewis, who is strangely and unnecessarily a man in this version (because women in this version are reduced to wives, yes-men and assistants who exert no real will or strength on their own). As such, when the city’s crime boss, renamed Antoine Vallon, puts a bomb on Murphy’s car, he hasn’t done anything that’s made us really give a damn about him, and so his “death” (no he doesn’t ever really die) is so swift and telegraphed, that we don’t end up feeling any pity, shock or sorrow for him. It doesn’t feel like our hero has died (cause he hasn’t, he’ll just be paralyzed and blind in one eye), it feels more like obligatory set up.

This problem is compounded in that that the writers of the film seemed to realize that they underdeveloped Murphy, and attempt to compensate after they “revive” him as Robocop, by spending a great deal of time establishing him as a “sad hero”. We see him confused, and running away from Omnicorp, we see him taken apart in front of a mirror to see how little of him there is left (which is visually fantastic by the way, and stands out as one of the best moments in the film), and we see him crying during a video chat with his wife. (Quick note to screen writers, showing someone being sad doesn’t make us feel sad for them.)

All of this basically means nothing, though, because Omnicorp has him quickly rewired so that, by the time he’s on the streets, there’s not much of Murphy left emotionally, and so he has to go one the Robocop voyage of self discovery. This could be a great thing, since the self discovery process is what made the original so compelling, if it hadn’t been reduced into a 15 minute period with no suspense to it what so ever. Murphy is confronted by his wife, who says his son is upset. He pulls up CCTV footage of his son and sees he’s upset, so he investigates his own murder. Then he solves it in five minutes, shoots up the bad guys and finds iron clad proof of the corrupt cops in his department.

This was the point where I thought to myself “Man, that movie flew by, but it has a really anticlimactic ending”.  Then I looked at my watch, and realized we still had a half hour left in the movie.

This brings to light another critical problem of the film. There really isn’t a plot that develops and complicates and resolves. Instead the movie goes in bizarre phases that it believes are linked through Murphys growth, but Murphy isn’t developed enough to grow, and the movie intentionally sets back that grown in act 2. So what we get it a series of seemingly episodic pieces that culminate in a third act which feels tacked on for the sake of mirroring the original films revelation that OCP were the bad guys. The problem is that while the original added elements to show how terrible OCP was, the new film makes Omnicorp seem innocuous until they take a non-sensical dive off the deep end and become flimsy villains for the third act.

So where does our build up come from? Murphys character growth is reversed in act 2, so his progression isn’t out through line. Murphy’s revenge, and the story of police corruption and Antoine Vallon, go unmentioned for 90% of the film, so that’s not our through line. Murphys wife and son are pretty minor characters (though more substantial than in the originals) so it’s not their reconnection with Murphy that pulls us through. Omnicorp is toothless and mostly window dressing until act 3, so it’s not their descent into villaindom. So, what is it?

The answer is that there really isn’t one. The movie has no strong driving force pulling us along for its two hour run time. It’s just a series of loosely related events that don’t produce a strong climax or fulfilling resolution. It’s a set of action pieces, that aren’t exciting, linked by scenes representing emotion that don’t inspire emotion. It’s actors going through the motions for most of the film with the occasional shining moment that makes it all the more frustrating by illuminating what might have been if they’d had a better script and director. It is a generic action film that hoped to gain a few more ticket sales by slapping a familiar name on it.

The original Robocop was not only a great action film, it had an emotional core that created a great throughline. Robocop’s emotional journey to find his humanity gave the film a dramatic weight that the new film sorely lacks. Moreover, the original film had a very sharp sense of humor peppered throughout that never felt forced or out of place. It offered satire and black humor that never allowed the film to become too dark or too serious. It had a levity to it that said, “yes our movie is about a robot cop who can’t move very fast and therefore would make a terrible cop in real life, but we’re in on the joke”, without playing the story as a joke. It offers just enough of everything that nothing feels out of place or forced.

The new film lacks that mixture. It has its moments of satire, mainly foisted onto Samuel L Jackson and Jay Baruchel (whose marketing executive could easily be inserted into the original without making the film miss a beat), but their moments are much more on the nose and obvious than in the original. It has its “emotional journey” but it’s unfocused and poorly structured. It has its action, but it feels cookie cutter. On the whole the film feels like an amateur chef was given a prize winning recipe, but because of his lack of skill only managed to make something that sort of looked and tasted like it was supposed to. Eating it certainly won’t make you sick, but it’s not a meal you’ll remember or come back to.

Let me reiterate this – the Robocop remake is not horrible. It’s just mediocre. It lacks the intelligence and bite of the original, and even falls short of the ideas that Robocop 2 throws around (albeit largely unsuccessfully). It also fails to be abjectly terrible like Robocop 3.  This is a movie by committee which is a living representation of everything the movie seems to criticize. Perhaps that’s the greatest thing about the film, it is an unintentional commentary on itself. A soulless product made not by the passion and creativity of a precious few, but by men in suits who make a product for profit. It is a product of a group think that believes it knows what the public wants better than the public does (illustrated in a scene where Baruchel shows Michael Keaton a rendering of the original Robocop and tells Keaton that the design is testing through the roof, to which Keaton responds “the public doesn’t know what it wants until you give it to them”), and gives them something that lacks everything that the public ACTUALLY wants. It’s disposable merchandise created to be consumed and immediately forgotten. 

It’s a film that will be almost entirely forgotten in a years time. It doesn’t and won’t muddy the memory of the original, because you’ll forget it exists. It’s not offensive, it’s just empty. 

It’s not terrible. It’s just horribly mediocre, and almost certainly not your $14 bucks.