RoboCop (2014), and the hidden digs you may have missed
How closely did you watch the RoboCop remake? We've found some extra jokes you might not have spotted
There are mild spoilers for RoboCop (2014) in this article
Don’t worry, don’t worry: this isn’t going to be an article looking at the merits or otherwise of the RoboCop reboot that was released to mixed reactions in February. There’s already plenty of debate about the film on this site right here if you want it.
Instead, though, we’re just going to quickly highlight some of the fun that director Jose Padilha and his team had with the rolling news channel reports that are on-screen in his film. Padilha isn’t the first to use 24 hour news reporting as a storytelling device of course, and in truth, he’s not the first to sneak subtle little digs into the scrolling bar that goes across the bottom. Here, for instance, is director Noel Clarke employing it in his movie 4.3.2.1 (which remains worth seeking out – you’ll find other scrolling news examples in it too)…
So: Padilha is having similar fun here, sometimes going for humour, sometimes making a sly point. He kicks this off right at the start of the film too, in the pre-credits sequence. That’s when we learn, for instance, that hookers in space are now legal and that beer has overtaken water in terms of popularity….
From that point on, whenever a bit of scrolling news goes across the bottom of the screen, more stories pop up that you may have missed.
So: with the fish stock of the world depleted, giant squid sushi has now been banned in California…
Then we learn that Wikileaks has gone for Greenpeace…
Most of these scrolling messages are near the start of the film. But there are a few later on. In the background here, for instance, we learn that the Mexican president now “opposes illegal Americans” and the “inequality in America proves that Karl Marx was right”. Who says modern blockbusters aren’t political? You certainly wouldn’t get these in a Transformers movie…
And one last thing. Right near the end of the film, when a newspaper appears on screen, just check out the story that’s lying in the bottom left of it…
We can all go back to arguing over the film now…
RoboCop arrives on DVD and Blu-ray in June, incidentally.
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