Why bother remaking much-loved 80s and 90s science fiction movies? Frankly it never ends well. Len Wiseman’s 2012 reworking of Total Recall, with a baffled-looking Colin Farrell taking over from Arnold Schwarzenegger as the amnesiac dreamer of futuristic secret agent dreams, struggled to capture the bombast of the superbly trashy Paul Verhoeven original, and never even made it to mutant-heavy Mars. The maverick Dutch director’s 1987 version of RoboCop is a gloriously effective corporate satire masquerading as an all-guns-blazing actioner, but its 2014 remake from José Padilha (despite a stellar cast) seemed to smooth off all those rough, wonderfully stop-motion fuelled sci-fi edges and somehow lose something in the process.
