New Robocop is far from Total Recall of unique original

How strange it is to see Paul Verhoeven's back catalogue being remade by Hollywood at a time when the veteran Dutch film-maker is still, just about, making his own movies, and when the originals have hardly started to look dated. But how much weirder it is that producers seem to think the best way of bringing Robocop and Total Recall back to the big screen is to change most of the details that made those films great in the first place.

The standard Hollywood line when remaking famous features is to hint that the new versions will examine the stories through a fresh prism. Hence, Len Wiseman's forthcoming Total Recall is excising the entire section where Quaid gets his ass to Mars, in line with Philip K Dick's rather whimsical source, the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, while adding a dash of George Orwell's 1984. And earlier this week Joel Kinnaman, who is stepping into Peter Weller's steel size 12s for José Padilha's new take on Robocop, revealed that the audience will be able to see the entirety of his face when he's wearing the suit.

"Robocop is going to be a lot more human," Kinnaman says. "The first movie is one of my favourite movies. I love it. Of course, Verhoeven has that very special tone, and it's not going to have that tone. It's a re-imagination of it. There's a lot of stuff from the original. There are some details and throwbacks, but this version is a much better acting piece, for Alex Murphy and especially when he is Robocop. It's much more challenging.

"It's not going to be jaw action. They're still working on the suit and how it's going to look, but the visor is going to be seethrough. You're going to see his eyes."

All of which rather raises the question: why bother to call the movie Robocop at all? Sure, iconic characters change over the course of time: the original 1938 Superman was incapable of flying. But Robocop's outfit is the way it is because the creators of the film were inspired by Judge Dredd, the famous 2000AD crime-fighting comic book hero whose face is never seen by the reader. Removing his helmet is almost as sacrilegious, therefore, as the decision by the makers of the atrocious 1995 Judge Dredd film to allow the world to see the character's visage. No one would dare to remove Batman, Darth Vader or Zorro's trademark masks (except for effect), so what has poor Robocop done to deserve such ill-treatment?

In Verhoeven's original film, Weller's taciturn performance is all the more affecting because we cannot see his eyes, their absence from the frame adding extra gravitas to the words that echo from his mouth. In Robocop, everybody listens when Weller speaks, because the audience is fixated on those proud lips and jutting jawline. Just as in the best episodes of Judge Dredd in 2000AD, the villains' often wildly expressive features are a mark of their evil character, while our hero's stony-faced stoicism signals his even-handed right-mindedness. When traces of Robocop's former personality become apparent, they are exaggerated tenfold because we are not permitted to peer through the windows to his still-human soul.

Padilha's Elite Squad films depict a police force whose fiercely utilitarian methods in many ways resemble the futuristic crime-fighting approach of both Robocop and Judge Dredd, and the Brazilian film-maker has promised to hold on to the edge of social satire which made Verhoeven's film such a sleazy treat. The Dutch film-maker's best movies pull off the paradoxical trick of condemning extreme violence and those who espouse it at the same time as the camera revels in all that bombastic brutality. Padilha might just be able to tap into that contrast, but one has to wonder whether Wiseman, who is best known for the shallow Underworld movies, will be able to find a similar sweet spot when it comes to the PG-13, $200m-budgeted Total Recall.

As an aside, might the latter's decision to steer clear of the red planet be a sign of Hollywood's well-known Marsophobia? If so, it's a ridiculous decision, especially if Wiseman's planning to keep the mutants from the original film as believed (who could forget the three-boobed hooker?). There were no mutants in Dick's short story, so shoehorning them into a version that stays entirely on Earth suggests a maddening hotchpotch of ingredients is being thrown together.

Verhoeven is now 73 and it seems unlikely that he'll ever make a big-budget Hollywood movie again. I'm not sure there's anyone quite like him in the current film-making stratosphere, and mainstream cinema certainly misses him. Who else could take Starship Troopers, a right-leaning Robert Heinlein science fiction novel designed to counter liberal theories about nuclear testing, and transform it into a vilification of humanity's cheery willingness to enslave or wipe out anything which does not walk and talk like itself?

What might Verhoeven have made of John Carter, Disney's recent box-office turkey, given that he was a boyhood fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series? Once thing's for certain: it would probably not have received a 12A certificate in the hands of the man who brought us Basic Instinct and Showgirls. At his worst, the Dutch director showed a propensity for fleshy fireworks that demeaned just about everybody involved, but at his best he took advantage of the 1980s' shifting ethical standards to deliver movies that met viewers' demands for salacious storylines without pushing the no-brainer button.