Jose Padhila’s ROBOCOP To Be… A Medical Drama?

The remake of Robocop is unstoppable, and instead of Darren Aronofsky, we're getting Brazil's Jose Padhila, whose Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is opening soon. The director already said he was going to abandon the satire of Paul Verhoeven's version, which kind of baffled me - I mean, that's a huge part of what makes the film work on any level - and his latest comments continue to confuse!

Talking to Coming Soon he said:

In the first 'RoboCop' when Alex Murphy is shot, gunned down, then you see some hospitals and stuff and then you cut to him as RoboCop. My movie is between those two cuts. How do you make RoboCop? How do you slowly bring a guy to be a robot? How do you actually take humanity out of someone and how do you program a brain, so to speak, and how does that affect an individual?

Okay, despite the headline of this piece I understand it's unlikely that Padhila is being literal (that said, if he had the balls to make a Diving Bell & The Butterfly version of Robocop, I'm paying to see it ten times). I'm assuming what he means is that he wants to get more into what it means for a man to become a robocop. Which I thought the original film handled fine.

I still don't know what the actual timeframe of the Robocop remake even is, or whether the film is going to be R - I know there was some friction between Aronofsky and MGM about just that issue. Padhila certainly doesn't make soft action films, so I'm assuming it'll be R, but I also wonder if he has the standing to fight that battle.

Of course, a movie where Robocop is in a hospital bed and develops a touching romance with a nurse and an understanding of himself could easily be PG-13.