No matter how many character actors the RoboCop remake surrounds itself with as a titanium shield from angry Internet barbs, its squishy, vulnerable middle remains the suit design—for many fans the first indicator of whether they would buy Jose Padilha's film for a dollar, or first dip that dollar in anthrax. This weekend, the new RoboCop's day of premature reckoning arrived: Set photos were leaked of star Joel Kinnaman wearing what appears to be repurposed Batman armor, along with various elements of Iron Man, Dredd 3-D, G.I. Joe, myriad video games, and other Hollywood factory-pressed things that are dismayingly derivative of contemporary aesthetics, even for a watered-down PG-13 remake. Indeed, the new RoboCop looks less like the intentionally grotesque cyborg that embodied the darkly comic premise of an evil corporation maximizing its resources by turning corpses into police officers, and more like another guy wearing a superhero suit with rubber abs.
Of course, these are just set photos, and it's entirely likely there will be post-production enhancements that make RoboCop more of a, you know, robot cop. It's also possible that at this point in the film, RoboCop has not yet received his chrome finish, along with the undercoating and rust-proofing that most RoboCop dealers recommend. (Some say they're just needless add-ons, but if you live in a humid climate, you're gonna want that rust-proofing on your RoboCop.) Or, perhaps no one cares what you think, and they're going to make another teen-appropriate movie in which a guy in body armor fights other bad guys who may or may not have their own body armor, because those things tend to make money, no matter what people on the Internet say. [via Coming Soon]