While Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop excelled at a lot of things—sociopolitical satire, dystopic visions of the future, examples of how to talk to bitches—it was sorely lacking in at least one crucial area: the opportunity to gaze deep into RoboCop’s eyes, except for the approximately 60 percent of the movie where Peter Weller went without his mask. But we no longer live in the coldly dispassionate ’80s; it’s a new era of openness and eyeball accessibility, and Jose Padhila’s forthcoming RoboCop reboot will reflect that by finally allowing you to see RoboCop’s eyes, which the traditional proverb says are the windows to the robot-cop soul. Newly minted RoboCop star Joel Kinnaman made the revelation during a recent MTV interview, saying of the revamped character design, “They’re still working on the suit and how it’s going to look, but the visor is going to be see-through. You’re going to see his eyes.” This, Kinnaman says, means, “It’s not going to be jaw action… RoboCop is going to be a lot more human,” as being a mechanically reanimated corpse should not preclude one’s humanity, nor limit them solely to the emotions of the jaw.
Not that the jaw doesn’t have its own part to play: “There's a lot of neuroscience now raising the question, 'Is all the intelligence in the human body in the brain?' and they’re finding out that, no, it’s not like that," Kinnaman added. "The body has intelligence itself, and we’re much more of an organic creature in that way. It's not a control tower that does everything." That scientific, “more grounded in reality” approach will reportedly color Padhila’s vision, in addition to Kinnaman’s promise that “it’s going to have a political satire to it too”—satire that, for the first time, can be conveyed with a knowing RoboCop wink.