Mark Thomson

I can still remember being allowed in my teens to see the first Robocop. It's a brilliant film, sure its graphically violent, but its black comedy themes of corporate enterprise generating profits at the expense of dehumanising and destroying peoples lives is still very much true today.

Murphy's journey to regain his humanity is often touching and heartfelt, and in striking contrast to the acts of violence the character perpetrates in his pursuit of justice. I guess there is 'justifiable' violence in the world. Peter Weller does a great job communicating his struggle to regain who he once was, the loss of his life and family, through layers of prosthetics and a bulky suit. Nancy Allen is also excellent as Murphy's tough partner Lewis. And who could have suspected that Kurtwood Smith who plays such a horrible bad guy in this could later go on to be hilarious in a comedy series.

I hear a remake is in the works somewhere down the track. I honestly don't know why Hollywood feels it has to remake a film that is perfect just the way it is. No doubt they'll foist some PG-13 piece of crap upon us. I'd rather they did started a fresh trilogy of stories with the character and made it an R-rated, than do another PG-13 kiddie friendly movie like Robocop 3 that completely misses the point of this character. Mind you we've seen a lot of this politically-correct crap lately - Aliens vs. Predator anyone?

The picture and sound quality in the DVD is pretty good considering the age of the movie. I hear an HD release of this film is too be offered soon, and it would be interesting to see how much better that print is. There are some extras about the making of the film, behind the scenes etc that are quite interesting, especially some of the director's comments about the film.

Plot Synopsis:

Detroit is a city in a bad state - crime is rampant, violent gangs roam the streets, and its not being helped by the large corporation at its heart, Omni Consumer Products. With plans to tear down a large section of the city and build a new corporate run Delta City, OCP is doing nothing to discourage the violence and lawlessness. When their plan to sell and deploy military robots, Enforcement Droids 209, go wrong, a backup plan is ordered - Robocop. OCP manipulates good cops into situations where they could be killed in order to provide material for their project. Alex Murphy is recently transfered to the worst Metro Police Dept in the city, and on his first day is brutally killed by Clarence Boddicker and his gang.

OCP take the barely living remains of Murphy and rebuild him into Robocop, erasing his memories, and deploying him as an unstoppable anti-crime machine, mostly as a PR exercise. Murphy is reunited with his partner Lewis who reawakens his memories, and leads him on a search to reclaim his humanity. In the process, he hunts down Boddicker and his gang to bring them to justice for his death, and uncovers corruption leading back all the way to OCP.

I'm going to break away for a moment from my usual DVD reviews and actually review a movie. We don't often go to the movies, mostly because of the excessive pricing, but we treated our daughter to the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie last night. It had some good bits, but I'll agree with most people that it wasn't as good as the first one. Personally I feel the pacing was a bit off. It had some really exciting, thrilling sequences, but there was lots of exposition, and it dragged a bit in places.

I suspect the problem is possibly that it's part one of a two-parter. I don't know whether it was originally written as two parts or one complete script that was cut in two, but its mostly all exposition and setup, and really only comes together towards the end of the film. My wife complained that while it had some good bits, it was mostly boring. I'd be interested to see part two (or part three in the series) when it comes out. I think most of the action and resolution will be in the last movie. Personally, I think it should have been written as one complete movie with some threads into the next.

Something else that strikes me as a bit odd, and I've seen it commented about in other forums, so it's not just me - Captain Jack seems odd. It's nothing that Johnny Depp is doing, as usual he's fantastic, but instead of Jack being a great pirate pretending to be a fool, he's the other way round this time. In the first film it was almost like it drunken idiotic behaviour was merely a distraction so that others would assume he wasn't a threat, but really he was. This time he just seems to lurch from disaster to disaster, bumbling along, and just narrowly escaping. I guess it just seemed strange for the character. Another friend commented that perhaps it was because Sparrow was deathly afraid of Davey Jones. Perhaps he's right?

I suppose it didn't help that we were only able to get into a late session and we were pretty tired by the time it finished - nearly midnight! I'd probably still buy it on DVD when it comes out, but I don't think i'll pay theatre rates to go again. Perhaps I would enjoy it more in the comfort of my own home when I'm fresh and alive.

What's good:

• Captain Jack - even as a fool he's still good fun


• The undead monkey


• Davey Jones and his crew


• The Kraken


• The cannibal island sequence


• The fight over the chest sequence


• The Voodoo Witch - dirty, but strangely sexy all at the same time

What's bad:

• Lots of exposition - can drag on a bit


• Some sequences don't serve much purpose - seem to be in it just for the sake of it


• The new governor - his scenes are mostly exposition - not that interesting. Hopefully it'll play into something more later.

So how should I rate it. I'd have given Curse of the Black Pearl a 10/10, so I'll have to give Dead Man's Chest an 8/10. It's not an abomination to entertainment, but could have been better - may improve upon subsequent viewings with it's missing half intact, the eventual Pirates of the Caribbean - End of the World.

Things are developing at high-speed as usual. Robyn's got the idea of immigrating into her head, and I've come home to find this, that and the other arranged. We've already got somewhere to live, something to drive, she's found a job, and I've put my feelers out into the job market to see what's available. I have managed to get her to agree to waiting for a few months though, and just investigating everything we need to know to make sure that moving to Brisbane is the right thing for us to be doing.

Already though it's looking pretty attractive. Houses are much more reasonably priced and we could probably get into something pretty spectacular on what we'd get for our place here. Jobs look to pay a lot more, so it's looking pretty good. Cars didn't look much cheaper though, so we're going to investigate whether we can take the SP20 with us or not. We've been told it's pretty hard to insure imported imported Japanese vehicles over there, but I guess its worth investigating since we just spent $15k on it and it would be a shame to flick it on so soon. Damnit, I was so happy with it too...

Bit of a downer though, I received an email from a client today who wants to cease hosting of his site with us. This is the second one in two weeks now, although both for different reasons. One is throwing in the towel because he isn't getting much business out of it. Unfortunately is company name uses too very common words with an 'and' in the middle, so when you put it in the search engine it comes up with everything under the moon that has those two words in it. Usually his site doesn't pop up to the top. We've tried everything we could, but he really needs to look at rebranding his business. So it's a shame but not entirely unexpected. The other client has been having problems with his telecommunications provider (Telecom again!!) and is sick of receiving multiple bills from different providers so he's looking to consolidate. I've offered to combine the lot, but haven't heard back yet so I don't know what's going on. Might be easier just to let him go now since we're looking at moving on. Still in two minds what to do about the business though: let it go, or try to carry it on from a distance?

We've been talking about whether to move overseas or not. There's increasingly becoming less and less to keep us here. Don't get me wrong, we live in a beautiful country and given the choice I'd rather be here, but the money is crap compared to how much its increasingly costing to live here. It's just becoming too hard now, petrol's just gone up again, local rates have gone up 10%, more compliance charges for things, ARC rates have gone up, food has gone up 30% in recent months - it just seems like theres no end to it. How are we left to manage this, I get a mediocre 2% pay increase from work. I've just recently dodged the redundancy bullet, and ironically I've been given more opportunities now to do development work instead of support work which I've been becoming increasingly tired of. But theres no more pay, no recognition, no modification of my contract, so I'm kind of confused now as to what's going on. Seems like I've been handed more work to do, and I'm supposed to be happy about it. I suppose on one hand the fact I still have a job is a good thing, but I work to live, not the other way round.

So we're starting to ask the hard questions, should we sell up and move across the ditch to Oz? We're going to look into it, best to see what the advantages and pitfalls must be rather than just being enamoured with the idea of the 'grass being greener over there'. It's hard to look at how well the inlaws are doing over there and not be a tiny bit envious, although after our experiences of the excessive heat over there at Xmas, I'm still a tiny bit dubious about the idea. But I always thought if I worked hard then I could have the things that I wanted and enjoy my life, and now it's just working to have enough money to put gas in the car to go back to work again, or to be able to have lunch today, stupid little things that we shouldn't have to obsess over in life.

I guess we'll see in time. We don't have to rush into anything at the moment. Rob is considering returning to parttime work after her trip to PNG, so we've got time to consider, and maybe her returning to work will help alleviate some of the pressures we've been feeling lately.