You might recall that one of the highlights of the vast and varied promotion for Prometheus was the faux TED talk given by Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland talking up his plans for the future. Sony and the RoboCop remake marketing team have torn a leaf from that book with this new viral vid, a mock Consumer Entertainment Show keynote address by OmniCorp in 2027 about the company’s new technological breakthrough.
Sadly this one doesn’t boast a performer of Pearce’s calibre and it appears they couldn’t get Michael Keaton to do it in character as OmniCorp figurehead Raymond Sellars. The result, then, is a little mixed. While it definitely has the flavour of a big tech announcement from a company such as Apple, it feels more than a little forced and unnatural.
As for the film itself, Jose Padilha’s team keep promising a different model of the tale unspooled by Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi classic, with Joel Kinnaman’s tragic cop Alex Murphy given a little more humanity. Still, the basics are there: the struggle between man and machine, morality and profit, life and death.
Gary Oldman, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Jay Baruchel, Jennifer Ehle and Samuel L. Jackson are among the cast for this one, which arrives on our screens on February 7.
**Update: A second video, featuring "crowd reactions" to the keynote is now also online. Check it out below. **