Robocop

The dystopian future portrayed in 1987's ROBOCOP is damned frightening.   Director Paul Verhoeven's movie works beautifully on many levels: satire, action,  human drama, dark comedy, but in the end the utter hopelessness of its landscape is what is most memorable.  It portrays the sort of bleak outcome many of us fear will come to pass.  Perhaps it already has, or at least is on its way.

Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) was a model cop for the Detroit PD.  He is declared dead after an encounter with a gang of ultra lowlifes led by Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith, at his slimy best).  But thanks to to Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer, also slimily good), junior exec for Omni Consumer Products, which essentially owns the DPP, Murphy will have a new life as "RoboCop", a cyborg engineered to "serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law".  Robo's campaign to clean up crime ridden Detroit is highly successful, but OCP CEO Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) meanwhile seethes in anger and jealousy as his creation, the ED-209 droid, malfunctions and even kills one of the other execs.

And Robocop begins to be nagged by memories.  Murphy's memories.  There is still a human in there?

With increasing crime and despite Robocop's skills and impressive record of apprehensions, the police eventually go on strike. Those humans do resist this new machine.   Boddicker and his band continue to merrily pillage their way through the urban war zone.  Verhoeven, never one to look away from the ugliness of the human condition, likewise colors his palate with a suitably grim set design that feels quite real.  Organic.  We're always aware of the f/x department, the use of miniatures, and superb stop motion effects (courtesy of Phil Tippet), but the sum is of an inescapable hell that has always made me feel as if that writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner had some sort of privileged foresight.  Verhoeven was the perfect one to realize it.  It never felt like a total fantasy, even less so as the years have passed.

The film has enjoyed a favorable response from fans and critics for decades.  I've been a bit surprised by how revered it (and Verhoeven's later STARSHIP TROOPERS) is.  Criterion did the honor of a remaster.  Am I saying the film is overrated? Somewhat, yeah.  If you're going to place this scrappy B-movie on such a pedestal, there are many other such films that at least deserve as much praise for their trenchant statements on the same subjects.

ROBOCOP has always worked best as a nasty actioner, but there is much going on beneath the violence and vivid sleaze.  Its critical eye toward the media and consumerism is as on target as anything from its time.  The social and political barbs still sting, quite uncomfortably.  Technology not necessarily as savior but as damnation and ruin is a key theme.  But this idea of identity, of human beings pushing a weakened arm up through the rubble of the metal parts and circuit boards that have defined society is what leaves the viewer with some sense of hope by the film's conclusion. Maybe.  ROBOCOP 2 conversely was a thoroughly unpleasant, unrelentingly cynical and despairing pile of toss (though with its plotline involving a bankrupt Detroit, may have been proven to be even more prescient).