Robocop

The first of Dutch Director Paul Verhoeven’s three English language cult sci-fi films, Robocop is a movie that owes a great debt to the comic book character Judge Dredd and was inspired by Blade Runner. In the near future Detroit is a city on the verge of collapse. There are no jobs and criminal gangs run the streets. The mega-corporation OCP runs the battered up police force and hopes to create a new super-city in the ruins of Detroit. To clean up the streets they design an automated robot cop but when tests go badly they return to the drawing board. Veteran cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is out on patrol with his new partner Officer Ann Lewis (Nancy Allen) when he encounters a criminal gang. The cops chase the gang to an abandoned mill where Murphy is brutally killed. OCP use what is left of Murphy’s body to create a new version of their robotic policeman – Robocop.

I saw Robocop when I was in my early teens at remember thinking it was pretty violent and cool. Now aged twenty-six and twenty-five years after the movie’s initial release, I found the film had aged very badly and wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I remembered. The violence though, remains.

Although I didn’t particularly enjoy Robocop it did leave be wanting for the days when action movies were for adults. 1980s action films like this; Total Recall, Rambo, Predator and Die Hard were all films for adults and had adult ratings. They contained graphic violence and swearing and were bad ass if not always great movies. Twenty-five years on and the recent TotalRecall remake was rated a 12A here in the UK. Die Hard 5 was a 12A. Action movies have become softer and more family friendly in a bid to draw in a larger audience and thus create more profit. This has been detrimental to the action movie as all that was going for a lot of them was their adult nature. A look at the critical success of the recent Recall and Die Hard films will attest to their poor judgement with regards to attracting the largest possible audience. Robocop might not be great but at least it’s gruesome and violent and has something to say. The violence actually looks quite shocking. Early scenes of bodies being blown apart and limbs being shot to pieces are a far cry from the mass explosions and noise of modern action movies.

Robocop has a lot to say about regeneration, both of a person and of a city. Murphy himself is resurrected in part as an attempt to help resurrect and regenerate Detroit. There is also a strong theme of corruption and corporate greed which runs through the film. Although these aspects are interesting, they are brutally obvious and muddled in the story of a robot-man who is trying to figure out who he is. All of the aspects of the plot were interesting at some point but overall I didn’t really care too much for any of them. The criminals were unfortunately stereotypical 80s criminal gang members and looked like a cross between gay nightclub tramps and Mad Max extras. They had little personality other than a desire to inflict pain and destruction on people and objects. The bad guys also had really good aim when practising and were able to hit fire hydrants from 100 years but were unable to hit Robocop when he was walking towards them slowly.

Science Fiction is probably the genre of film which ages the quickest and the most badly. The technology in the movie looks incredibly dated and computers with tape reels, boxy televisions and polygraphs all date and age the film. Robocop himself looks really bad now and is basically a man in a latex suit with a plastic bicycle helmet. It is perhaps wrong to criticize the film for being dated as the likes of The Avengers and Prometheus will probably look just as bad in twenty years but suspension of disbelief is hard when the robot policeman has less technology on him than a Furby. Another thing that dates the movie are the costumes and hairstyles. Leading lady Nancy Allen is the most 1980s looking woman I’ve ever seen and looks like Sandi Toksvig’s twin sister.

Something that I liked a lot about the movie was the stop motion and prosthetics. The early version of Robocop is a huge robot with guns and moves with the aid of stop motion. It hasn’t aged as badly as the live action footage but poor green screen doesn’t help. I liked the design and movement and it is something that Verhoeven is consistently great at. Verhoeven also excels at prosthetic work and a scene in which a man emerges from a vat of toxic waste looks fantastic and is well acted. Overall there is still a certain charm to Robocop and it reminded me of a better time for action movies but it is looking very dated and wasn’t as fun as I remembered it to be.  

5/10

Titbits

• The point-of-view shots from RoboCop include references to MS-DOS.   
• The Robocop suit was so heavy that actor Peter Weller was losing 3lbs a day due to water loss until an air conditioner was built into it.
• David Cronenburg turned down the chance to direct the movie.
• President Nixon was hired to promote the home video release of the film and donated his fee to the American Boys Club.