Oct 051987
 
four reels

In a near-future, crime-ridden Detroit, policeman Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is murdered by a local gang. This is perfect timing for an unprincipled, wiz-kid moving up the corporate ladder at the corrupt Omni Consumer Products Corporation, which manages the police department. He turns Murphy’s dead body into a cyborg, RoboCop.

A prime example of cinematic Cyberpunk, RoboCop is set in a dystopian city, where the poor are helpless and amoral business executives do as they want, hand-in-hand with crime lords. Varying from literary Cyberpunk, the protagonist (do you call a cyborg, that is following a program for a large part of the story, a “protagonist”?) is a hero.

At first glance, RoboCop is the story of Murphy’s quest for his identity. He has become a machine and needs to determine what is left of the man. There is a shocking, blood-drenched scene of Murphy being shot apart (this is as gory as any film scene I can think of), several scenes of him learning who he was, and a long segment where he talks with his ex-partner, showing that he has almost regained what he lost. But this is just a frame, and only a part of the film. Director Paul Verhoeven spends little time worrying about who Murphy was (we barely meet him before he is dissected) and uses him whenever he wants another violent shootout. This is not a complaint as this movie has more important things to do.

Verhoeven is a master of cinematic sex and violence, both to convey a message and just for fun. In ’85 he created Flesh & Blood, an underrated tale of the confrontation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—punctuated by nudity, rape, and death—and like a magician, he made it fun. In 1990 he directed another of the iconic Cyberpunk films, Total Recall. For Basic Instinct, he dropped the comedy evident in his other works and went with a more traditional thriller, but using his trademarks. It all went terribly wrong in ’95 with Showgirls, which was filled with brilliantly shot scenes of naked bodies, but missing anything that was either meaningful or entertaining.  Unfortunately, Verhoeven tends to be remembered for this mistake rather than his earlier triumphs.

RoboCop sits comfortably in that triumphant stage. The action is pounding and the violence is particularly gory, and they are used to comment on Reagan era thinking (which is pretty much the same as G. W. Bush era thinking). It isn’t the Christ-like Murphy (Verhoeven has commented that he sees RoboCop as the messiah, returning from the grave to save the downtrodden) that Verhoeven focuses on, but rather on The Old Man (Dan O’Herlihy), Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), and Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). These corporate leaders, and one crime-lord, represent what’s wrong with society (and that doesn’t mean just companies, but the thoughts and politics that support the disfranchisement of a large segment of the population). When an employee is gunned down in front of him by a robot with a glitch, all The Old Man can say is “I’m very disappointed.” That pretty much states the theme of RoboCop. The media is little better, and many of the film’s funniest moments are in the news reports that happily announce the deaths of hundreds and then cut to a commercial for a Battleship-type game where you nuke your neighbor. It’s all satire.  Dark, bloody, satire.

Paul Verhoeven also directed the genre films Starship Troopers (1997) and Hollow Man (2000).

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