RoboCop (1987)

 

RoboCop

“RoboCop” is one of the weirder gaps in my movie experience. I have known about Robocop since it came out and have been watching enough clips from it to recognize it, but I believe I have never actually sat down to watch it. That is, until now. I cannot say why. Teenage me would have loved this movie.

In future Detroit, the city looks like shit, and the police is run as an investment by a large corporation. So far, this is not too much of a stretch. Being an officer on the street is dangerous business. Standard equipment includes helmet and body armour, and the casualty rate is still high. Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) has just transferred to a hard-hit downtown precinct and on his first patrol with officer Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen) he gets captured and shot by a particularly vicious gang led by Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). Somehow, he survives long enough to be salvaged by a development team under Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to be incorporated into their new super cop cyborg: RoboCop.

OCP is the big corporation than owns the police. In fact, they seem to own most of everything in Detroit, but it is also subject to internal power struggles. The department outfitting the Robocop prototype, led by Rob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) is rivalling a group headed Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), who is developing a robot named ED-209. Not entirely surprisingly, Dick Jones is allied with Clarence Boddicker. It is into this fray the incorruptible supercop enters with determined and unquestioning steps.

RoboCop is the corporate solution to law enforcement. Highly efficient, no salary, long working hours and no pestering union. An employee who simply does the job. Should it get hurt and die it is not really a problem because it is already technically dead. All this is of course a big issue for the actual police force in the precinct and in these AI times, this conflict is easily the most interesting in the movie. Unfortunately, it is not getting anywhere enough space in the movie and that is a real shame. Instead, the focus is on the corruption at the very top, which provide us with a lot of noisy and very violent action. The question here is how does a square thinking machine react when the very source of its orders is the problem. There is some philosophy here and it gets a bit more space. Finally, there is the question of how much humanity is left in the cyborg. Does it still identify as the original human or is it entirely disconnected from it. As the movie progresses, more and more of its humanity is surfacing, but besides making RoboCop more sympathetic, more human if you like, it is a bit difficult to see where that story element is leading.

At the end of the day, RoboCop is an action movie, and it is the action sequences everything else must eventually make way for. It is a good action movie. Verhoeven, the director, is known for not pulling any punches and here he is going all in. In fact, “RoboCop” does feel more modern than its age, and that is largely because the violence is so much in your face. The is not “The A-Team” where nobody seem able to hit their target, but unflinching and merciless violence. A part of me is saddened that it is this sort of violence that makes it feel modern.

The brutality is strangely offset by a dark humour that at times is so silly that it almost derails the movie. The competing robot, the ED-209 is so brutally overpowered and insanely incompetent that it is darkly funny but also difficult to take it serious as a competitor to the RoboCop. Broadcasts are interrupted by absolutely insane commercials for products such as a boardgame where you nuke your family.

Taken apart, “RoboCop” sounds like a mess, but it actually works. I would personally have preferred a movie that would follow through with some of the many very interesting ideas the story presents instead just reducing itself to an action movie, but I suppose that would require a TV-series to realize that and there “RoboCop” is 20-30 ahead of its time. Today, such a series would be both possible and absolutely work.

I still do not understand why I did not watch “RoboCop” back in the day. It is possible the world needed to catch up with it.