Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
It seems strange, for a man of my vintage and interests, to try to explain Robocop as if it’s a thing that is not a universal part of human experience. It’s like trying to explain how water is wet. It’s been part of the background radiation of my life for, well, not quite as long as I can remember, but close enough, and it’s almost unfathomable that it is not thus for us all.
However, I suppose time makes fools of us all, and maybe there’s some people who only know the not awful but certainly nowhere near as good remake of 2014. You poor bastards. Let me then give some potted recaps of the 1987 original.
Set in Detroit, in one of those 80’s near futures where we seemed to be a half hour away from crime gangs running rampant on the streets (see also Predator 2), the po-po are overwhelmed and the government does the only thing it could reasonably do – bring in a corporation to clean up the mess, with their ultimate aim being to demolish Detroit and build a shining city on the hill, with none of of them poors getting in the way of their fancy haircuts.
When Ronny Cox’s Dick Jones, a senior exec at Omni Consumer Products’ policing project, the semi-mobile gun platform Ed-209 goes quite spectacularly and messily wrong, Miguel Ferrer’s ambitious Bob Morton seizes the opportunity to get his robot cop project greenlit, earning him plaudits with his boss but Dick Jones’ enmity, and that’s a list Bob will soon find out it’s unwise to be on.
But, Robocop needs a head to drive the agreed upon total body prosthesis, which comes in the shape of Peter Weller’s Alex Murphy a cop recently killed by the rampant, mayhem causing Boddicker gang, run by, who else, Kurtwood Smith’s Clarence Boddicker, later revealed to be in cahoots with Dick Jones to further OCP’s schemes. How deliciously evil.
So, then, the soul of the film, I suppose, is about the mind-wiped Robocop’s mind slowly unwiping, and, with help from his old partner Nancy Allen’s Anne Lewis, getting revenge for the Alex Murphy he’s gradually reconstructing. Oh, and ludicrous levels of violence, often involving gruesome fates for Rob Bottin’s special effects creations. Poor Emil.
Wikipedia tells me “the effects were excessively violent because Verhoeven believed that made scenes funnier”, and whether Verhoeven actually believed that or not, it’s undeniably true. It might not necessarily be absolutely true that they don’t make action films like this these days, but they certainly don’t make anything like enough of them. It’s a very fun romp that never gets old. In fact, as corporations encroach ever more on all aspects of life, if anything it’s just getting closer and closer to becoming a reality. Yay, dystopia!
Recommended, one hundo percent.