Day 23: Robocop (1987)
“Robocop,” the action movie’s action movie, may seem like an odd choice to sit amongst such “Criterion Collection” classics as the works of Bergman and Fellini, but, if you go beyond the film’s simple shoot’em up style, you might just find its genre surprising. With a dry wit played out in a bleak dystopian future amongst an excessive display of gore, “Robocop” messes with genre contradictions and, by doing so, gives us one of the best satires ever constructed on film.
Set in the near future, “Robocop” places us in the almost war zone “Detroit,” where crime and fear run ramped and the police department can hardly catch up. In fact, crime is hardly the only problem the department has. Having recently been contracted by “Omni Consumer Products” (or OCP for short), the police find themselves underfunded by their new bosses and their men begin dropping like flies on the city streets. But hope soon comes in the form of one of their own.
When Officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) was gunned down and ripped to pieces by crime boss Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith), the OCP decided to take his bullet ridden corpse and infuse his brain into a robotic body, creating Robocop- the first ever super police officer. In Robocop, the city and OCP believe they have finally found a hero to hit crime where it hurts, but, when the cyborg policeman begins digging into his past life as Murphy, he soon finds that his killer is not just a simple mobster, but a highly connected thug, who has partnered with Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), OCP’s second in command!
As I have mentioned, “Robocop” is more than just an action movie with a severe case of bloodlust. What we actually have is a very bombast satire, which uses the late 1980′s Reagan era as a jumping off point for farce. As the 1980′s centered on the rise of big business and a pop culture boom of ‘here today, gone tomorrow” film, TV and music stars (“New Kids on the Block” anyone?), “Robocop” showed the results of such a society, giving us a Detroit laden with big skyscrapers amongst a landscape of slums and a culture of citizens, who all seem to watch the same plotless TV show with the catchphrase, “I’d buy that for a dollar.” In one scene, during a local news station broadcast, the reporters cheerfully do a quick segment on what sounds like a modern day “Cuban missile crisis” and then cut to a commercial for a battleship type game called, “Nukem.”
It’s this contrast of images and situations that lead to the very dark humor found in “Robocop,” including one of my all time favorite scenes in film history, which utilizes extreme gore and one simple quip to bring the house down. At an OCP board meeting, Dick Jones is showing off his very own version of a robotic cop, the ED 209, and, when the robot malfunctions, it blasts away a second rate corporate flunky with a barrage of firepower that simply decimates him into a fountain of blood. When the scientists finally shut down the robot, the room grows quiet as a board member stares down at the goop left of his coworker and questions, “Shouldn’t we call a paramedic?” Hilarious.
“Robocop,” directed by Dutch filmmaker Paul Vernhoeven and starring the ever fun Peter Weller, is a complex film that tricks its viewers into thinking its something far simpler. While many critiqued the film’s gory violence on its release, today it looks mild in comparison, which says a lot about “Robocop’s” insight onto just how desensitized we as a nation would become. Like the film’s hero, there is more to “Robocop” than what meets the eye.
To learn more about “Robocop,” check out Criterion’s page here.
If you would like updated on all things Nathan and “The Criterion Summer,” check out our Facebook page here.