Robocop opens with a lovely establishing shot of a futuristic “Old Detroit” at dusk. The camera hovers over a body of water (probably the Detroit River) and pans toward the city. The buildings have clean lines and are elegant. The sky is dark blue. We think this place looks pretty nice.
Ah, but it’s an ironic joke — one of many at the expense of city folk longing for a livable urban environment amid industrial ruins — because nothing else in the film is going to be beautiful, at least not in conventional terms. Every beauty can be seen through the eyes of greedy men who can only appreciate the deadly curves and angles of militarized steel, the dizzying skyscrapers of wealth and privilege, and the glittering aura of money in all its forms. When a crime boss chews out an underling for accidentally frying the money from a robbery, he seems almost as horrified by the desecration of the pristine greenbacks as by the fact that the gang won’t be able to spend them.
Robocop is a film about these evil people, the venal institutions they run and the scraps of human decency that prevent them from capturing what good is left of the human spirit. Among the many reasons why the film remains so popular after 35 years (the rousing sci-fi plot, the biting wit, the impeccable world-building, the first-rate filmmaking) is its insistence that the good among us can still rise from the (sometimes radioactive) mire that threatens to overwhelm us.
Paul Verhoeven is a serious director
Orion
A lot of bad movies were made in the 1980s, and many of them were in traditionally disreputable genres like science fiction and horror. This was partly due to the huge popularity of the new home video market, which was desperate for products to fill the shelves. Any old direct-to-video geek show would do as long as it featured some gore and some T&A and maybe had a sense of humor.
Robocop there’s plenty of that, but acclaimed Dutch director Paul Verhoeven — making only his second film in America after Flesh + Blood — signals that he is a serious filmmaker by engaging in bravura filmmaking early on. Even as an irate black police sergeant repeatedly yells “scum” (could anything be more ’80s?), Verhoeven establishes the station and new recruit, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), with several intricately choreographed long shots and a moving camera. . As if he wants to warn the viewer that, while Robocop it can go on the video store shelf next to it Venomous avengerit will hardly be a quick exploit.
A gnarly venomous avenger of sorts works they appear late in the film thanks to that ubiquitous 80s movie staple, the acid barrel, but the looming threat in that early scene is that the cops might go on strike, leaving the populace unprotected. But like the lovely opening shot, this is another Verhoeven misdirection. While unions were public enemies to many in the conservative 1980s, Robocop is a radical, subversive leftist and firmly on the side of the beleaguered workers. The institutions that enable runaway capitalism—whether political, corporate, or military-industrial—are the real threats to public safety and welfare in the film.
Corporations are the real criminals
Ronny Cox as Dick Jones with ED-209 Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Verhoeven and writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner waste no time identifying the bad guys in the first of the famously satirical accounts of the future of film. Talking Heads (party tonight’fizzy reporter Leeza Gibbons was an inspired casting choice) gleefully recount the legacy of European colonialism in Africa, now in the menacing form of a French neutron bomb, along with the clumsy inadequacy of the US president, who hovers helplessly around during his “Star Wars Orbital Peace Platform” visit. The point is quickly made: modern Western leadership is mired in the past, potentially lethal and ineffective. As the film is about to dramatize, governments can never hope to match the ruthless efficiency and undiluted purpose of global corporations.
“RoboCop” (1987) Closing credits + Opening news segment HD
Of course, the first speech by the corporate Big Bad, Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), is about how the privatization of public enterprises like hospitals, space research, and the military has enriched Omni Consumer Products (OCP). Their next goal is to privatize the police, which is a ripe target given the low level of public trust (mostly due to poor funding). Jones’ solution is to throw out the robots/tanks marked “ED-209” to keep the peace. But Verhoeven savagely fleshes out the idea of a machine doing the delicate human work of policing in the now-infamous sequence in which the prototype ED-209 slices a lower-level executive into a bloody hamburger without even understanding what it’s doing (the machine continues to pump the corpse full of lead long after a man already dead).
The fact that the robot (which is programmed for “urban pacification)” is shown in unusual stop-motion animation is a sly joke about how untouchable it is. In another subtle attack, the name of the scientist running the program is Dr. McNamara, as in Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War and warmongering scourge of Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning documentary, The fog of war. That a bloody corpse ends up flattened on top of a diorama of Delta City, OCP’s gentrification model for Detroit, is less subtle, but the point is that none of the cold-hearted executives are in a position to even pretend to care. Delta City could be an ocean of carnage and they would only see their next money making opportunity in their meeting room in the sky.
RoboCop: Director’s Cut | REMASTERED – ED-209 Crash Scene (1080p)
In a parallel attack, criminals on the ground are just as ambitious, talking about capital investment and free enterprise in between robberies and murders. These low-level criminals are led by the psychopathic Clarence Boddicker, played with mocking astonishment by Kurtwood Smith. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: Smith and Cox play two of the best movie villains of all time here. Miguel Ferrer also does a slimy stellar job as the aggressively ambitious young director. The fact that they are all here together is another reason why Robocop it is considered the pinnacle of the genre.
Classic sci-fi themes
Orion
Speaking of genre, the film is also considered a classic because it deftly combines many classic sci-fi preoccupations: dystopian futurism, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the nature of human identity. It all coalesces around the character of Murphy, a rookie officer who is violently fired by Boddicker’s gang, leaving enough warm flesh (and a handsome beard) to reshape him into a titanium-clad super cop.
But something stirs in the consciousness or the soul or whatever metaphysical designation you want to give it, and that something is the essence of Murphy, who will struggle throughout the film to understand and affirm the self. The cast and filmmakers do a great job imbuing Murphy/Robocop with a touching pathos, especially since we don’t really get to know him before his transformation and only see his family in flashback clips. When his ex-partner, Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), tells him that his family has abandoned him after what they assumed was his death, we genuinely feel sorry for the downed can.
Of course, that’s after we’re already on his side, witnessing his acts of reckless superheroism in protecting the community. Another of the jokes in the movie is that Robocop is efficient, but not very efficient. It tends to cause a lot of collateral damage whenever it foils a crime or saves a victim (it’s really no better than ED-209 in this regard). But no one seems to care, either because the city is already such a mess that it doesn’t matter, or because the people are so happy to see something working in their favor that the destruction is worth it.
Orion
In terms of genre, Robocop it’s also one of the few sci-fi movies that predicted a real-world future that more or less came true. As Blade Runner (played by Verhoeven’s frequent collaborator, Rutger Hauer) shows big cities collapsing and gentrifying at the same time, the widening gap between rich and poor, the destruction of social services, global corporations controlling all the wealth and they have a monopoly on the best technology and research and development, all teetering on the brink of ecological disaster.
Unlike Blade Runnerwith its eternal rainy night and empty streets, the urban environment is depicted in Robocop more look like the crumbling industrialism in some big cities today. If you’ve wandered around parts of the real Detroit, I’m guessing you wouldn’t notice much of a difference.
Deep humanism
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
Despite being rooted in dystopian sludge (sometimes literally), Robocop it is not a nihilistic film, or even a cynical one. Although his primary form is sharp satire, he is deeply humanistic. Verhoeven was a child in the Netherlands during World War II and witnessed the carnage and chaos firsthand. Although the forces of darkness may have seemed to extinguish the light of civilization, that light survived amid profound acts of courage and heroism. The film convincingly dramatizes a similarly optimistic scenario.
Verhoeven also said that, from the boy’s point of view, the war felt like a spectacle or an adventure, which may explain the fun and liveliness of the film (as well as some of his other films, such as Total recall and a World War II action drama Black book). A good satire must move, so as not to get bogged down either in depression or in preaching (one of the great satirists in the English language was called Jonathan Fast, after all). Verhoeven and the screenwriters know when to step in and out of the story, and indeed the film delivers one of the most successful conclusions in all of cinema: the hero takes out the villain and regains his human identity in one fell swoop. Cut to black, turn on the music.
RoboCop (1987) Official Trailer – Cyborg Police Sci-Fi Movie HD
Robocop a Hollywood film was made within the studio system by a foreign director during the overtly commercial era of American filmmaking. It destroys capitalism and suggests that democracy is nothing more than a textbook fairy tale of citizenship in a world ruled by authoritarian tycoons. This version of the world is pretty well accepted now that we’re all a little wiser about how things work (thanks Internet!).
But in 1987, when President Reagan, almost perched among amber waves of grain, gave speeches about American exceptionalism, such notions were little more than pinko-hippie talk. The fact that Verhoeven’s punk treatise was created in that environment at all is a real miracle. That it became one of the enduring indictments of its era while still being relevant to our contemporary moment and an awful lot of fun makes it a really special movie.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn