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Directed by Paul Verhoeven Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner Produced by Arne Schmidt Executive Produced by Jon Davison Music by Basil Poledouris Cinematography by Jost Vacano Edited by Frank J. Urioste Production Design by William Sandell Special Make-Up Effects by Rob Bottin ED-209 Sequences by Phil Tippett Cast |
Hard to imagine, but RoboCop premiered twenty years ago. This recent realization has spurred me to start a little retrospective feature on my site for the year 2007 about the films of 1987. But why 1987, you might ask, aside from the double-decade anniversary relevance? The year has personal importance to me because it’s the year that I began to pay attention to mainstream movies. I was fourteen years old, and started to awaken to contemporary cinema. Most of my previous experience with movies in theaters was seeing garden-variety “family” fare with my parents and younger siblings. But in 1987 I stepped out of the kiddie comfort zone—and it’s been a glorious cinematic ride for me ever since. My film attendance amped up in 1990 when I could finally drive and legally get into R-rated films, but 1987 is when my brain first crossed into the Movie Nut Zone.
The big Oscar winners for 1987 were The Last Emperor and Moonstruck, but I’ve never liked either, nor have I ever embraced the year’s two biggest money-makers, Fatal Attraction and Three Men and Baby. Films that did make an impression on me in 1987 include The Princess Bride, The Untouchables, Good Morning, Vietnam, The Living Daylights (the first Bond movie I saw in a theater), Predator, SpaceBalls, Summer School, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, Angel Heart, and Prince of Darkness. But today’s subject is the science-fiction geek winner of the year, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s melding of cyberpunk and superheroics, RoboCop.
You could argue that RoboCop is a “kiddie film” in a way because of its outrageous comic book storyline aimed at an excitable young male population. But at the time it was considered incredibly violent. Early cuts of the film received the taboo “X” rating from the MPAA, which was still a few years away from the creation of NC-17. The violence remains extreme even today, and with the current push for PG-13 films so to get the widest audience possible, a film with RoboCop’s bloody swagger would probably never get made. Just the killing of protagonist Murphy, where his hand gets grotesquely splattered with a close-up shotgun blast, would never pass the studios’ self-appointed censors.
Enter Alex J. Murphy, an experienced cop transferring to the bloody Metro division of the Detroit Police. Murphy’s a good cop and a family man, but he hasn’t long in a world like this one. Before the twenty-minute mark he’s a bloody corpse left behind by ruthless drug lord Clarence Boddicker. And only a few minutes after that, thanks to a clever visual and editorial device from Murphy’s point-of-view, he’s OCP’s newest project to revamp the police their way: RoboCop.
Original studio plans would have placed hot-ticket action star Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of the police officer who gets cyborged into the ultimate cop. Thankfully, the restrictive suit for the character required a much thinner actor to play it, and Wisconsin-born actor Peter Weller took up the task. Weller is an underrated actor whose work in RoboCop has unfortunately overshadowed his career. Weller possesses great, distinctive facial features and jaw line and an icy delivery perfect for the part. His physical embodiment of RoboCop’s mechanical movements, however, is what really impresses about his performance. Try to imagine Arnold putting as much thought into the distinctive movement of the melding of man and machine and you realize how fortunate the film is to have Weller.
Another director might have placed the focus on Murphy trying to recover his humanity from within the machine that imprisons him. Verhoeven spends time with the concept, and Peter Weller’s finely judged acting sells these small moments, but the director’s true intent lies in bleakly satirizing 1980s corporate greed and deflating the lie of “Morning in America” that pervaded the dollar-happy Reagan years that slashed social services in a disaster known as “Trickle-Down Economics.” The villain of the piece is OCP vice president Dick Jones, who has sights on the biggest military contracts through his ED-209 battle platforms and also holds a grip on underground Detroit through his connection to Clarence Boddicker. The scenes of OCP manipulations, backstabbing, and high-handed controlling of public policy take center stage in Verhoeven’s handling of the story. As a democratic socialist myself, I appreciate the director’s satiric intent, and a lot of the thrill I get from the film today comes from seeing it take down Big Business irresponsibility in a hail of blood and entrails. Even in 1987, when I got a thrill just from watching a badass cyborg lacerate punks into Swiss cheese, I sensed the film’s polemical underpinnings and black humor. While jingoistic ‘80s actioners like Rambo: First Blood, Part II now seem outdated artifacts, RoboCop maintains a cynical bite and humor that makes it superbly re-watchable.
The humor also prevents the film from getting too grim and mean. Make no mistake, this is an often downright ugly and nasty story. A friend of mine who saw the film in theaters before I did remarked with surprise that he hadn’t expected “horror movie” violence in an action film like that, and specifically mentioned Robo stabbing Clarence Boddicker in the neck with a spike from his fist. Not only does Clarence visibly lose a chunk of his neck, but he stumbles around spurting jets of blood before collapsing. We also witness a thug mutated by the world’s quickest acting toxic waste get splattered across the hood of car like a popped zit, a schmoe executive ripped to ribbons in an obsessive rain of bullets from an amuck machine, a would-be rapist blasted in the groin with a semi-automatic machine pistol, and numerous scenes of hapless citizens assaulted by grotesque goons. As a bonus, more people get thrown through more windows than in any film up to that time. Had Verhoeven approached the film with grim-jawed seriousness, it might have ended up repulsive. Instead, the mix of wit and mayhem results in a giddy high of a film.
A sad aspect of RoboCop is that it is one of the last films to make use of stop-motion animation effects. The CGI revolution lay around the corner, and the Phil Tippet effects for the ED-209 battle-bot would be outdated only four years later. Tippet achieved the affects with his patened “go motion” technique developed for Dragonslayer (1981) that uses a motion blur to disguise the jerkiness inherent in stop-motion affects, and the look is stunning while maintaining the wonderfully unreal and slightly creepy appearance of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion work. Robo and “Ed” don’t meld together seamlessly, but the eerie menace of go motion would disappear with the more realistic CGI effects of the coming decade.
The surprise success of the movie, with a generous $54 million take in the U.S. against a lean $13 million budget, guaranteed a sequel. But 1990’s RoboCop 2 disappointed audiences and box office predictions, and couldn’t even hold up firepower against Disney’s Dick Tracy on its opening weekend. The sequel is better than it’s often claimed. Phil Tippet’s effects sequences are more extensive and astounding, and the nihilistic violence and savagery of the original got taken up a few notches. But with Irving Kershner in the director’s chair instead of Verhoeven, RoboCop 2 lacked the satiric wit and comic book zip that made the original so memorable. A second sequel, RoboCop 3, went into production immediately, then sat on a shelf until 1993. The only decent thing I can say about it is that it brought composer Basil Poledouris back to the series after Leonard Rosenman’s inappropriate music for RoboCop 2. Peter Weller turned down playing the character for a third time, and the PG-13 film compromised the ultra-violence splatterpunk of the first two to sell to the younger kids. RoboCop 3 ended up selling to nobody and the film series died. One season of a TV show appeared in 1994 and a mini-series in 2000. Ideas for a RoboCop vs. Terminator movie have kicked around, but it seems unlikely and undesirable. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if in this revival and remake happy Hollywood environment that RoboCop rises from the ashes in the near future.
RoboCop’s message to film executives: “Your move, creep.”
RoboCop is a seminal film in the development of cinematic cyberpunk. Blade Runner in 1982 was the first true “movement” cyberpunk film, appearing the same year as the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but RoboCop’s larger success brought the cyberpunk setting of near-future, corrupt corporate-run worlds overrun with crime to theater-goers’ attentions. The story takes place in Detroit in an unidentified futuristic period (actually filmed in Dallas to take advantage of the ultra-modern architecture) when the privatization of public services has reached the extent that mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) now runs the Detroit Police. Crime in Detroit rages unchecked in the old downtown, much the same way it did in the 1970s when the drug trafficking nearly took over the city. OCP decalres its intention to clean-up the area and then raze it for a new development project: urban renewal at its most extreme and profitable. OCP is only slightly less villainous and corrupt than Weyland-Yutani from the Alien series. The film encapsulates all this in a clever opening with a fictional news program, Media Break, hosted by none other than Leeza Gibbons. Gibbons appears completely unaware that she’s satirizing the smiling, empty-content newscast, which is probably what director Verhoeven wanted. Not only does the newscast and a fake commercial crammed into it quickly fill-in viewers on the future setting and the situation in Detroit, it also establishes the film’s ironic sense of humor.
The casting make some surprising decisions in putting together an ensemble, particular with its two villains, Ronny Cox and Kurtwood Smith. Cox had a reputation for amiable characters, and prior to RoboCop was best known as the other half of the “dueling banjos” scene in Deliverance. Here he’s all stentorian menace and glares, an old-guard boardroom bandit willing to crush any yuppie punk who thinks he can undercut an experienced cutthroat. The scene where he confronts young turk Bob Morton in the corporate washroom shows how furiously Cox attacks the role as he delivers the movie’s most cynical and hysterical line: “I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for twenty years! Who cares if it worked or not?” And the be-speckled and balding Kurtwood Smith (best known today from That 70s Show) as a ruthless drug czar? Sonuvabitch, it just works. Smith translates his educated nebbish look into terrific condescension.