Movie Review: Robocop (1987) "I'd buy that for a dollar!"

If California was home to a nexus of psychedelia and visionary experiences in the 1960's and 1970's, it was definitely a nexus of visionary blockbusters in the late 1980's and early 90's. Even though most kids of my generation were not old enough to see them in theaters, just about every boy my age not only saw Terminator II, Aliens or Predator on VHS multiple times, but had at least one or two action figures depicting characters (or Xenomorphs) from one of those great films. Which is why I'm surprised -and a bit ashamed- that I'd never seen the the 1987 Robocop, directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, until recently. And, boy does it stack up to the greatest sci-fi action movies of that era. 

Scene from Robocop 1987

As the name suggests, Robocop features a part-man part-robot cop who patrols "Old" Detroit in the near future. The crime-ridden and economically depressed city needs a masked, armored hero to save the day and blast the bad guys. Sigh... seems familiar enough, so maybe that's why I avoided this one until now. In a world of dime-a-dozen Marvel supermen, Batmans and vigilante "heroes," I didn't need to see yet another maverick cop blowing shoplifters away with a comically large pistol. No way was a move called "Robocop" going to age well into the current political and social climate. It was certain to be a paranoid orgy of violence, warping suburban America's view of the inner-city into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of lunatic criminals robbing, raping and murdering good, innocent, all-American folk. However, as I watched it became clear that Robocop, played by Peter Weller, was more than just Dirty Harry with robot armor and an even bigger gun. He was a complex, sympathetic figure who provides us with a frighteningly accurate look into humanity's future. 

The film begins in the boardroom of the powerful Omni Consumer Products corporation, a private multi-national industrial concern that supplies large manufactured goods, civil services and, of course, weapons to the government. Think Raytheon meets Halliburton plus Proctor and Gamble, etc. The company has just won a contract to run Detroit's police force and is eager to demonstrate their new 100 percent mechanical policing robot, the ED-209. SPOILER ALERT: the demo does not go well. With only a few months until Omni is set to take over the Detroit police department, they need a solution. Enter Robocop, a part-man, part-machine hybrid with the hardware to take down the criminals, but with the mind of a human to act with discretion.

In classic Paul Verhoeven fashion the first few scenes of the film demonstrate that what we're about to watch is more than a simple action movie. Sure, it's got all the explosions, gun battles and solid kills necessary to keep any adolescent boy (or adolescent-minded adult) interested. However, Verhoeven -who went on to direct Starship Troopers (1997)- shows us early-on that the film has a message that goes deeper than the simple good-guys versus bad-guys motifs. Between the lines, the film is critical of policing, but not anti-cop; it's suspicious of artificial intelligence, but not anti-technology; and above-all it shows how badly things can go when for-profit commercial entities, rather than institutions accountable to the public trust, are put in charge of running a society. 

I suppose any astute grown-up could have predicted in 1987 a lot of what was about to happen over the next 3 plus decades. Computers would have an increasing impact on our daily lives; the privatization of services traditionally provided by the government would have expected results; and robots would begin to replace human workers in every industry. However, given where we're at in 2023: with crime on the rise; policing strategies called into question; flying drones patrolling airspace firing missiles toward the ground on a regular basis; and revolutionary AI software poised to change everything we've come to think we know, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more accurate and entertaining vision of the future than Paul Verhoeven's Robocop.  

Verhoeven, Paul. Robocop, Orion Pictures, Los, Angeles California. 1987.