Robocop (

1987

)

Over the 1960s and 70s Crime in urban America had gone from virtually nonexistent, to an outright blight. The promises of an America without poverty and crime made in the 1960s were frustrated by reality at every turn. By the 1970s, law-abiding Americans were sick of reformers that promised to address the crisis with carefully measured responses and handholding psychobabble. The measured and the human had been tried, and all they brought was a decaying urban wasteland that got more and more dangerous one year to the next. The collective populace wanted law and order, and if that meant enlisting the aid of violent thugs of their own, they were more than willing to do so. On the streets, this meant greater police presence and a general disregard for the niceties of civil rights. On-screen, it meant the uncomplicated lawmen of films like High Noon (1952) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) had to give way to the possibly psychotic vigilantes of Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974). By the late 80s, this trend no longer even bothered to debate the morality of these heroes. Dirty Harry was downright nuanced, in his first outing at least, and only looked more so when compared to the heroes of Cobra (1986) or The Exterminator (1980). The whole genre was ripe for a satirical takedown, and Dutch director Paul Verhoeven was keen for the challenge.

Our story for today is set in a decaying crime-ridden Detroit that would have been instantly recognizable to the audience of the late 80s, and perversely much nicer than a modern audience would expect. The city government has failed so spectacularly, that a massive conglomerate named OmniCorp had stepped in to run the Detroit Police Department. The plan is to use the city as a testing ground for OmniCorp’s new military-grade mech, the ED-209. Once it has proven itself capable of urban pacification, OmniCorp can sell the ED-209 to the army for use in the ongoing Mexican war. The only problem is, the new weapon is really a piece of junk that winds up killing an executive during a demonstration before the OmniCorp board of directors. It’s a rare case where a film criticizing the military-industrial complex notes that the defense contractors profiting from the cozy arrangement are incompetent as well as evil. With his latest prototype failing spectacularly, the project’s top man, Dick Jones, is left hanging high and dry. Jones’ underling, Morton, seizes the opportunity and pitches his contingency plan to use the brainpower of a recently deceased cop to power a humanoid robot, a creature he dubs “Robocop.” The OmniCorp CEO, referred to only as The Old Man, is game for the idea and green lights Morton’s project over the objections of an outraged Jones. Now all they need is a dead cop, fortunately, those are turning up all the time in the crime-ridden slums of Detroit.

Morton and his team get a volunteer almost immediately, in Alex Murphy, a cop from the comfortable suburbs who has been re-assigned to Detroit’s sprawling slums. Murphy and his new partner Anne Lewis start off their time together with a bang when they are called in to chase a gang of bank robbers. The gang is headed by the crime boss of all of Detroit, Clarence Boddicker, who evidentially doesn’t believe in delegating his heists to his small army of thugs. Boddicker may look like a substitute teacher (he’s played by the dad from That’s 70s Show and already in 1987 he looks like a balding, frustrated middle-aged man), but he and his thugs are well armed and downright sadistic. When Murphy corners them in an abandoned warehouse, they fill him so full of lead that if he somehow survived the ordeal I’d be worried he’d get heavy metal poisoning. Murphy is quickly spirited away to OmniCorp’s laboratory and fashioned into a cyborg crime-fighter dubbed Robocop. The mechanized cop makes short work of Detroit’s sizable population of scumbags, but he also begins to show troubling signs of humanity that his creators did not design for. Little quirks that Murphy exhibited during life begin to express themselves in Robocop’s actions, and the cyborg begins to dream recalling memories of his life and death as a mortal man. In short order, the cyber sleuth has pieced together most of the details of his life as a human being.

Unbidden by his OmniCorp handlers, Robocop begins to hunt down the men who killed him. This is all well and good, but the trail takes him in an unexpected direction. After capturing, and knocking the snot out of Clarence Boddicker (evidentially, the programmers at OmniCorp did not put in any anti-brutality parameters), Robocop discovers that Boddicker was working for Dick Jones of OmniCorp this whole time. Robocop books the crime lord, and heads for OmniCorp’s massive high-rise headquarters to arrest Dick Jones. There he discovers that while his programming may allow him to beat up an unarmed and already arrested criminal, it will not allow him to arrest an executive at the corporation that created him; normally such law enforcement biases are not nearly so clearly defined. Violating one of his prime directives causes his system to short circuit, and a semi-functional Robocop is forced to flee the tower amid fire from ED-209 (most of the kinks have been worked out of its programming, though the killer mech does have trouble with stairs) and the rest of the Detroit police department.

Humorless buzzkills are quick to analyze sci-fi as allegories for contemporary politics, ignoring the countless films and books that are really meant for nothing more than harmless escapism. Star Wars (1977) has about as many political implications and A Princess of Mars, and those that try to force their politics into it will only wind up looking ridiculous in the process (perhaps not to their peers and professors, but theirs is a breed of foolishness unique to the well-educated). Not everything is political, and for a great many things injecting politics into it will only serve to undermine its appeal. Indeed, it takes a skillful hand to make a political statement with a fun action blockbuster. Most who attempt it will wind up will inept, boring propaganda like Three Kings (1999) or Shooter (2007). I say all this because for once the humorless buzz kill mode of analyzing fun movies as if they were political treatises bears fruit. Unsurprisingly, it is the work of Paul Verhoeven, who bucks the rule. Robocop is unmistakably a film about the privatization of public services, a process that was ramping up into high gear in the mid-1980s across the Western world, though most notably in Britain and America. Nor is the film even very subtle about its political commentary, hell the bad guys are a massive corporation that, after assuming the management of prisons and space exploration from the US government, has taken over running the Detroit police department. This message has become all the more relevant in modern times, as the governments of the West continue to unload responsibilities onto corporations eager to transform non-profit sections into for-profit ones. But to read Robocop only as a polemic against privatization is to miss much of the movie’s message and nearly all of its charms. Robocop is many things, and political satire is just one of them. It is also a goofy comedy, on the lines of an X-rated episode of Loony Tunes, and a religious film that frames his hero as a latter-day Savior. More than anything though, Robocop is an action movie and deserves to be considered as such.

As an action movie, Robocop leaves something to be desired. The hero is invincible, and for most of the film after his transformation into the titular police-prototype he simply guns down adversaries while their bullets bounce off his armor harmlessly. The fight cinematography is clear and coherent, but without tension, it would get pretty stale on its own. Fortunately, the last act introduces a new and more powerful enemy for Robocop to square off against in Ed-209 and gives Clarence Boddicker and his gang, weapons that can actually damage Robocop. Here, the film’s action sequences develop real tension, and as a consequence rise fitfully to the level of genuinely thrilling. Yet, even when the action sequences are lackluster, it doesn’t do all that much to weigh the film down, there’s simply too much else going on in the world of the film.

The universe that Robocop takes place in is a wonderfully strange place that is violent, funny, and perplexing in turn. TVs are constantly tuned to a degenerate sit-com where a perverted old man says, with regards to various comely younger women, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” Whenever anyone tunes into this show, regardless of whether they are a regular Joe or a hardened criminal, they burst out in uncontrollable guffaws. It’s a world where weapons tests are conducted in front of a full board of directors, and where if one of them dies in the process it is regarded as a minor embarrassment akin to forgetting to zip up after using the restaurant. It’s a world where the police force has co-ed shower rooms (judging from Starship Troopers (1997) this may be Verhoeven’s personal fetish). In short, this is a world that is a fun-house reflection of the one we live in, that exaggerates our foibles so as to better mock us for having them. It’s a comedy and a social satire, and at times it is incredibly successful. The humor is frequently grotesque, and so over the top that it must be seen to be believed. Taken all together it becomes gleefully absurd, resembling nothing so much as an extremely violent cartoon.

Finally, there are the film’s aspirations to tell an authentically Christian story about a man who dies and is reborn a savior. To Verhoeven’s credit, he keeps the overtly Christian symbolism extremely subtle. In one scene, Robocop walks on water, but the water is so shallow (little more than a puddle), that you could be forgiven for not noticing it. In another scene, Boddicker drives a sharp rebar into Robocop’s side, an image that recalls the Lance of Longinus. Murphy’s death sequence includes a close-up shot of his hand being maimed with a shotgun blast, an image that could represent the stigmata but could also just be an excuse for copious gore. The religious imagery is so brief and inconsequential that I’d be tempted to wave it all away if the director himself was not on record saying: “The point of Robocop, of course, is it is a Christ story. It is about a guy that gets crucified after 50 minutes, then is resurrected in the next 50 minutes and then is like the super-cop of the world, but is also a Jesus figure as he walks over water at the end.” It’s an odd reading of Christianity, as here Christ does not return to forgive the sinners, but instead to lay a righteous smackdown on the asses of those sinners. Imagine the gospels if the risen Christ had challenged Judas to a fist-fight after emerging from the tomb on Easter Sunday. Honestly, I think the morality of the film is closer to the ancient pagans than their Christian successors. Robocop pursues vengeance from beyond the grave; he has more in common with the Eumenides than with Christ. But there is a seed of something interesting when talking about the Christian Robocop. When he returns after death he is initially inhuman and flawless, perfectly executing his directives without error or hesitation. Yet, the human element gets in the way, he starts to remember what it is like to be human. If you buy the notion that God willingly turned Himself into a man, then He must have gone through the same thing and must have felt the same confused lost feeling of not being quite human. It’s an interesting concept but it floats so far to the periphery of the film that it barely warrants consideration. Much more important is the fact that Robocop is a funny, violent, and occasionally thrilling film.