After the unknown, chaos is probably humanity's greatest fear. Not being able to live a peaceful and quiet live, always looking over your shoulder to avoid suffering and a violent end, that sort of thing. Fear is also the second most common thing that makes people shitty after money. The notion of an indestructible cop, half-man and half-machine, is a paranoid fantasy in a dystopian world. I don't remember liking a lot of superheroes as a child, but I remember watching ROBOCOP a couple times and owning the movie's action figures. After my first viewing of the cyberpunk classic as an adult, I came to two conclusions 1) I was WAY TOO YOUNG to understand this movie and 2) What was wrong with my parents, allowing me to watch that when I was 5 years old? It's a seriously fucked up movie.
In a violent, dystopian Detroit *, the city is torn between bloodthirsty criminals and Omni Consumer Products, a company taking over every aspects of people life. They have recently acquired the police services contracts and are planning to replace the miserable city cops by robots. There is a power struggle going on at OCP, about which model they should use. VP Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) is pushing the ruthless and very experimental model ED-209, as young and ambitious Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer) is putting his faith in a cyborg cop philosophy. All Morton needs to put his plan into action is ED-209 to go wrong (which he awesomely does) and a cop to ressucitate, which he gets when Metro South transfer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) gets shot and killed on his first day of working downtown. Robocop was born, ladies and gentlemen.
I had no recollection whatsoever of how gory ROBOCOP was. There are some things the feeble mind of a 5 year old WILL block. I remembered the toxic waste incident, the peeling skin and the death wails of Kurtwood Smith's ** henchman. It's a detail of ROBOCOP everybody remembers for its sheer originality and its traumatic value. I didn't remember the hacked-off limbs, Murphy's mangled corpse and the bullet holes. The many gaping bullet holes leaking life. That was fucked up. ROBOCOP is one of my earliest formative movies and all there is to it is a bunch of maniacs mangling each other, really. There is a little more to it, to be honest, but savage corporate interests vs pure savages is the backbone of this movie and all they do is paint the streets with one another's blood.
The greatest moment in ROBOCOP. Probably one of the greatest moments of the eighties.
I suppose I should slip a word about this whole man vs machine ethical debate that ROBOCOP is pushing. The screenplay is operating under that very eighties paranoid idea that men should not turn their future over to computer programming, that life is going to lose its sanctity if we do. Well, it happened in real life since then and it was a lot less dramatic than a man vs machine fight to the death. In ROBOCOP, even wired to a central computer, Alex Murphy always takes the human way out to every situation. Technology cannot take over his spirit, even if he is basically a face plastered over a steel frame. Even if ROBOCOP was trying to make a desperate plea against the use of machines, Murphy is so ridiculously romanticizes, he's at his best when he's just letting his programming take over to kick some ass.
ROBOCOP is kind of a hollow pleasure, I must say. It's an aged and self-indulgent piece of pseudo-ethical cyberpunk that comes of as being ridiculously brutal. Even if it loves its own purpose, you have to admire the wild abandon director Paul Verhoeven embraces his themes with. ROBOCOP is a reckless cyberpunk movie that'll make you fear a parallel future that will never happen. That's fuel-efficient paranoia for you. Cyberpunk is always about paranoia, one way or another, but Paul Verhoeven nailed an interesting middle ground between it and pulp fiction with ROBOCOP. At least, it turned into pulp with age, I'm not sure what the initial intent was. It's as satisfying as cinematographic junk will ever get to me. It doesn't always need to be high art to work.
* I'm hearing my Detroit readers go ''hah!'' from here. I don't blame you.
** We should always refer to Kurtwood Smith as THE Kurtwood Smith. One of the most eighties actors of all-time.
