Robocop begins with a lovely establishing shot of futuristic “Old Detroit” at twilight. The camera soars across a body of water and pushes in towards the city. The buildings are clean-lined and elegant. The sky is a deep cerulean. This place seems pretty nice, we think.
Paul Verhoeven is a serious director 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 partially due to the massive popularity of the new home video market that was desperate for products to fill the shelves. Any old straight-to-video geek show would do as long as it contained some splatter gore and a little T&A and maybe had a sense of humor about itself.
Corporations are the real criminals Verhoeven and writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner waste no time in identifying the bad guys in the first of the movie’s famous satirical future news reports. The talking heads cheerfully recount the legacy of European colonialism in Africa, now in the threatening form of a French neutron bomb, along with the bumbling inadequacy of the US president, who floats around helplessly during his visit to the “Star Wars Orbiting Peace Platform.
In a parallel jab, the criminals on the ground are equally aspirational, making small talk about capital investment and free enterprise between robberies and murders. These ground-level criminals are led by the psychopathic Clarence Boddicker, played with sneering bemusement by Kurtwood Smith. I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: Smith and Cox play two of the all-time great movie bad guys here.
Of course, this is after we are already on his side, having witnessed his acts of reckless superheroism protecting the community. Another of the movie’s jokes is that Robocop is effective, but not very efficient. He tends to cause a great deal of collateral damage whenever he foils a crime or saves a victim .
Profound humanism Despite rooting around in dystopian sludge , Robocop is not a nihilistic movie or even a cynical one. Though its primary form is scathing satire, it is profoundly humanist. Verhoeven was a child in the Netherlands during World War II and he witnessed the carnage and the chaos firsthand. While it probably seemed like the forces of darkness were extinguishing the light of civilization, that light survived amidst profound acts of courage and heroism.
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