Robocop
Year:
1987
Directed by:
Paul Verhoeven
Rated:
R
Country:
United States
Runtime:
1 hr. 43 min.
Production Company:
Orion Pictures
Written by:
Edward Neumeier
Michael Miner
Starring:
Peter Weller
Kurtwood Smith
Miguel Ferrer
Nancy Allen
Similar Films:
Good in theory, not in execution.
Robocop. That doesn't sound like something you can take seriously, does it? If it is a relief to hear that this film is a little more thoughtful than you might expect, it may also be a disappointment for me to tell you that that still is not enough. Robocop, thankfully, is more a commentary on technology dependence and corporate greed than it is an action film, but the substance of the film only lightly touches on these themes. This is a well-plotted, violent film that has a point to make, but I don't feel that this point was given enough attention.
Omni Consumer Products, a Detroit mega-corporation, has basically bought out the city's police force, funding it with the agreement that they will also manage it. Part of their restructuring plan involves robotic law enforcement for increased efficiency. When the first prototype, which resembles a small BattleMech, is demonstrated in front of a table of executives, a disastrous glitch results in one extremely bullet-ridden corpse, rendering the model unviable. "That's life in the big city," says one exec. However, when a newly transferred officer, Alex Murphy, is killed, his limbs are amputated, his memory is erased, and the leftover body is outfitted with all the technology and armor needed to take down any criminal threat (not to mention a kick-ass three-burst handgun). When Robocop, as he is called, starts having dreams, though, he also starts to regain a sense of self and past. With this burgeoning autonomy, Robocop begins unraveling executives' connections with the local crime syndicate and sets out to bring his makers to justice.
The point of this plot is that big corporations make robots out of those who work for them. Technology is perfect in theory but unpredictable in reality. Humans, though inherently imperfect, can be easily manipulated. Combine the two and you have the ultimate subordinate. As this film demonstrates, though, the imperfections are not done away with in such an amalgamation, and it is our imperfection that tethers us to humanity despite what others may do to us. The corporation could not succeed in totally wiping Murphy's memory, and it is because of that impossibility that he is able to begin regaining himself and act in ways that are meaningful to him and not the corporation for which he works. In a final analysis, we are able to have ourselves back after corporations haven taken us for their own, but doing so is not easy.
This socially charged plot is smart, but the movie as a whole does little with it. There are two interesting aspects of this film: the Robocop-coming-to-life scene and the violence. When Murphy is killed, we switch to his point of view: blackness. After a moment, we wake into technology. As he comes to for short, intermittent periods, we view the world as through a television screen, sometimes watching people work on us. The effect, the feeling, of waking from a coma in such a way impacts the viewer more than any corruption plot ever could.
The film's violence is vivid and sometimes grotesque. This is not a movie in which gunshots result in nothing but falling bodies. These gunshot wounds are shown in bright, bloody detail. One character's hand and arm are shot off, leaving loose strips of flesh at the wound. Another crashes into a toxic waste tank and is melted into a monster. This violence is a smart inclusion -- demonstrating the violence resultant from greed -- but it helps only a little, as it is present only sporadically throughout the film.
Don't count on the action to add anything. Though there is plenty of it, it mostly consists of Robocop standing while being pelted with bullets and blowing away the bad guys one-by-one. I'm sure director Paul Verhoeven was not aiming to make this an action film, so there is no problem in it not delivering on that ground; the problem is that there are so many areas in which it does not deliver. The film is stylistically bland, with only scraps of witty dialogue, few memorable images, and an entire cast, save for Robocop himself (and even he is not terribly dynamic), taken directly out of stock.
I can see that Verhoeven tried to make this a genuinely good film, but ultimately it feels half empty. It is stuck in a gray area, being too violent for kids and too simplistic for adults. I think some creative camera use and better characterization would have added a lot to Robocop. A film cannot survive on plot alone.
