ROBOCOP
Since my recent viewing of the TERMINATOR trilogy was a smashing success I decided to look for some other ’80s-’90s sci-fi/action robot trilogy to watch, and I came up with ROBOCOP. I’d seen the first one a million (1,000,000) times and never seen the sequels, but I had a pretty good idea it was not gonna be pretty. And it wasn’t.
To me the real trilogy is not ROBOCOP 1-3, it’s ROBOCOP, TOTAL RECALL and then STARSHIP TROOPERS, Paul Verhoeven’s three ultraviolent, FX heavy studio sci-fi action satires. ROBOCOP started off that trilogy with a bang, and even including those other Verhoeven classics there’s really nothing quite like this one. Its unique approach is established at the very beginning when it opens with a TV newsbreak (co-anchored by Leeza Gibbons) that’s a weird hybrid of news from the ’80s and from today. We learn alot from the TVs in this movie: the world is in chaos, with wars and rebel attacks a regular part of life, deadly fires caused by a laser misfire of “The Star Wars Global Peace Platform” in space, but there’s a nuclear war themed game you can buy and a really good artificial heart (is a surgery ad really that different from the prescription drug ads we already have?) and a popular comedy where a dude always says “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” and everybody laughs. They really capture the feel of the ’80s and the 2000s, that it’s a crazy fuckin nightmare but everybody’s used to it and doesn’t care. This movie predicted everything but Paris Hilton. They weren’t too far off predicting what police cars would look like (those things looked futuristic in 1987, now they just look the wrong color) and there’s even a DVD in this movie when the villain, Clarence Boddicker, storms into a penthouse, pulls out what at that time appeared to be a CD, and plays a video from it.
In fact I think it’s mainly the details of this world that make the movie work so well. The movie seems more dated than some of the other classics of the era, some of it is a little cheesy and although I still like the stop motion animation of the ED-209 that was so cool at the time I’m sure kids now would laugh at it. But as much as the ideas of the future come out of the ’80s they still seem believable. I mean, I bet these corporate executives really do have stock tickers above their urinals. And the guy making a speech in front of a bank of monitors showing animated corporate logos and footage of war planes doesn’t seem that exaggerated anymore. (more…)
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Paul Verhoeven’s first American-produced (and English language) movie was this knights and swords movie about a group of amoral mercenaries in Europe circa 1501. It’s not a fantasy because there’s no sorcery or dragons and Mako does not narrate. It does have Susan Tyrrell, but she doesn’t narrate either.
