Okay, let's get one thing straight: I love RoboCop.
It's true. I don't love RoboCop 2, and I've never seen RoboCop 3, so we're not talking about the franchise, here. We're talking about good old 1987-Peter Weller-Paul Verhoeven RoboCop.
Why, Carl, do you like this sci-fi/action B-movie so much, you might ask?
Well, a couple things:
1. It's set in Detroit. As some of you know, I'm originally from Flint, Michigan (a horrible little town that usually finds itself in the Top 5 "Most Dangerous Places To Live In America" list), and any time a film depicts the industrial settings of Michigan in an accurate way, I'm all for it. Even though the film was actually shot in Dallas (because Dallas is a real city, and it ended up looking more like what people would think Detroit should like in the future, since Detroit has no future), it still seemed to evoke the right mood for Detroit: desperation, greed, crime.
*Author's note: No matter where you go in Detroit, there is always crime scene tape blocking your view.
2. It was made in the Reagan-era satirizing everything that the Reagan-era stood for. Just watch those "newsbreaks" with Leeza Gibbons that are throughout the movie...everything from the military-industrial complex running rampant to star wars programs to the idea of global domination as an at-home board game just scream "Reagan". This was the 80s, so what better way to skewer it than with its own ideals?
With this guy in charge, what could possibly go wrong?
3. It is extremely violent, and the level of violence ends up satirizing itself. This movie was made by Paul Verhoeven. If you don't know Paul Verhoeven, he also made Showgirls and Starship Troopers. Now, if you don't think this guy has a sense of humor about Americans, you can go right back to watching straight-to-DVD American Pie sequels. All that aside, Verhoeven uses the ultra-violence to comment not only on American society and their fixation on violence, but also on the depiction of violence in American cinema. The violence gets so crazy throughout the movie, that it ends up being laughable...Verhoeven certainly made his point.
"This pole tastes like disappointment." - Elizabeth Berkley, reflecting on her career.
4. It is about our love/hate relationship with technology and perfecting the human race. This is probably better suited for a whole other post (or series of posts), but the man v. machine idea is prevalent throughout the history of literature and film (see Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Stanley Kubrick's 2001, and Short Circuit 1 and 2, among others).
Steve Guttenburg would have made a good Robocop.
5. It is about Jesus Christ.
What!? You must be crazy now, C-Murder, RoboCop is about a robot cop. "Thank you for your cooperation" and all that shit...it's not a messianic tale, and there's now way that JC is going to be shooting gangbangers and sticking the Dad from That 70's Show in the neck.
Oh but it is, dear reader. Oh but it is...
more on that in Pt. 2.
