Well, the Sunday Night Movie feature now turns 50! Not 50 years of course, but this is number 50 for my Sunday Night Movie posts.
I started the Sunday Night Movie more than fifty movies ago, but I did not blog about it at first. The movie events started for me when I noticed a convergence of two factors. The first was that had a large and growing library of films on DVD and Blu-ray, but I didn’t always make time to watch any of them. I would think about them, a title would pop into my head during the day and I’d think ,’Man, it’d be good to see that movie again.’ However life would catch up with me and I wouldn’t watch anything. So I committed myself to a movie every Sunday night.
The second factor was that my sweetie-wife and I have divergent tastes in movies. There are plenty of films we watch and enjoy together, but some not so much. The Sunday Night Movie became a time when I could screen a film that was not to her tastes. (Such as the blood-tastic violent film I watched last night.)
Robocop, from 1987, is the first film I saw from director Paul Verhoeven. It is also the film that convinced me that Paul Verhoeven had one good movie in him. He made an alright film next, Total Recall, and after that what I have seen shows little to no talent and truly awful scripting. When I once watched this DVD with the audio commentary turn one I learned that it was a good film by accident and that Paul Verheoven had intended all manner of symbolic imagery that I had not seen and when explained found — shall we say ‘strange.’ (Paul says he views the Murphy/Robocop character as a Christ metaphor, but I really did read the part in the New Testament where Christ goes on a killing rampage against his enemies.)
Many people view this as a science-fitcion movie, but that really is the wrong genre. Robocop is a comic-book superhero movie. It should be viewed with the same state of mind as you would watch, Superman, X-Men, or Spider-Man with. However if you want to view it as SF, that is acceptable as well.
The film takes place in a near future where crime has all but destroyed the city of Old Detroit. Pro-Business philosophy has destroyed the public funding base and government is weak and easily manipulated by the all powerful corporations. (Note that this film was released in 1987 during Regan’s second term and reflects a liberal panic about a conservative future.) The mega-corporation, OCP, has taken over the funding and management of the Detroit police department . Within the corporation there are two competing products being developed for the law enforcement market, the ED209 and the lesser funded Robocop program. After a particularly bloody failure by the ED209 team the Robocop program is put into effect.
When police officer Alex Murphy is gunned down and murdered by a criminal gang lead by Clarence Boddicker, he is resurrected – albeit it without his consent or memories — into the cybernetic Robocop. With the help of his form partner – Ann Lewis — Robocop not only has to uncover the conspiracies of Boddicker’s gang and corruption at OCP, but must untangle the mystery of his life and who and what he really is.
There are lovely and wonderful moments of world-building in Robocop that would be at home in any SF story. Mainly by way of commercials and brief news updates, the writers and the directors fill you in on a world that is like ours, but not. While the newscast about the beleaguered city-state of Pretoria is vastly in error for how that region shook out over the years, the stories about the collapse of Mexico into civil war and the USA’s involvement scarily might still come to pass. (It is amusing that in a near future world with GPS tracking, advanced computer systems, and other nifties, everyone’s TV’s are 4X3 CRTs.)
This is a film well worth seeing, but be advised it is bloody and it is violent.
Re.- Paul V. – I sort of like “Flesh + Blood” that he made before Robocop, but mostly for the grtty feel to the medieval era. Most films pretty that time up WAY too much and don’t depict the struggle for suvival that life was. I will agree that the script absolutely sucks when it comes to women, as do most of the his films in the parts when women are in them. My nomination for the worst line ever by an actress? “At least I got to have you…” from _Starship Troopers_. And lets not even discuss _Showgirls_, which is evidence that men really should think with the head on their shoulders and not the other one, which was obviously what he was thinking with when he created that pile of manure for his girlfriend (or wife? or was that later?). To be strictly fair – we have not seen any of his German language films- have we? Perhaps they are better?