For many years, even as I understood more strongly what he was doing to undermine the very genres he was inhabiting, I still maintained that Robocop was my favorite Verhoeven film. Despite my propensity to abandon nostalgia, I had grown up with Robocop. It helped that it was one of the few films from my youth that, upon adult reflection, is still actually good. But I think there's a reason for my holding onto it that demonstrates an adolescence of taste and need for cinema to be a certain thing that I had always expected it to be. That is to say, I wanted it to be grounded in a level of reality and, for want of a better word, sentiment about its world and characters. Despite its more satirical and incisive political elements, Robocop still takes its story more-or-less seriously. Its view of a man who becomes a robot and interest in the loss of human psyche to machinery/technology is one based in pathos. And, in a lot of ways, this is what makes the movie more limiting than Verhoeven's later American films. It is about a man and, despite some hints of ambivalence, his triumph at the end is a real triumph. This is a stark contrast to Verhoeven's very next feature, Total Recall, in which none of the characters represent real people so much as postmodern representations of film iconography and the ending triumph is a lampoon of action film wish fulfillment/escapism.
I find it a little hard to say that a movie that cares about its characters as real people, and wants the audience to care about them, somehow makes it worse than other movies that don't do this. Fortunately, I guess, Robocop is still a good movie, even if I will no longer call it my favorite (or, perhaps, even include it in my top 5 Verhoevens). Made on a relatively small budget, it says some surprising things about privatization and American corporate fascism -- surprising mostly for their context in the still Red world of Ronald Reagan (and, soon, Bush, Sr.). I suppose its context as a sci-fi film and its low budget were the only things that allowed this fairly clear anti-Red message to get through. Or, to be a little more bleak about it, perhaps corporations already realized that they could be made easy scapegoats for the world's ills without affecting their bottom line. While there were no doubt earlier examples, I suspect they were less successful, so in some ways Robocop can be seen as the precursor to the modern action/thriller formula, in which corporate greed threatens to destroy a lone man or woman just trying to make it in the world. Especially in television, in which a huge number of modern sci-fi/action show made in the last 10 years has some elusive, privately backed "Company" as its big boogey man (Heroes, Alias, Lost, Dollhouse, others). I suppose the way it justifies it is the way capitalism justifies everything, that is not All Companies that are evil, greedy, shameless abusers of human rights, but rather This Specific Company. In a way, I am sad to say, even Robocop plays a little fast and loose with its intentions. The older, real head of OCP is seen as mostly genial and unaware of the machinations of his head underling, and the film's main villain, Dick Jones. And, despite the ambivalence of transforming a human into a robot crime fighting machine, the movie does imply that Robocop is making things safer and better.
This, I guess, would be the main reason that Verhoeven's attachment to Murphy/Robo as a character makes this a lesser film than his later works. Because we are supposed to like him, and see him as the good guy, in a way it means we must endorse his methods, which mostly involve violent abuse of criminals and a willingness to ignore the way socio-economic factors affect crime. These are ideas that are vaguely hinted at throughout the film, but Verhoeven mostly skirts them in favor of less pointed attacks on Jones and the other ruthless executives. I will say, however, that the way he ties Jones to Kurtwood Smith's wonderfully slimy Clarence J. Boddicker, and the implication that moving up the criminal ladder really isn't so far from moving up the corporate one (in that they both involve a willingness to be heartlessly opportunistic) is, of course, fairly obvious, but Verhoeven isn't out to hit you over the head too hard with it. And its observation that Detroit would become a gutted urban wasteland seems frighteningly prescient (though my history is a little stiff, perhaps it was apparent even by 1987 that the American automobile was going to lose the race badly).
The ending, too, is surprising and, sadly, completely implausible in a modern action movie. It ends on exactly the note it should, without wearing out its welcome with an unnecessary epilogue about Robocop returning to the streets and having come to terms with his existence as part man, part robot. I guess it's strange to contemplate the '80s, which are often held aloft as the worst decade in American history, in terms of social and political progress -- and to yet even see that the films being made in that era take wild chances that would be unheard of in a modern Hollywood picture. I guess bemoaning the fate of Hollywood is another boring standard of the critical world, but here I am. The main reason is, likely, that it's difficult for me to put my finger on what it is about Robocop that is so interesting to me, still. I mean, there are the obvious factors, like that it moves efficiently and still looks fantastic. There's the mirroring elevator scenes with Miguel Ferrer that, while obvious, that still have a disturbing casualness to them. Honestly I wish I'd written this two weeks ago when I first watched the movie. Now, it feels like there's something missing from my brain that I wanted to say about it.
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