If life hands you a lemon, you make lemonade, right? So what happens if life hands you a kumquat
If life hands you a lemon, you make lemonade, right? So what happens if life hands you a kumquat
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Question: You lend a friend your prized copy of 'RoboCop: The Unrated Director's Cut' - formerly available on the exclusive (and expensive) Criterion Collection of DVD's - now discontinued. Your friend then loses/scratches/breaks it.
Do you:
A). Not care, it'll be on telly again soon won't it?
B). Shrug your shoulders and say "OK", but inwardly vow never to lend any of your 'friends' anything again?
C). Demand that your 'friend' scours memorabilia fayres and collectors' auctions the length and breadth of the country until he finds you a replacement?
D). String up his dog and burn his house down?
Now any movie fan really worth his salt will probably answer D) straightaway, and up until recently so would I, but now you have a fifth option - you can pop along to your local video shop or supermarket and arm yourself with the entire RoboCop trilogy on a spanking new DVD collection, which emphatically consigns the previous Criterion Edition to the scrapheap. It comes with all the extra features of the Criterion disc including a commentary track from controversial director Paul Verhoeven and writer Ed Neumier, the trailers, storyboards and a 'Shooting RoboCop' feature, plus you also get a brand new documentary on the making of Robo, a handful of deleted scenes, and DVD ROM stuff. You even get the option of playing the regular theatrical version or the super-brutal director's cut, an almost unprecedented move from our friends at the BBFC! Oh, and you also get RoboCop's 2 and 3 thrown in,
but seeing as these are two of the worst movies ever made, this doesn't count for a lot. Still, considering that the whole package comes for around 28 quid, compared to £45 (and rising!) for the single-disc Criterion version, who's complaining?
Back in 1987, RoboCop was the film that every teenage boy wanted to see, but was never allowed to because, we were told, it was for grown-ups. However, when a film has an invincible, metal guy stomping around, blowing away villainous scum with a really big gun, wild stallions wouldn't keep most bloodthirsty adolescents away and most of us somehow managed to see it anyway. But don't let the comic-book 'blast-the-bad-guys-kids' philosophy fool you, there's a lot more to RoboCop than that. There's no doubt that Verhoeven's sci-fi classic does work brilliantly as an all-action, slam-bam crowd pleaser, but closer inspection reveals that RoboCop is also a pitch-black comedy, a not-so-subtle satirisation of American corporate greed. Made near the end of the Reagan era, it gleefully pokes fun at the ''Great Communicator's'' pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatisation.
It's the late 1990's and the city of Detroit has degenerated into a war zone, mirror and steel skyscrapers reflect crumbling, crime-ridden slums. The police force (now privatised by a multinational conglomerate, OCP) are over-run and half the city's population are hooked on cocaine. It's a world where local news anchors chirp for ten seconds about a report on World War III, whilst taking a full minute to pitch a boardgame called "Nukem". Where big business has gotten big because it makes huge profits by creating a mess, then doubles profits by making the machine to clear it up.
High up in the OCP corporate boardroom, suited execs squabble over which robot should become "the future of law enforcement". Flinty vice-president Dick Jones favours the all-mechanical 'Enforcement Droid, Series 209' (ED 209 for short), whereas Bob Morton, his slightly more humanitarian adversary, thinks that RoboCop - part-man, part-machine - would be the better investment. However, when the imperfected ED 209 accidentally kills an OCP board member at its grand unveiling (one of the film's satirical high points), the committee soon decide that Morton's RoboCop idea would be a safer bet. All they need is "some poor schmuck to volunteer..."
At about the same time, Detroit police officer Alex Murphy and his partner, Lewis, are busy doing battle with Clarence Boddicker and his gang of subterranean slime, a battle which sees Murphy lose his life, and most of his vital organs to boot. OCP, it would seem, had their 'volunteer'.
Up until this point it's all a huge giggle - the jokes, the chases, the 'Mediabreak' news bulletins and ED 209's unforgettable debut - but then you're confronted with one of the most graphic and extended death scenes ever committed to film, and all of a sudden it's not funny anymore. From hereon in, RoboCop adopts another trait - that of a drama. A powerful and extremely human one at that. By subjecting his leading character to an ordeal comparable to crucifixion, Verhoeven adds huge emotional wallop to what could easily have been a scene of bloodthirsty exploitation, and in doing so ensures that Murphy's true identity is never forgotten, despite him spending the rest of the movie with his face concealed behind a robotic visor. Look hard enough and you'll see the crucifixion theme carried through as Murphy is 'resurrected' as RoboCop, OCP's new weapon in the fight against crime. Indeed, it's no accident that Robo appears to walk on water in the final showdown.
In trying to save money by using the pre-existing 'circuitry' of the human brain, OCP doesn't bargain for the results: a cyborg with a human memory and ethics that just might subvert corporate command. Soon enough, RoboCop's (or is it Murphy's?) memory flickers into consciousness, and the 'human' in him cries out for vengeance. He seeks out his killers, not realising who the real killers are. Criminals with shotguns blew his arm off, but it was OCP who took away the arm he had left, it was they who tried to strip away his identity, his memory. His humanity.
But they failed.
Murphy's identity showed through at all times, thinly at first - the twirling pistol, the favourite catchphrase, the little things you wouldn't normally think about. As more of his memories begin to surface in the form of dreams, he is tormented by fleeting images of his wife and son. He could feel the loss of his family, but couldn't remember their names. At it's very core, this is a modern day Frankenstein story, that of a robot-man seeking his own life, and like virtually every mad-scientist creation from Frankenstein to Jeff Goldblum's telepod in The Fly, RoboCop proves to have functions unplanned by his creators.
In the end, Murphy is denied the chance to overcome his programming and arrest Dick Jones, but it didn't matter by this point. The OCP chairman asked him for his name. He gave it. Murphy. Not RoboCop. All the jokes, the carnage, the cartoonish violence, even the "I'll buy that for a dollar!" guy can't detract from the sheer victory for humanity announced in that one single word: Murphy.
Called by Ken Russell "the greatest science-fiction film since Metropolis", RoboCop is an action packed, effects-laden cult phenomenon, a wholly original urban satire that has as much impact now as it did 15 years ago. No DVD or video collection is complete without it.
Production Year: 1964 - Action/Adventure - Director: Cyril Endfield - Original Language: English - Classification: Parental Guidance - Starring:Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, Ulla Jacobsson, James Booth, Michael Caine, Nigel Green
Production Year: 2002 - Action/Adventure - Director: Vincenzo Natali - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring:Lucy Liu, David Hewlett, Anne Marie Scheffler, Joseph Scoren, Matthew Sharp, Jeremy Northam
Action/Adventure - Director: Gore Verbinski - Original Language: English - Classification: 12 years and over - Starring:Bill Nighy, Keira Knightley, Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Chow Yun-Fat
Good op. The 80's were a strange time for movies but produced some of the finest Sci-Fi films ever in my opinion (Terminator/Blade Runner/Predator/Aliens... etc!)and Robo is certainly one of them because,as you point out, it ultimately adds up to more then the sum of its parts and is great fun too. Shame about 2 and 3 though..typical sequel fodder. cheers, Rik
alliecat 21.04.2002 10:13
What a stonking film! I'm a girl, but I loved it, and the religious symbolism is a typical Verhoeven shock device, similar to the Nazi overtones he used in Starship Troopers. He is such an underrated director - just because he makes action films doesn't mean he has nothing important to say! Great op. Allie xx
georgie_boy 18.04.2002 22:42
Was it just me or was whipping off his visor entirely the wrong thing to do in the third installment? (or was it the second one?) I cant say i share your enthusiasm for it- though enjoyable, Verhoeven always seems to go a bit too far with the cartoonish violence, eg; Starship Troopers; when the huge bug 'swallows' Dina Meyer's hand grenadey thing, or Total Recall, where Arnie scrapes off Richters arms on the open lift, or when Kuato is shot.
great op
When it arrived on the big screen in 1987, Paul Verhoeven'sRoboCopwas like a high-voltage ... more
jolt of electricity, blending satire, thrills, and abundant violence with such energized gusto that audiences couldn't help feeling stunned and amazed. The movie ...
Postage & Packaging: £1.21 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
When it arrived on the big screen in 1987, Paul Verhoeven'sRoboCopwas like a high-voltage ... more
jolt of electricity, blending satire, thrills, and abundant violence with such energized gusto that audiences couldn't help feeling stunned and amazed. The movie ...
Postage & Packaging: Free! Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours...
There's a new law enforcer in town...and he's half man, half machine! From the director of ... more
Total Recall and Basic Instinct comes a Sci-Fi fantasy witha sleek, high powered drive about an indestructible high-tech policeman who dishes out justice at ever...
Advantages: A classic piece of sci-fi - still relevant after almost 15 years, with little of its impact faded by time Disadvantages: Extremely voilent (perhaps too much so for some), the distinctly 80s feel
EnglishPatient 22.01.2001 ·
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Review of Robocop (DVD)
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Feb 27th, 2002
(Apr 12th, 2002)
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