RoboCop (1987)

There's a moment in RoboCop where a corporate suit smugly presents a walking tank of a robot to a boardroom full of executives, it malfunctions spectacularly, and a man gets shot dead in front of everyone. The suits are horrified. Not because someone died. Because of the PR problem. That scene tells you everything you need to know about what Paul Verhoeven was up to here, and it tells you within the first twenty minutes. This isn't just an action film. It's a savage, gleefully violent skewering of corporate America dressed up in a bulletproof vest.

And what a skewering it is. RoboCop is, without question, one of the finest pieces of 80s sci-fi ever committed to film. It's got everything: a propulsive, genuinely iconic score, gore so over-the-top it loops back around into dark comedy, and a satirical bite sharp enough to draw blood. The fake adverts and news segments that punctuate the film are a masterstroke, each one a little grenade of commentary on consumerism, media rot, and the creeping privatisation of everything that should be public. Decades on, some of those jokes land harder than they probably did in 1987. That's either very clever filmmaking or a depressing sign of the times. Probably both.

Peter Weller is extraordinary in the title role, doing something genuinely difficult: making you feel the humanity beneath the armour when the character can barely move his face. The physicality of his performance is meticulous. The stiff, deliberate walk. The way he holds himself. There's grief and confusion in there, buried under metal and corporate branding, and Weller finds it without ever overplaying his hand. The supporting cast are tremendous fun too, leaning into the heightened, almost theatrical tone of the whole thing without tipping into parody.

The action, meanwhile, is brutally, gleefully satisfying. Verhoeven never lets you forget that violence has weight, that bodies break and bleed and don't get back up. It's nasty in the best possible way, the kind of R-rated filmmaking that studios seem increasingly reluctant to greenlight these days. There's a confidence to every set piece, a sense that everyone involved knew exactly what kind of film they were making and committed to it completely. That commitment is what separates RoboCop from its imitators.

And yes, I'll say it plainly: this is the only RoboCop film worth your time. The sequels exist. I've seen them. We don't need to talk about them. The 2014 remake is a competent, entirely forgettable film that strips out everything that made the original dangerous and replaces it with a PG-13 shrug. The original works precisely because it refuses to be safe. It's violent and funny and angry and strange, and it holds all of those things together without any of them cancelling the others out.

What strikes me most on revisiting it is how little it has dated. The setting is a near-future Detroit on the verge of collapse, run by a corporation more interested in real estate than justice, policed by underpaid, undervalued workers being strong-armed out of their jobs by automated replacements. If you wrote that pitch today someone would call it timely. The film earns its relevance not by being preachy but by being smart, hiding its politics inside a story that works just as well if you only want to watch a half-man, half-machine punch criminals through walls. You can take RoboCop at face value and have a brilliant time. Or you can pay attention to what it's actually saying. Either way you're getting your money's worth.

Four stars, and honestly I wrestled with giving it the full five. It's an absolute gem of a film, one of those rare cases where blockbuster instincts and genuine filmmaking intelligence are pulling in exactly the same direction. See it if you somehow haven't. See it again if you have.

Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)

Originally logged on Letterboxd.