Visions of the Future: Robocop (Dir Paul Verhoeven, 1h 42m, 1987)

Somewhere in Detroit, Michigan, a statue stands, awaiting its plinth, and public unveiling; it's not a sports hero, or a musician or actor, though Motown launched itself into the American conscious from the city, nor is it a historical figure, though the city has no shortage of (in)famous people who called it home. For the past decade, the city has raged back and forth on how, where, and indeed if, it should finally erect this tribute to one of its most famous sons; this wouldn't be so outlandish but for one fact: the statue isn't even of a real person, but a fictional character. The statue is of RoboCop (played by Peter Weller), a cyborg policeman patrolling the streets of a dystopian near-future Detroit (actually mostly shot in Dallas), in the 1987 Paul Verhoeven film of the same name, and whilst it may have begun as the result of a rivalry with Philadelphia and the statue of its own cinematic icon, the statue and its subject mean far more to the city than this. Why?

Robocop himself is a good place to start: Robocop, without question, is one of the great science-fiction designs of the 1980s, a mixture of the art-deco, co-opted from Star Wars' C-3PO, itself cribbing from Metropolis' (1927) Maria, and the designs of Marvel super-heroes. There is also the sizable debt, both in design, in particular the half-face helmet, and the character's no-nonsense pragatism and his often dryly humoured retorts to criminals, to 2000AD's Judge Dredd. In the armour, designed by Rob Bottin, who would also head the special effects team, there is also a distinctly Japanese sensibility, influenced by the artwork of Hajima Sorayama, who would later go on to design the AIBO robotic dog.  Yet, the man behind the mask is far more than simply an extention of the Eastwoodian ruthless cop, much as Dirty Harry influenced the initial concept-Robocop, for all the film's other darkly satirical elements, is an ultimately good man at the centre of a dystopia.

His arrival in an embattled Detroit Central, now under the auspices of Omni Consumer Products (hereafter OCP), is not just a great introduction to the character, entering a police HQ struggling with its financial overseers, the rising death toll due to criminal Clarence Boddicker (a scene-stealing and gloriously unpleasant turn from Kurtwood Smith), and an increasingly militant police force threatening to go on strike. It is also a smartly done introduction to this world, the film interjected with multiple faux news broadcasts, and Verhoeven, together with the film's creator and co-writer, Edward Neumeier,'s darkly satirical take on post-modern America. The world outside Detroit is slowly falling into what seems to be a third World War, with military action in Mexico, and war ravaging the rest of the world. Inside Detroit, in the words of co-writer Michael Miner, is an indictment of Reaganism.

Following his death at the hand of Boddicker's thugs-a grim scene that proceeds into Peckinpah-ish excess as Murphy is practically torn apart by bullets, so OCP and the ever-present spectre of hypercapitalism comes to the fore, Miguel Ferrer's Bob Morton taking posession of Murphy's corpse and reanimating it via science and technology to create the first cyborg crime fighter. Simultenously, Verhoeven, Miner and Neumeier do two things: first, they produce a nigh-unstoppable action hero-his arrival on the streets of Detroit, to Basil Poledouris's thunderous score feels triumphant, and his combatting and subsequent arrests of the city's criminals, complete with quips, may feel like something out of an action movie. Yet, this is, although his return to life is affecting, shot largely in a point of view with a blurred filter by cinematographer Jost Vacano (also responsible for the claustrophobic Das Boot) as he is trained and grows from cyborg newborn to police officer, he is no longer truly a man, but a machine, a possession of OCP.

Here, once more, Detroit comes into focus: ravaged, in the view of Miner by Reagonomics, by capitalism red in tooth and claw. Whilst not understood by Verhoeven at first, leading to his relucantance to direct this film. This we can see in the film's most savage sequences: the boardroom scenes of OCP. Here, Ronny Cox's gleefully nasty Dick Jones holds court, a corporate Machiavelli climbing the greasy pole by any means necessary, first unveilling the security robot ED-209 (animated by stop-start animation titan, Phil Tippett), which proceeds to murder another member of the board in typical Verhoeven violence. Whilst his initial plans to replace the Detroit police with the robot are thwarted-there's a dark implication of an indifference from Jones if the machine works or murders random bystanders because it's cheap- Morton and his RoboCop program is no better, his boardroom dog-eat-dog mentality eventually turning fatal as Jones sets his sights on the gentrification of Detroit.

More than this, against the cold steel of corporate America, Robocop is a film about humanity, and about a man wresting his identity back from a corporation; this runs contrary to both Blade Runner, on which Neumeier cut his teeth, which considers the near-humanity of its replicants but, at least in its raw 1980s form, stops short of considering how human its protagonist is, whilst The Terminator others its cyborg menace into a slasher villain, an unstopppable killing machine. Neumier has something very different in mind: a film about a mechanical man regaining his humanity. This is not just a philosophical quandary: thinkers like Marxist Slavoj Žižek and British psychoanalyist, Darian Leader considering the film's mix of brutal capitalism and deeply personal regaining of selfhood, indeed, if Robocop can become Murphy again, but, from Verhoeven himself, a surprisingly religious one. This is, after all, a film with a hero that is executed, rises from the dead and-yes-walks on water at one point.

Yet, Robocop is, like much of Verhoeven's action movies from the late 1980s to late 1990s, more than the sum of its parts; yes, Robocop is a ultraviolent action feature that critiques Reaganomics, inner city deprivation, and the rise of business-as-ruling-class, that, more than anything we've covered this season, feels like a prescient warning of things to come, many of which have arrived. It is a film in which  a man's internal struggle to be human is his drive, rather than the rote mechanicalism of the 80s action hero. It is also a gleefully stupid film in which a man is turned to sludge by toxic waste, our protagonist can fix himself with a screwdriver, and where Richard Nixon played a starring role in the film's promotion. We've viewed a handful of great cinematic visions this season, but most of all, in all its profound and moronic beauty, only Robocop feels like we're living in it. And somewhere in Detroit, that statue, that Robocop, stands, and waits, to patrol the city that loves him so, once more.

Rating: Must See

Robocop is available via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD and BluRay from Warner Home Video in the UK and via streaming on HBOMax, and on DVD from Warner Home Video

Next week and indeed next month we arrive in December with a Very Welles Christmas, as we discuss what could have been the director's other masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons