Viking Night: Robocop
By Bruce Hall
March 2, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Stop! Or my cyborg will shoot!
Most consumers have no problem loving a huge budget blockbuster. Movies that are meant to appeal to the widest possible audience usually do just that. But some films have a narrower vision, or simply contain more complex meaning than meets the eye. They aren't always art, and they aren't always even very successful. But for a devoted and eccentric few, they're the best entertainment money can buy. Once, beginning with Erik the Viking, a group of dedicated irregulars gathered weekly in a dingy dorm room to watch these films and discuss how what pleases the few might also appeal to the many. Time has separated the others in those discussions so that I alone remain to ponder the wider significance of cult cinema. But while the room is cleaner and I no longer have to skip class to do it, I still think of my far off friends whenever I hold Viking Night.

It’s ironic that a movie about a mechanical police officer was the first one I ever sneaked into. In fact, it wasn’t even that simple. Since a friend and I were too young to get into a rated R film not only did we sneak in to see Robocop, but we hid in the theater until the next showing and watched it again. I’m not trying to glorify breaking the law; I’m just waxing nostalgic about a film that made a significant impact on me as a child. Maybe because at that age the primary appeal of Robocop was the violence and the fact that it was, well, about Robocop. Come on, it’s a movie about a crime fighting cyborg with a big gun and a cool voice. What more do you need? But with the benefit of years you don’t always tend to appreciate a film for the same reasons you did the first time you saw it, and sometimes you lose the ability to appreciate it at all. It turns out that for me, Robocop is still equal parts entertaining and disturbing, but even more interesting than before. The film’s biting cultural satire resonates more now than it did then; what seemed like an over the top depiction of the future looks, in some ways, pretty quaint today.

It’s said that Peter Weller spent his time between takes in character, refusing to respond to any name but "Robo." This level of dedication to a movie about a crime fighting robot might seem unnecessary. But had everyone involved not taken it so seriously, the material wouldn’t have worked as anything other than excruciating B movie camp. As a result, the first 30 minutes of Robocop are among the smoothest of any film you’ll ever see. You’re whisked into a bleak, funhouse version of the future. You’re shown how things work and why. You’re introduced to the main characters and to the origin of everyone’s favorite titanium traffic cop. It’s a near perfect arc that richly sets the pace and tone of the story and positions the film for what should be an easy home run, but ends up being more like a sweet double play.

Except for one thing, Robocop is a great mix of action and satire. Except for one thing, Robocop transcends its own silliness and flirts with the great dour classics of the era, like Blade Runner and The Terminator. But one tiny thing has kept Robocop a lightning rod of controversy for a quarter century and prevented the city of Detroit from awarding its hometown humanoid hero the statue he so richly deserves. And that thing is an almost Saving Private Ryan level of graphic violence. But before I dwell on this, let’s open up the hood on Robocop and see what else is inside.

It’s the story of Detroit Police officer Alex Murphy (Weller), a pleasant but somewhat naïve man who’s devoted to both his job and his family. In fact, Murphy is such a good sport it almost seems like he doesn’t belong in this film, and that’s kind the point. Right off the bat we see that he is a swell guy stuck doing his job in a not so swell world. Throughout Robocop a series of humorous "news breaks" interrupt the action, masquerading as a cable news update of the future. They put context around the film’s events and provide a needed break from the story’s dark and cynical foundation. Apparently the future is going to be one where urban crime and drugs will be rampant. Corporate corruption will be at an all time high and America will be fighting two wars against terrorist aggression. The public will hardly notice because a glut of cheap consumer goods, bad television and 24 hour mass media will be there to soothe their troubled nerves.

In today’s world violent crime and drugs are down but the rest of planet Robocop sounds remarkably like what we see every day on CNN, if we’re not too busy catching up on Jersey Shore. It’s definitely real for Alex Murphy, and today he’ll kiss his family goodbye and walk into his new assignment with a spring in his step. And on his first day there, he’ll become the 32nd officer killed in a year.

Murphy’s untimely demise comes at the hands of Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith, the future Red Forman putting his foot in Detroit’s ass), the city’s leading crime boss. Boddicker is 100% psycho and lives life like Grand Theft Auto. Every day is a party and if you get in his way, he’ll riddle you with bullets and spit his gum out on your body. But Boddicker isn’t the only problem in town. A shadowy corporation called Omnicorp runs the city and the police department. Omnicorp creates artificial need for its security products by under funding the police, allowing violent crime to run wild. Murphy becomes Robocop when one of Omnicorp’s schemes – a cyborg protector – ends up needing a recently dead volunteer. Robocop proves to be an efficient dispenser of law enforcement bad-assery, yet he’s haunted by memories of his family, and of the men who shot him. This puts the temperamental tin man at odds with Boddicker and the feuding executives at Omnicorp, who view Detroit as nothing more than a chess board on which to test each other’s ego. Unbelievably, this scenario is executed nearly to perfection from a crisp, witty script full of humor and more than a little smug self awareness. But there’s just that one little thing…

I am absolutely not a Puritan, and generally don’t take issue with high levels of bloodshed provided it feels relative to the plot. This is a subjective issue, of course, so let’s just say that I am an enthusiastic fan of Grand Theft Auto, therefore Clarence Boddicker and therefore Robocop. But even I have limits. For me, it isn’t so much a matter of being grossed out, although it will be with most people. It’s more because the story was already endowed with everything it needed to be successful. The story already presented a society so desensitized to violence that a room full of business executives could laugh off an epic death moments after witnessing it. The movie already drew out a world so devoid of accountability that governments, corporations and the people they served all viewed each other as the problem. But like every Mel Brooks sketch that ever went on too long, a handful of scenes in Robocop overextend their welcome, shoot past the point they were trying to make and into the realm of visual hyperbole. The death of Alex Murphy serves the story well on a number of levels, one of them being that in this movie the police are portrayed as heroes - trapped in the middle of a war, trying to balance their duty to serve while the facts on the ground make it impossible to do so.

But since Robocop clearly wants to be a drama as much as anything else, it’s fair to point out that Murphy’s over the top sacrifice ends up trivializing itself a bit. Much of the film’s story focuses on the irony that when you become insensitive to suffering you become insensitive to your own humanity. But in radicalizing so much of its own message, Robocop stumbles over its own point and becomes, like Omnicorp, part of its own problem. I still view it as an all time classic but it’s a movie that thanks to its crassness has had a hard time finding mainstream enthusiasm.

Robocop has always been kind of a fanboy thing, and the fact that its violence almost got it an X rating pulled them all in, even as it pushed away their parents. It’s the reason I snuck into the theater that day. But beneath it all is a very good dystopian thriller that makes great points about how societies decay while never taking itself as seriously as that sounds. And at the center of it is a man who just wanted to do the right thing, was brutally punished for it, yet ended up a savior to the very people who wronged him. I know, that story probably reminds you of something else. But Robocop is already surrounded by controversy. Let’s not bring religion into it, too.