RoboCop Movie Analysis and Review
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Evil company Omni Consumer Products gets a contract from the city government to privatize the police in Detroit. Crime-fighting cyborgs: The company leads street cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) into a fight with crime lord Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) so they can use his body to test their RoboCop prototype. But when RoboCop learns about the company's evil plans, he turns on his boss.
The movie Robocop, by Paul Verhoeven, is about a murdered police officer who is turned into the ultimate crime-fighting machine. It's hard for me to forget my fanboy side when I'm reviewing it. The movie has a lot of action, great scenes, and a cool idea. Robocop is one of the best movies ever made.
Officer Murphy (Peter Weller) has recently been reassigned to the city's most dangerous precinct. During a routine patrol, he and his new partner, Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), are confronted by Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his gang, who are among the city's worst criminals. Murphy is killed by Boddicker's men in an abandoned warehouse.
But as it turns out, Officer Murphy isn't done yet!
But is Robocop really more machine than man, or will the memories of his "human" past keep him from being fully robot?
Robocop is a great mix of sci-fi and action. There are a lot of great scenes in this movie. When Murphy and Boddicker's gang first fight, it's very bloody. Boddicker blows Murphy's hand off with a shotgun, and Verhoeven shows us every bloody part of it (in the uncut version, anyway). In the Omni Corporation's board room, Dick Jones is staging a demonstration of his favorite project, the ED-209, which is a huge robot with a lot of weapons. There are still some problems with the ED-209, which become clear when it blows away Kinney (Kevin Page), the young businessman who agreed to be a test subject!
Despite the thrilling action, Robocop is more than just a series of gunfights. The "creation" of Robocop, as seen from his point of view, is one of the film's most spectacular scenes (those moments when, early in the transformation process, he regains consciousness). During the New Year's Eve celebrations, Robocop is strapped to a table at Omni's labs and we witness most of what happens in small bits.
So if you're a fan of movies with a message, Robocop is the film for you.
Early in "RoboCop" a robot goes on the rampage. Intended to shoot anybody who doesn't put down their weapon if they don't comply with its instructions. It is wheeled into a board meeting of the firm that wants to profit from selling the robot, an unsightly and cumbersome gadget. The machine gets shot at by a junior executive. There's a warning out there. It seems that the exec has surrendered his weapon. This time, after a quick countdown, the robot fires a warning shot and ends the threat.
The sequence shocks us since it occurs in a movie that was turning into a thriller. Uncertainty is one of the film's strongest points.
The movie is set in the future, but it doesn't say when. It takes place in Detroit, which is a city where gang violence is the norm. There has been a lot of killings by cops that were very rough. There is a big company that wants to sell the robot cops to fight crime, but the demonstrator model doesn't seem to be up to the task.
Many of the robocop's personality comes through his voice, which is robotic and a lot like a machine. When I was at the Atlanta airport a few weeks ago, I was on the shuttle train that took me to my terminal, and the train started talking just like robocop. It didn't have any accents or words. ("Your-attention-please-the-doors-are-about-to-close.")
I laughed at myself. No one else did. To make the commands seem like they came from an authority that could not be appealed to, the robotic audio style was chosen. The recorded message could have been made with a normal human voice. In "RoboCop," Verhoeven and Weller get a lot of mileage out of the conflict between that utterly assured voice and the increasingly confused being behind it.
Considering that he spends most of the movie hidden behind some kind of makeup, Weller does a great job of making the character he plays feel like a real person. This makes him seem more "human," though, than when he's just an ordinary human being in the movie. Nancy Allen is good as the determined partner who wants to find out what happened to him. His story is very interesting, and she does a good job.
Tickets Sold
Because of increased ticket prices and an additional week of the summer theatrical season, 1987 broke the previous record of $1.58 billion in box office revenue achieved in 1984 by only $1.6 billion. Only one blockbuster was released in 1987, as opposed to the previous summer's slew of hits like Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. RoboCop was among the more successful pictures, grossing $274 million in total, a 50 percent increase over 1986. Teen films like RoboCop and Beverly Hills Cop II had a 22% reduction in performance compared to their 1986 counterparts, as the average audience age continued to rise. Revenue from adult-oriented films grew by 39 percent. The success of RoboCop, one of the summer's biggest surprises, helped boost Orion's fortunes.
Critical Reaction
A lot of publications thought Verhoeven's direction was smart and darkly funny, with sharp social satire that, the Washington Post said, would have been just a simple action movie if it had been directed by a different person. Others, such as Dave Kehr and the Chicago Reader, found the picture was over-directed with Verhoeven's European filmmaking style missing rhythm, intensity, and pace. The Chicago Reader said that Verhoeven's usual skill at portraying the "sleazily psychological" through physicality didn't work well with RoboCop's "Aryan blandness" which the film is about. The Washington Post and Roger Ebert both said that Weller did a good job and that he was able to make people feel bad and show chivalry and vulnerability even though he was mostly hidden by a big costume. The Washington Post said that Weller had a kind of beauty and grace that made his death even more horrible. In contrast, Weller "hardly registered" behind the mask for the Chicago Reader. Variety highlighted Nancy Allen as providing the only human warmth in the film, and Kurtwood Smith as a well-cast "sicko sadist".
Among the film's most successful efforts, according to Kehr and The Washington Post, was its satire of corporations and the interchangeable use of corporate executives and street-level criminals to show their unchecked greed and callous disregard alongside witty criticisms of subjects such as game shows and military culture. While some viewers appreciated this adaptation of an old-fashioned story about an individual's quest for justice and redemption, the Los Angeles Times noted the film's transformation of a typical cliché revenge story into a mechanical character that keeps succumbing to human emotions, feelings, and ideas. It was pleasing to the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer that RoboCop's triumph gave a parable of a virtuous hero battling back against corruption, villains and the stealing of his humanity, with morality and technology on his side, since it offered a parable. The Washington Post concurred that the film's storyline was well-crafted "With all our flesh-and-blood heroes failing us—from brokers to baseball players—we need a man of mettle, a real straight shooter who doesn't fool around with Phi Beta Kappas and never puts anything up his nose. We need a man like Murphy." 'RoboCop' is what our planet desperately needs."
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