71. Robocop (1987) - Dir: Paul Verhoeven
Paul Verhoeven's Robocop is a movie that film fans like to discuss. Like Videodrome, or Blade Runner, it is a science-fiction-genre film that transcends the boundaries of genre-conventions, and is appreciated in both low and high brow circles. I often hear film fans discussing its subversive criticism of corporate America, capitalism, and state sanctioned violence, while praising Verhoeven's satirical wit and scathing socio-political commentary. Often times, when I hear people discussing the film's virtues, I feel as though I am the only one who likes the film simply because of its nasty, ultra-violence, amazing special effects and squib usage, and for its hard-hitting future-noir, cyberpunk narrative.
Robocop's bloodletting is a thing of grotesque beauty. Each individual bullet wound inflicted on each of the film's many victims can be felt; the transfer of pain from screen to viewer is something I admire. While much of the violence is over-the-top and cartoon-like in its execution, the special-effects, and the characters' reaction to the agony they are suffering, masterfully convey primal feelings of writhing, gut-wrenching pain. When the out-of-control ED-209 guns down a hapless office-monkey during a company meeting, each individual bullet wound erupts in a technical fury of cloth, flesh, and blood, doubly so in the uncut version of the film. The robot's victim gets shredded by military-grade ballistics, and flops around like a rag doll on a jackhammer, as freaked out bystanders watch in utter horror.
The acts of violence escalate throughout the film, each becoming more absurd, more painful, and more awesome, while each display of technical wizardry is more outlandishly executed than the last. When Murphy's (Paul Weller) hand and arm get blown off by Clarence (Kurtwood Smith) and his goons, the visceral punch of the gore coupled with Weller's twisted-in-agony facial expressions exude feelings of real torment and hell. This scene of torturous cruelty is one of the most powerful displays of cinematic violence ever captured on film, and it often elicits nervous bouts of laughter and seat-squirming from the audience. And who can forget the splat of gooey flesh and slime when the toxic-waste guy explodes all over the windshield of a speeding car? Robocop is simply teeming with memorable moments such as these, moments the truly do leave a lasting mark on its viewers, it is a scarring experience.
A well-told cyberpunk story should always deal with humankind's relationship with technology, and Robocop uses this as the foundation for its narrative. The desires to control steel, to create robot workers, and to use electronics as extensions of our own fragile lives is presently a growing reality, and has always been a concern of the cyberpunk narrative. However, these conventions almost always reveal their double-edged nature, as the flawed creators realize, usually far too late, that by creating something with their tainted human flesh, the creation itself becomes infused with it's creator's faults; mechanized sons inherit the sins of their human fathers. Robocop takes this premise a step further, and also examines the licensing rights of a corporate controlled cyborg. Who owns something that is part man and part machine, and what happens with the control of ownership when a battle is waged over the very soul and machine-parts of the cybernetic-being?
While I enjoy Robocop for its subversive satire, I enjoy it more for the its execution of genre-convention, and for its hardboiled, future-noir, cyberpunk narrative. That it takes the typically stoic, law enforcing hero, and turns him into a robotic-dispatcher of violent, no-holds-barred justice is a stroke of genius, and renders criticism of the hero's robotic-nature a moot point. However, even more than its narrative, I admire, and flat out love, the execution of its extraordinary violence, and the special effects the filmmakers use to achieve such wonderful, splatterific, gory, effects. Robocop is an example of an A-class, expertly crafted genre film, and I wish there were more like it.
