FromNight of the Living DeadtoThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre, genre moviescan be used to convey sociopolitical messagesmuch more effectively than a straightforward Oscar-bait drama. Paul Verhoeven’sRoboCopis a prime example. Its premise of a cop being brought back to life as a killing machine is used as a springboard to indulge in many explosions, car chases, and blood-soaked shootouts, but it’s also used to satirize authoritarianism and corporate greed.
Alex Murphy is a good cop who’s gunned down and left for dead by a sadistic gang and then reassembled by a corporation and sold back to the Detroit Police Department to launch a relentless one-man crusade against the city’s rampant crime. While it’s primarily an ultraviolent B-movie, Verhoeven’s masterpiece also touches on the privatization of law enforcement and the concept of personal identity (a popular theme for science fiction).
RELATED:RoboCop Prequel Series in the Works But it Doesn’t Have RoboCop
As with any existing movie that has the slightest whiff of familiarity, Hollywood has done everything in its power to turnRoboCopinto a cash-cow franchise it can rely on for regular profits. Since the original movie is best remembered forits uncompromising violenceand political overtones – two things modern studio executives avoid like the plague to keep their audience as wide as possible – launching aRoboCopfranchise has proven to be easier said than done. The 1987 original was followed by a couple of sequels with rapidly diminishing returns before the whole franchise was inevitably rebooted in 2014 by José Padilha.
Just as one would expect from the director ofElite Squad, 2014’sRoboCophas plenty of solid, visceral action sequences. For all intents and purposes, it’s a satisfying blockbuster. But it’s a disappointment as aRoboCopmovie for two key reasons: Alex keeps taking off his helmet after he becomes RoboCop, allowing him to live his life as a normal human and connect with the family he’s supposed to have lost, which humanized him and therefore defeated the point; and on top of that, the reboot was entirely lacking in the original movie’s satirical edge, despite the ample opportunities provided by updatingVerhoeven’s ‘80s-era satirefor the fraught modern-day political and economic landscape.
Joel Kinnaman is a fine actor, as his performances inEasy Money,The Killing, andAltered Carbonhave more than proved, butPeter Weller was a much better RoboCop. Weller humanized Murphy in the movie’s early scenes, then snapped into playing him as a callous, cold-hearted machine as soon as Omni Consumer Products turned him into their own personal murder slave. This arc culminates in a hugely satisfying finale in which RoboCop turns on his makers before identifying himself as “Murphy.”
In the 2014 reboot, the transformation doesn’t have any effect on Murphy’s characterization, which flattened his arc. After becoming RoboCop, he’s the same heroic, likable, regular guy he was before, which suits the evergreen superhero blockbuster the studio was going for, but works against the anti-authoritarian satire ofRoboCop. If RoboCop isframed as a traditional “good guy,”then the movie endorses OCP’s ruthless police state.
TheRoboCopreboot was just a few months shy of existing in a nearly identical political landscape to the one in which its predecessor was made. The original 1987RoboCopmovie was read by contemporary critics as a direct response to Ronald Reagan’s policies, and just over a year after the 2014RoboCopreboot hit theaters, an ultimately successful Presidential campaign was launched that literally recycled Reagan’s own slogan.
As with any movie that costs a studio more than $100 million, executive meddling may be the blame for the disappointment of 2014’sRoboCop. It’s unlikely that the studio decided to pump that much money into a newRoboCopmovie in order to satirize the socioeconomic landscape; it’s more likely that they saw the potential for a new superhero franchise so they could cut off their own slice of the Marvel pie. But if RoboCop is a superhero, he hasa lot more in common with Judge Dreddand the Punisher than Iron Man and Captain America.
Much like the 1987 original, aRoboCopreboot has the chance to be both a razor-sharp satire and a crowd-pleasing action thriller, but the studio needs to be willing to take creative risks to make it happen. After the 2014 reboot’s underperformance at the box office made its planned sequels a moot point, the studio is rebooting the franchise yet again with a project titledRoboCop Returns.
The fact thatLittle Monsters’ Abe Forsythe is onboard to direct the new movie is a promising sign that the franchise’s sense of humor is making a comeback. Hopefully, the studio executives will take a step back and give Forsythe the freedom to restore the biting satire that Paul Verhoeven imbued in the originalRoboCopmovie.
