Review: Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop Gets an Arrow Video Blu-ray Steelbook

This gnarly, amazing, quasi-hypocritical action thriller has been outfitted with an improved transfer and a superb bounty of extras.

RoboCopIt’s never quite clear who the joke is on in Paul Verhoeven’s films, as the filmmaker thrives on mixed messages, fashioning an aesthetic that blends trashiness with designer style. Verhoeven has the chutzpah and the talent to do whatever he pleases, reveling in a freedom of kinetics. Take 1987’s RoboCop, which drops left-wing talking points in the middle of a vigilante thriller so sadistic it’d make Death Wish blush. This tension—between social protest and reactionary ultraviolence—yields a visceral kind of meaninglessness. Anyone of any ideology can bring to the film whatever sentiments they wish, and this malleability is Verhoeven’s most caustic punchline. RoboCop embodies the nihilism of self-interested, self-canceling political cacophony.

The most irritating facet of the prototypical American vigilante thriller, especially of the ’70s and ’80s, is its aura of macho self-pity. When middle-class white men kill in these films, it’s because they have no other choice in the face of crime that’s unpunished by liberal politicians. (Such a theme can’t be laughed off as a trope, as it continues to be a selling point for carny politicians even as the nation’s crime rate drops.) In RoboCop, Verhoeven and screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner turn this cliché on its head, as the crime-ridden hellscape of future Detroit is controlled by capitalist fascists who run amok under the implicit protection of Reaganomics. Detroit’s government has been subsumed by OCP (which stands, hilariously generically, for Omni Consumer Products), a company with ties to the military that has recently taken control of the police department and is systematically crushing police unions while rendering human cops beside the point with new weaponry.

OCP is also in bed with street criminals, particularly the vicious Clarence (Kurtwood Smith), whom they play against the cops in a bid to wipe everyone out so as to realize a new gentrification project. This notion, of the government funding killers to suit its own means, suggests too many Reagan-era controversies to count. (The president’s proposed space defense program, Star Wars, is also referenced, and is revealed to have a habit of accidentally killing people.) Much of this world-building is introduced via TV soundbites that relate atrocity with a glibness that represents virtually no satirical exaggeration of news programs. The soundbites are punctuated with advertisements that also barely exaggerate the sorts of promotions of the time. Only one coherent message arises out of all this stimulation: Buy things, and, when you can’t, commit aggression. Buy a woman for a dollar, as a TV personality says, or pretend to nuke your brother from the comfort of your bedroom. (Lest we miss the point, Clarence, a budding entrepreneur, even directly says that there’s no theft like free enterprise.)

Advertisement

Yet there’s a key difference between RoboCop and most left-leaning message movies: Verhoeven gets off on the heartlessness of his villains, pruning his political platitudes of the earnestness that can often make message movies feel so naïve and insipid. This film, with its cold, hard, silver sheen, studied callousness, and whip-snap editing, understands the pull of capitalism, of the giddiness of exercised force, which is the hunger—for movement, for every desire to be gratified regardless of larger implications—that the action genre satiates to begin with. The film’s satire of America as a corporate wasteland is wallpaper laid upon bitter walls. Corporate overreach might be destroying us in RoboCop, but it’s also our savior.

A more earnest sci-fi auteur might’ve wrestled with the existential crisis of a man who’s turned into a machine, a development that suggests the ultimate commodified invasion of an invasive age. Verhoeven pays occasionally poignant lip service to this idea, and Peter Weller’s gravity in the central role serves as resonant emotional shorthand, but the filmmaker can’t wait to get his metal warrior—billed by the film’s poster as “part man, part machine, all cop”—out into Detroit’s ravaged streets to do battle with Clarence and his goons, who blew RoboCop’s human basis to pieces in a scene of ejaculatory violence that’s still shocking. (Verhoeven has as much fun in this scene as Clarence, and this killing mirrors an earlier murder committed by the ED-209, a law-enforcement robot with Gatling-gun arms that’s unable to arrest without excessive force. Such an echo further rhymes Clarence with the OCP.)

Once RoboCop hits the streets, the film becomes one of the most disturbingly exhilarating of all action thrillers. Like future Verhoeven mixtures of kitsch and art object, RoboCop is broken up into hard, tactile shards of action, from the stabbing of a thug’s throat to the splatter of another melting thug against a windshield. The very weighty metallic sound of RoboCop’s stride is intoxicating—a promise of violence to be unleashed that’s pronouncedly fulfilled. When he fires his gun, which suggests a steroidal .45, it resounds with the aural dimensions of a canon. RoboCop’s very invincibility serves to shed the vigilante film of its fake pathos, providing us with a wave of force, in which objects of left- and right-wing scorn are destroyed with equal prejudice. The film’s appeal resides in a willingness to allow everyone to have their cake and eat it too, as the right of the corporation’s power to inherit the world is ultimately vindicated in a finale of stunning violence that’s arguably sarcastic, though by this point such a distinction hardly matters. RoboCop is a celebration of the politics of unbridled formalism.

Advertisement

Image/Sound

RoboCop has always looked a little vague and blurry to these eyes over the years, and Arrow Video’s new 4K transfer addresses many of these issues. The glare of several transfers (particularly in rendering RoboCop’s suit) has been reduced; the silvers and whites are quite attractive here. Facial and clothing details are nuanced, and other colors are livelier than they’ve been before. If there’s still a certain pervading softness to the image, this seems to be inherent to the film’s memorably grimy aesthetic, especially in the deliberately cheap-looking videos that embody the film’s cynical view of the media. Which is to say that RoboCop has been subtly buffed up without compromising its aura of underground sleaziness. The multiple audio tracks are conventionally superb, and this is a film that allows for a real show-pony presentation, abounding in bass-y, cacophonic aural fireworks, which are tied together by Basil Poledouris’s quasi-ironically patriotic score. The 5.1 track offers an especially immersive soundstage, potentially inspiring you to dodge bullets, if that’s your thing.

Extras

This collection of extras is gargantuan even by Arrow’s obsessive standards. Three versions of the film are included: the director’s cut, the theatrical cut, and an edited TV cut. As a variety of featurettes contrasting the various versions remind us, Verhoeven’s cut was rated X by the MPAA and so trims were made, most famously to the scene where the ED-209 mows down an executive during a conference. (For what it’s worth, Verhoeven is right: The longer, gorier version is funnier, reveling in the sheer pointlessness of this machine’s depravity.)

There are also interviews and tributes, new and archival, centered on many a significant person involved in RoboCop’s production, including Verhoeven, screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, the film’s stars (and even supporting bad guys), and the FX specialists who created the RoboCop suit and the ED-209. One of the most revealing of these programs is the interview with second-unit director and frequent Verhoeven collaborator Mark Goldblatt, who offers a succinct and informative description of the precise function of second-unit work, while discussing his specific role in Verhoeven’s productions. There’s also an archival commentary with Verhoeven, executive producer Jon Davison, and Neumeier, as well as two new commentaries by film historian Paul M. Sammon and fans Christopher Griffiths, Gary Smart, and Eastwood Allen, respectively. These commentaries, taken together with photo galleries, storyboards and alternate scenes, offer a comprehensive history of RoboCop.

Advertisement

And, yes, the filmmakers are very aware of the film’s mixed political messaging, and discuss it frankly, particularly in “RoboTalk,” a new conversation between Neumeier and filmmakers David Burke and Nicholas McCarthy, and in a 2012 panel discussion with most of the pivotal players who worked on the film. The best description of RoboCop is attributed to Davison, who’s said to have called it “fascism for liberals.”

Overall

This gnarly, amazing, quasi-hypocritical action thriller has been outfitted with an improved transfer and a superb bounty of extras. I’d buy that for a dollar.

Score: 
 Cast: Peter Weller, Kurtwood Smith, Ronny Cox, Miguel Ferrer, Nancy Allen, Ray Wise, Paul McCrane, Calvin Jung, Felton Perry, Robert DoQui  Director: Paul Verhoeven  Screenwriter: Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner  Distributor: Arrow Video  Running Time: 102 min  Rating: R  Year: 1987  Release Date: November 26, 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.