Robocop - The old one

With the release of the remake of the 1980s blood-fest Robocop upon us, there have been a few reviews knocking around in which I have seen various people telling me how much they love and respect the original movie.  Robocop is a film I saw as a teenager, probably at too young an age as several of the brutally violent scenes have stuck in my mind ever since.  It's a film that I never had any great affinity for, but since seeing so many people who's views I usually respect talking it up I decided to watch it again.  With nothing to do a few Friday evenings ago (Valentines Day) I fired up Netflix in the hope of finding Robocop and yes, there it was.  Time to watch it again for the first time in over 20 years.

It was almost immediately obvious from the opening scenes that the satire of Robocop had totally passed me by as a young teenager.  We are treated to a series of farcical news reports and adverts set in a corporate dominated near-future.  Here, the US city of Detroit has been condemned to rot under the heel of ruthless criminals, while the police officers who are supposed to fight them are reduced to cannon fodder in a war the corporation is funding both sides of.

Robocop is very similar to Starship Troopers.  Both are films that present a hyper-real nightmare vision of a near future in which the corporation / fascist government is set upon erasing all traces of humanity that don't fit into their plan.  Of course these films both have the same director, so the comparison is obvious.  Inside the first 5 minutes we are treated to the infamous ED-209 scene (youtube clip not available) in which an over-the-top military grade android is presented as the solution to Detroit's crime problems.  The droid comes complete with automatic machine guns, which are for some reason fully-loaded for the boardroom demonstration that goes wrong in elaborately gory fashion after ED-209 decides that one of the board members is a threat that needs to be 'neutralised'.  All the rest of the boardroom seem to care about is that there's now one less person trying to climb the greasy pole.  It's a scene that sets the tone for the rest of the film as a hyper-violent parody of the militarisation of the police and the seedy effect that corporate influence can have over society.

The acting is very hammy in places and the film revels in clichés (angry black police sergeant, evil corporate boss and their toady stooges) but the point is made in spite of this.  Even by modern standards it's an incredibly violent film.  It harks back to an age before digital effects when fake blood was used on set rather than being digitally added in post-production.  The two crucial scenes at the start of the film when ED-209 kills the boardroom toadie and then Officer Murphy is murdered in cold blood each go on for much longer than strictly necessary.  There is a lot of focus on the injury and harm being done, with the final bullet through Murphy's head being shown in close-up as it creates a hole through his skull.  For these reasons I expect that even as a contemporary film it would be an 18.

If the new version of Robocop does nothing else, then at the very least it has given me an excuse to go and seek out the original for the first time in what must be 20 years.  It's a film that deserves a lot more credit than I had been prepared to give it, and with grown-up eyes it's clearly much more than just a cheesily-acted slice of ultra-violence.  What films did you watch as a kid and have never seen since?  Perhaps it's time to go back and give some of them another go.