9 / 10
RoboCop is the satirical action franchise that established the cybernetic-cop subgenre and among the most accomplished critiques of late-1980s corporate American culture put on film. Paul Verhoeven directed the 1987 original. Irvin Kershner directed RoboCop 2 (1990). Fred Dekker directed RoboCop 3 (1993).
José Padilha directed the 2014 reboot. Peter Weller plays Officer Alex Murphy in the original and the second film. Robert John Burke replaces him in the third. Joel Kinnaman plays Murphy in the reboot. The premise is consistent across all four films.
A Detroit police officer is killed in the line of duty. The Omni Consumer Products corporation, which has effectively privatized the Detroit Police Department, uses the officer’s brain and face in a cybernetic body. The cyborg becomes the experimental urban policing solution. The technology has consequences the corporation didn’t anticipate.
The original made approximately fifty-three million dollars on a thirteen million dollar budget and ranks among the most respected American science fiction films of the 1980s. The sequels are progressively weaker.
The 2014 reboot is competent but significantly less ambitious than the original. The franchise is the case study in how a sharp satirical premise becomes a marketable franchise that loses its bite.
The original RoboCop is my kind of nasty. I think Verhoeven made a satire with real venom in it and then had the nerve to make it funny, and whenever Murphy’s humanity leaks through that metal suit it catches me off guard. The sequels are another story, and they drag the franchise down hard.
The 1987 Original
Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop is the foundational entry and the film that establishes everything later entries try to recapture. The Dutch director who lived through the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II brought his suspicion of authoritarian institutions to a critique of American corporate culture. The film satirizes Reagan-era privatization, advertising-driven media, militarized policing, and the systematic dehumanization of urban life. The satire is dense. The action is intense. The film justifies the R rating multiple times over.
The film’s commercial-break sequences are the satire’s most-quoted delivery vehicle. The future Detroit’s television advertisements run throughout the film. Cars that explode. Heart-attack-inducing food. Game shows that involve gambling for hostage rescue. The advertisements are funnier than most of the films Verhoeven was satirizing. The technique influenced later satirical productions for decades, including the Robocop sequels themselves, although none of those sequels captured the same energy.
Those fake ads are my favorite thing in the film. The exploding-car commercial gets a bigger laugh out of me than most comedies manage, and Verhoeven’s straight face while he runs them is what makes them sting.
For Writers
Satirical content can be delivered through in-world commercial inserts more effectively than through dialogue. RoboCop’s fake commercials communicate the world’s values in seconds. The audience absorbs the corporate culture through its advertising. The lesson is that culture in fiction is often best communicated through its commercial detritus instead of through its formal institutions. Show the audience the ads. The reader will read the society through what it’s selling itself.
Peter Weller
Peter Weller was forty during filming. The role required him to perform in a forty-pound metal suit while playing a character whose memories and personality were emerging through the cybernetic interface. The physical work is the foundation of the performance. Weller had studied mime under Marcel Marceau before the role. The movement work shows. Murphy moves with mechanical precision. The audience reads the character as a machine that’s been overlaid on a person instead of as a person inside a machine.
The performance is structurally important. The script asks the audience to invest in the personhood of a creature who’s mostly metal. Weller delivers the personhood through small specific human gestures that break through the mechanical movement. The way he tilts his head when uncertain. The way he addresses children with the residual warmth of a father. The slight delay before recognizing his former police partner. These small choices accumulate into a complete character. The performance is one of the great science fiction acting jobs of the 1980s.
The head tilt gets me. It’s such a small thing, and it’s the moment I stop seeing a machine and start worrying about the man inside it. I’d put Weller’s work here up against anything in the genre from that decade.
For Writers
A character whose humanity must emerge from a non-human shell needs an actor or writer who knows which human gestures to preserve. RoboCop’s Murphy is mostly machine. The humanity emerges through small consistent gestures. The audience reads the residual person from the limited signals. The lesson is that hybrid characters in fiction require the writer to know exactly which human traits the hybrid retains. Pick the gestures. Repeat them. The reader will assemble the full character from the consistent fragments.
The Sequels
RoboCop 2 (1990) lost Paul Verhoeven and gained Frank Miller as screenwriter.
The Miller screenplay was heavily rewritten in production, which Miller has discussed in later interviews. The result is a film that has Miller’s darkness without his craft and Verhoeven’s satirical edge replaced by a less coherent successor. The film has defenders. It’s significantly weaker than the original.
RoboCop 3 (1993) was rated PG-13. The decision to broaden the audience neutralized the satirical edge that depended on the R rating. Without graphic violence, the film can’t make the arguments about corporate brutality the original made. Robert John Burke replaced Peter Weller as Murphy. The recasting was a structural problem the film never solved. The film is a mediocre franchise extension.
No entry makes me angrier than RoboCop 3. Sanding the violence off a film whose whole point was violence is a choice only a marketing department could love, and losing Weller left Murphy as an empty suit.
José Padilha directed the 2014 RoboCop reboot. The film updates the premise to engage with post-9/11 surveillance state anxieties. Joel Kinnaman plays Murphy. Gary Oldman plays the lead scientist. Michael Keaton plays the corporate antagonist. The film is competent. It’s also missing the satirical edge that defined the original. The PG-13 rating constrains the project. The film made approximately two hundred and forty-two million dollars worldwide on a one hundred million dollar budget. That was sufficient for the studio’s purposes but not enough to launch a new franchise.
For Writers
A franchise whose original film derived its power from its rating loses that power when later entries reduce the rating to broaden the audience. RoboCop’s R rating was structurally necessary. The PG-13 sequels and reboot can’t deliver the same critique. The lesson is that genre constraints have meaning. Reducing the intensity of your work to expand the audience usually produces work that loses the qualities that made the audience care in the first place. Keep the intensity. The audience that wants intensity will return.
Craft Note
The ED-209 boardroom demonstration sequence is the film’s most-quoted satirical craft. Phil Tippett’s stop-motion animation, the practical squib effects on the executive, and Paul Verhoeven’s specific staging of the corporate complacency combine into a hugely influential satirical set piece in 1980s science fiction. Science fiction satire works through specific staging of corporate-language failure under real consequences.
Is RoboCop as good as people say?
9/10 for the 1987 original. 5/10 for RoboCop 2. 4/10 for RoboCop 3. 7/10 for the 2014 reboot.
The franchise averages out around 6, but the score above reflects the original, and that’s the one I’d put in front of anybody. The satire bites hard, the ED-209 boardroom scene makes me laugh out loud, and Weller finds a person inside the armor. The 1987 RoboCop is essential American science fiction. The sequels and reboot are largely skippable.
