The pReview retRo Re-viewing of..
RoboCop (1987)
CLICK BELOW TO VIEW THE TRAILER!
(it is highly recommended to view the trailer and THEN read)
(warning: I'd buy THIS for a dollar!)
by Jeff Finck
written: 2/13/2014
Release Date: July 17, 1987
In a world full of big action stars-- Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Norris-- Isn't it about time we brought action back into a Clint Eastwood cowboy era? ..except.. futuristic.. kind of. In order to do that, we have to get our hands dirty, though. It's going to take a lot of playing God and mashing things together that do NOT belong together. Let's take the story of a fallen cop, splice that in with a sheriff's mentality, graft robotic parts to it, resurrect our hero like Jesus.. And then give Jesus a reason to hate criminal scum.
Coming from Orion, flying across the farthest reaches of space.. Awkwardly shaking its way through backrooms in dingy research laboratories-- I present you with the greatest law enforcement tool ever conceived: RoboCop! He's got the fastest reflexes that modern technology has to offer (read: Just barely out-performing Paulie's robot from Rocky IV). It has on-board computer assisted memory.. Which is nice, however, very impractical considering the smallest computer right now is the size of a large apartment in Northeast Detroit.
But with a lifetime of on-the-street law enforcement programming, how could this fail? Answer: It cannot. It must not! And after watching RoboCop bulls-eye paper womprat cutouts with his T-16 (I assume that's the name of his gun?) in front of an increasingly jealous human police force, there is little doubt that this guy-- Sorry, this machine-- is ready to.. HOLY SHIT HE HAS ICEPICKS FOR MIDDLE FINGERS!? That's cool! Sorry.. Lost my train of thought there. It also becomes clear that the city officials and an ominous corporation (ominously called Omni Consumer Products) view Detroit as a cancer-ridden plague victim.
Luckily, OCP has the cure for cancer! Er.. Crime. They have a crime for cancer! ..No.. Wait.. I mean, they have a cure for crime! Which is their cancer.. The crime is, I mean. Look.. What I'm trying to say is that crime is the cancer and RoboCop and his bullets are the cure. And he's a pretty straight-forward crime fighter, too. When asked what his Prime Directives are, he just slowly states the Miranda Rights while throwing criminals through panes of glass. Specifically, in this case, one Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). He gets tossed like a blood-filled rag-doll through multiple windows. Ouch. Ah, movies.. When you run out of ideas for action shots, just throw someone through a window. I don't know what Boddicker said, but some old dude gets PISSED that he didn't exercise his right to remain silent. RoboCop is a freaking cyborg, after all! He has ways of recording everything being said, for fuck's sake!
I assume that while Old Bad Guy is talking to Young Bad Guy, that what we're witnessing is not only the future of law enforcement, but also a peek into RoboCop's back-story. It would seem that RoboCop was a human cop who has had dealings with Boddicker before (read: Got murdered the dick out of) and now that he's a robot, everything in his memory has become admissible in court as evidence! There's only one thing left for the bad guys to do: Kill RoboCop. But how do you kill a robot cop? Real cops, of course! Yeah, that should work.. Real cops who used to know this robot cop when he was still a human. That should totally work out just fine and they won't, in any way, have a change of heart and decide that it is morally wrong to not only kill someone they once knew, but also that it is totally acceptable to open fire and murder ANOTHER cop. I mean, come on! Cops are brothers (and sisters).. Theirs is an unspoken bond there that is impossible to break!
Look, this movie just screams, "I WILL CONSUME YOUR MONEY AND FORCE YOU TO QUOTE AND LOVE ME FOR THE NEXT TWENTY SEVEN YEARS!" It will, easily, be the best movie about cyborg crime fighting ever to come out and there is no way to improve upon the idea and what I assume will be the execution of this glorious allegory of the corruption of society and its reliance on technology. Well.. Unless you gave RoboCop boobs. That would be awesome.
Jesus Christ courtesy of God
RoboCop (1987) poster, trailer and screen shots courtesy of Orion Pictures
Personal System 2 computer (1987) courtesy of International Business Machines Corporation
Apollo 11 crew in quarantine with Nixon image (1969) courtesy of NASA
City of Detroit city shot (2013) courtesy of The Detroit News
Jenna Mourey couresy of Jenna Mourey at http://www.youtube.com/user/JennaMarbles
All credited images found via Google Image searches