Key Credits and Synopsis

Director: Paul Verhoeven Writers: Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner Starring: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith, Miguel Ferrer Producer: Jon Davison Cinematography: Jost Vacano Editing: Frank J. Urioste Music: Basil Poledouris Casting: Sally Dennison, Julie Selzer Production Design: William Sandell Art Direction: John Marshall, Gayle Simon...

Afterword: Be Kind, Don’t Rewind

This afterword looks at Michel Gondry's homage to RoboCop in Be Kind Rewind (2008), a film that is ‘sweded’ — a term referring to popular films innovatively re-enacted using a camcorder with the most perfunctory of budgets. The film reiterated the continuing fondness with which RoboCop has become part of popular culture. Gondry's inclusion of RoboCop as part of nostalgia for VHS, old media, as something retro is part of a cultural flow in which cinematic memories were forged in a discordant pattern of adolescent subterfuge and waiting impatiently at the video store for the tape to arrive with the hope it has not been chewed up by someone else's VCR. Perhaps the epitome of RoboCop's cultural popularity was the release of a crowd-funded project, ‘Our RoboCop Remake’, in 2014. Fifty filmmakers worked together to re-tell the story of RoboCop in a celebratory pastiche. Most recently, a comprehensive documentary on the making of RoboCop, ‘RoboDoc: The creation of RoboCop’ (2017), once again reiterates the many ways in which the film continues to capture the imagination. The chapter then highlights how RoboCop was re-made in 2014.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). If one were to compile a canon of great science-fiction films, the inclusion of RoboCop would be problematic simply because of the puerile title. Given the way films are inevitably marketed, made palatable for audiences naturally means film titles are transformed to suit commercial inclinations, often conflicting with the content of a film. In terms of high-concept cinema, the title RoboCop is a moribund simplification of the film's existential core. Yet it is such outward simplicity that fosters a contradiction often lurking in Hollywood-genre films like RoboCop. RoboCop's reputation was an early source of ridicule, such was the fate of many violent films of the 1980s when sanitised by the puritanism of the BBC or ITV. Fortuitously, the critical standing of RoboCop has grown over the years, in no small part aided by the intervention of Criterion, a specialist home video label which was first to re-release the film on Laserdisc and then later on DVD in an unrated directors cut. While the Criterion edition of RoboCop has long been out of print, the film's inclusion in the Criterion library accentuates its merit as a seminal science-fiction film; a key American work of the 1980s, overturning familiar genre trappings while its erudite philosophical address transforms the iconic Frankenstein narrative into an altogether more radical, theological work.

Genre Mutations

This chapter discusses Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) as a Western. Though the film's hybridity has been mentioned especially in regards to science fiction's interrelatedness with horror, and in the intertextual nods to Shane (1953), it has not been explored at length to sufficiently argue for iconographic slippages that account for the salience of the Western. The chapter's purpose is to widen the possibilities of looking intimately at the way iconographic details can create genre dissonance, what is known as ‘vraisemblance’. Reframing genre readings means retracing the intersections with the horror and science fiction. This includes accommodating for developments such as the science-fiction Western, a sub-genre that has veered from innovation to derision yet continues to elicit new rejoinders. The chapter then offers a consideration of Western themes, notably the savage, the massacre, and revenge, which intersects with the horror genre.

Neo-fascist Corporate Bodies

This chapter examines what the treatment of OCP, the fictional mega-corporation in RoboCop (1987), closely linked to fascism, that wields such power and control over the public and private reveals about the way science fiction has represented this ideological development over the years. It explores the physical effects of the corporation on the individual body, its commodification, dehumanisation, and namely Murphy's transformation into a fascistic product. At the same time, just how far does the film go with its critique of the corporation? As it is often suggested, the ending of RoboCop manifests an ideological lapse that contradicts the rest of the film's corrosive enquiry of corporate power. RoboCop also arrived at a critical juncture in American cinema, at the height of Reaganomics, and is a work that belongs to a cycle of anti-corporate films that used the science-fiction repertoire as a vehicle for contemporaneous anxieties.

The Legacy of RoboCop

This chapter explores the legacy of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop in terms of the original critical reception, the film's relationship with its two sequels, and the marketing of the film. Released in the summer season of 1987, RoboCop was an unexpected commercial success, leading to the creation of the RoboCop universe, extending into television, video games, animation, and numerous sequels. The chapter then considers Verhoeven's work in the Hollywood science-fiction genre. The success of RoboCop led to an interest in science-fiction cinema that would lead Verhoeven to direct three more science-fiction films: Total Recall (1990), Starship Troopers (1997), and Hollow Man (2000). None of the films are pure science fiction but hybrids, fusing conventions from a broad range of genres including war movie, horror, and the political thriller.