I just watched my favorite action/sci-fi flick of all time tonight, Robocop. This movie really held up well over time. Maybe it’s because they didn’t go WAY over the top in their prediction of how hi-tech the future was going to be nor how out of control crime would be. It’s true that crime was out of control in the movie but they point out that it’s only in Old Detroit.
Anyway, after watching it tonight I learned a small, but important, bit of the story I never caught before. When what’s his name (the young guy that headed up the Robocop program) was pitching it to the OCP president at the begining there is this exchange between the two:
Pres: How soon can you start the project?
Young Guy: We have all the best candidates assigned to the highest risk areas (of Old Detroit) so it shouldn’t be long before we have our first “volunteer”.
This sounds like they put Murphy in OD with the expectation that he, or some other awesome cop, would die quickly so they could roll out the Robocop prototype.
That makes OCP look even worse than they already did. I never caught that exchange before.
Anyway, great movie. Still has some of the goriest scenes of any movie I ever saw.
Naah =-- it was behind its time. It’s just that science fiction movies are so incredibly far behind the times compared to SF literature that this one sseems ahead of its time by comparison with everything else.
The screenwriters did a great job. It’s hard not to see Robocop as a descendant of the kind of corporate science fiction like Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. I think they paid homage to this with the catch-phrase of the internal TV show “I’d buy that for a dollar!”, which echoes the “Would you buy that for a quarter?” in Kornbluth’s story “The Marching Morons” (Inflation, I guess).
The humor is very dark, but very well done. I especially love the TV newsbreaks and that stupid “I’d buy that for a dollar” show, which all the crooks watch and laugh at. Gives new meaning to “the banality of evil”.
Really? I caught that right away. None of the corporate guys are really very good or moral in an absolute sense, although most of them are a lot better than Clarence Bodddeker and his bunch. Complex morality in this film. The only really good guys are the put-upon cops.
Did you catch the tag line at the end of the credits, stuck in the legal disclaimer? “Unauthorized use of this photoplay will result in prosecution by lawe enforcement driods” written in teeny-tiny letters. (You can’t make them out on your home screen, unfortunately. You gotta see it on a movie screen. Maybe ion a hi-def TV. Or go to the page on IMDB)
