RoboCop

RoboCop should have been ridiculous.

The title alone sounds like the sort of idea that could have disappeared into the endless pile of disposable action movies produced during the 1980s. Instead, Paul Verhoeven turned it into something violent, funny, angry, strangely moving and far more intelligent than the chrome armour suggests.

The genius of RoboCop is that it never forces you to choose between the action movie and the satire. You can enjoy ED-209 destroying an office, Clarence Boddicker being one of the decade's great villains and RoboCop walking into a room like an unstoppable tank while the film quietly tears into corporate greed and consumer culture at exactly the same time.

And underneath all of it is Alex Murphy, slowly discovering that the machine OCP built still contains memories of the man they thought they had erased.

What makes RoboCop more than a clever action movie is Alex Murphy.

Peter Weller spends much of the film hidden behind armour, yet somehow Murphy's personality keeps fighting its way through. At first RoboCop appears to be exactly what OCP wanted: efficient, obedient and apparently stripped of everything that made Murphy human.

Then the memories start coming back.

His old home, his family and finally the circumstances of his own murder begin breaking through the programming. Suddenly the story isn't simply about a robot policeman hunting criminals. It's about a murdered man gradually discovering who he used to be.

That gives the film an emotional weight you might not expect from something called RoboCop. Murphy hasn't simply lost his body. He has lost his family, his previous life and, for a while, even his identity.

One of the smartest choices the film makes is never pretending everything can simply return to normal. Murphy can't go home and become the person he was before. The question becomes whether enough of Alex Murphy survives inside the machine for him to become a person again.

By the end, when he is asked his name, the answer matters far more than it would have at the beginning of the film.

Some films leave you remembering the plot. RoboCop leaves you remembering moments.

ED-209's disastrous boardroom demonstration is probably the perfect example. The scene is horrifying, absurd and genuinely funny all at once, immediately establishing the film's peculiar tone. Corporate executives have just watched their colleague get obliterated by their company's latest product, and somehow the meeting still feels like it might continue afterwards.

Then there is Clarence Boddicker.

Kurtwood Smith doesn't play him like some enormous comic-book supervillain. Clarence is nasty, sarcastic and frighteningly casual about violence. That makes him much more memorable. His gang gives RoboCop someone suitably horrible to hunt while his relationship with OCP connects the street-level violence directly to the corporate world above it.

And of course there is RoboCop himself.

The heavy footsteps. The Auto-9. The slow turns of the head. The way he calmly walks into situations where everybody else would be diving for cover.

The film understands that RoboCop doesn't need to move quickly to look powerful. If anything, the deliberate movement makes him more intimidating. He doesn't chase people like an ordinary action hero.

He just keeps coming.

Watching RoboCop today, the surprising thing isn't how dated its vision of the future feels.

It's how familiar some of it feels.

OCP isn't merely an evil corporation sitting in a skyscraper plotting world domination. It talks about public services as business opportunities. Detroit's problems aren't tragedies to solve; they're markets waiting to be exploited.

Police work can be privatised. Urban redevelopment can become a corporate project. Human beings can become assets.

Even Murphy's body effectively becomes company property.

The fake television reports and commercials make the world even better. They're exaggerated enough to be funny, but they also show a society becoming increasingly comfortable with violence, fear and absurd consumer products as long as they're packaged correctly.

That is why the satire still lands.

RoboCop isn't predicting one particular version of the future. It's making fun of the idea that corporations will happily turn absolutely anything into a product if somebody thinks there is money to be made from it.

The movie may be covered in 1980s technology, hairstyles and television graphics, but that joke hasn't exactly expired.

If you wanted to explain a certain kind of 1980s cinema to somebody using one movie, RoboCop wouldn't be a bad choice.

It has enormous squibs, outrageous villains, corporate excess, television satire, chunky technology, industrial locations and an action hero whose silhouette is recognisable before you can even see his face.

Nothing about it feels timid.

Even the future looks wonderfully physical. Computer screens are bulky. Machines make noises. ED-209 looks like something that could actually crush you because, on screen, there really was a physical creation occupying the same space as the actors.

RoboCop himself benefits enormously from that approach. The suit has weight. Weller's carefully developed movements sell the illusion that there is machinery underneath it, and the sound design finishes the job.

There is also something particularly 80s about a studio action movie being allowed to be this strange.

It's brutally violent, occasionally disgusting, genuinely funny, politically angry and unexpectedly sad. Yet somehow all of those ingredients belong in the same film.

Modern blockbusters are often polished to remove their rough edges.

RoboCop is practically made out of them.

Absolutely.

RoboCop remains one of those rare films where almost everything that should make it ridiculous somehow makes it better.

Come for the armour, ED-209, Clarence Boddicker and some gloriously excessive 1980s action. Stay for a surprisingly thoughtful story about identity, memory and a world where corporations believe everything — including a human being — can have a price attached to it.

Peter Weller gives the machine a soul. Paul Verhoeven gives the violence a point. And the satire means there is considerably more going on underneath the surface than the title suggests.

It is violent, funny, bleak, clever and unmistakably 80s.

If you've somehow never seen RoboCop because you assumed it was just another old action movie, that's probably the best reason to finally watch it.

Nearly four decades later, we'd still buy that for a dollar.