When The Present Echoes The Past's Dystopian Future: Reviewing RoboCop In 2019 Detroit – The Arrow Video Limited Edition Reviewed
As an action film, RoboCop
needs no introduction. It stands alongside the likes of The
Terminator, Predator, and Die
Hard as one of the most
consistently beloved action movies of the 1980s, and it instantly
transformed the career of Paul Verhoeven from a Dutch director of
boundary-pushing art-house thrillers to one of the biggest directors
of (still very boundary-pushing) R-rated blockbusters in Hollywood.
RoboCop became a
cottage industry in its own right, spawning two sequels, a
live-action TV show, a Saturday-morning cartoon, and a slew of video
games and action figures. Those last couple points are what
ultimately lead to the unraveling of the franchise with the PG-13
RoboCop 3, as the
premise was being softened and dulled at the edges to appeal to kids,
and Verhoeven's dark vision got lost in the process. With all that
other media and merchandising, and with how the franchise ultimately
ended in Power Rangers-esque
self-parody, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the original
RoboCop is so much
more than just another '80s action franchise-starter; it is a
deceptively intelligent and cleverly-written social satire and
philosophical parable, and a brilliant film in its own right. It is a
movie that is good enough, and packed with enough thematic depth,
that it was one of the earliest films canonized as an important work
of modern cinema by The Criterion Collection in their DVD run (spine
#23). That disc went out of print over fifteen years ago, however,
and in the intervening time, the film's legacy has often blended back
in with the rest of its franchise, and with the canon of '80s
sci-fi/action favorites of which it is undeniably a part. It may not
need an introduction as a great genre film, but for a lot of viewers
it does need a reintroduction as a very prophetic work of social
commentary that predicted a few of the more dystopian elements of
American culture in the present day. Fortunately, RoboCop
has finally once again been given the sort of lavish special edition
that it has long deserved, which provides the context to see it not
just as the first in its franchise, but as a great movie that stands
on its own. What Criterion did for the age of DVD, Arrow Video has
done – and done significantly better – for the age of blu-ray,
giving us an appropriately lavish and distinguished RoboCop
limited edition.
The
film is set in Detroit, in an unspecified dystopian near-future. The
city is ruled less by government, and more by the manipulative
corporate autocracy of Omni Consumer Products – OCP – who own
most of the land in the city, and have just bought out and privatized
the police force. In their efforts to control the city by controlling
the police, they plan to replace human cops with robots built and
programmed by them, which leads to the creation of RoboCop, a
prototype cyborg built around the corpse of good-guy cop Alex Murphy
(Peter Weller in the role that would make him famous), who was killed
in action trying to take down Old Detroit crime-lord Clarence
Boddicker (an absolutely terrifying Kurtwood Smith in a performance
that makes it seem unthinkable that he would go on to be a sitcom
dad). But as RoboCop/Murphy starts to rediscover his buried humanity,
he sets out to figure out who he was and solve his own murder, which
pits him against both the sadistic thugs of Boddicker's gang and the
corporate evil of OCP's leadership (principally Ronny Cox). This
premise certainly could be played as a straight-faced sci-fi/action
film, and it does function on that level too, feeling at times like
the best comic-book movie made prior to Batman,
despite not actually being based on a comic book. But thanks to the
very intelligent, grimly funny sensibilities of director Paul
Verhoeven and writers Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner, it is also so
much more. It is a very clever, absolutely savage social satire about
corporate greed, privatization, and the buying of political influence
slowly but surely eroding American democracy and turning us into a
quasi-fascist state run by business conglomerates rather than
politicians. It is also a philosophical sci-fi story about what it
means to be human, which plays at times like a cyberpunk retelling of
Frankenstein as its
title character built from dead tissue and machinery searches for his
memories, humanity, and soul.
Rewatching RoboCop
in 2019, in Detroit, is an eerie experience: there are a lot of
things that Neumier's social satire predicted with astounding,
sometimes depressing accuracy. Like so many cyberpunk-ish sci-fi
stories of the 1980s (I would say that RoboCop at
least loosely qualifies as cyberpunk in its ideas and world-building,
though not its aesthetic) it imagines a dystopian future brought
about by corporate greed run amok, to the point that
mega-corporations are more powerful that governments, and wield that
power very amorally. While it is at least true that we do not yet
have any companies in America quite as powerful as OCP (though Jeff
Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are certainly trying, and that is also no
doubt what Trump has always dreamed of), the ways in which the
company achieved its power strike very close to home. In the iconic
boardroom sequence at the beginning of the film which introduces us
to the various sleazy characters and outright villains of OCP
(including, fatefully, the ED 209), Ronny Cox's Dick Jones gives a
speech about the growth of the corporation over the years that is
meant to instantly tell the audience that this is a morally bankrupt
company that is up to no good. The speech revolves around how OCP
built their power and fortune by privatizing and making huge profits
off of formerly-nonprofit sectors. But watching the film today, every
single one of the sectors that
Jones names as an OCP foothold are things that have indeed been
privatized and exploited for profit since the film came out, often
with highly controversial results that disproportionately hurt the
poor and/or minorities. Space exploration is the most innocuous of
the sectors, though nowadays the reference unavoidably conjures
thoughts of SpaceX. But the other three sectors? Private healthcare,
for-profit prisons, and corporate-run police. Yep, all of those
things have certainly come true in the intervening 32 years, and are
topics of heated debates which often circle back to issues of human
rights now more than ever. This is particularly true in Detroit,
where the film is set: healthcare is of course a debate at the heart
of our political discourse nationally, but this is a region where the
school-to-prison pipeline exacerbated by the for-profit prison industry
has been a major issue in recent years, and private security forces
with little transparency and unclear accountability, especially when
it comes to racial discrimination, have likewise been deeply alarming.
On the one hand, to see a movie villain using these same tactics
feels very appropriate and ahead of its time, but on the other hand,
it is very depressing that the supervillain tactics of 32 years ago
are today's reality.
Furthermore,
the ultimate insidious grand plan of OCP and its CEO The Old Man is
one that feels very relevant to 2019 Detroit. One of the biggest and
most debated cultural issues in the city today (and in many/most cities for that matter) is the tension between
equitable development and gentrification; the desire of Detroit
neighborhoods to be in control of their own destiny and guide
development in a way that involves and benefits those
long-established communities rather than pushing them out, and the
fear that outside corporations and interests will come in, alter the
communities in ways that do not involve or respect the current
residents, and price them out to create new, gentrified neighborhoods
in their place. Against this modern backdrop of the debate over who
should and will shape the city's destiny going forward, RoboCop's
story of an opportunistic corporation secretly buying up plots of
land all around the city with the endgame of bulldozing “Old
Detroit” en masse to make room for a shiny new corporate metropolis
(which I think we can take for granted is intended for wealthy white
people who look like most of OCP's board, and not for the current
residents of Detroit; there's probably not going to be affordable
housing in Delta City) feels exactly like what Detroiters in 2019
would come up with if asked to write a nightmare scenario of a future
dystopian version of the city. Indeed, this plot feels like the
extreme logical conclusion of the concerns that a lot of Detroiters
had when huge swaths of downtown and midtown were first being bought
up by Quicken Loans and turned into swanky new developments that the
former residents of those areas couldn't afford; I heard
people on multiple occasions use the analogy that they feared Quicken was becoming our OCP,
turning downtown and midtown into their Delta City. That the Quicken
companies also created their own private security force that act like
police, and that have gotten busted for racial profiling and pretty
explicitly enforcing the gentrification of downtown, just further
drives the similarities home; indeed, there have been times when it
felt like the only thing stopping us from echoing the RoboCop
future was the lack of any
actual robotic cops. Progress is being slowly made in (the real-life)
Detroit in terms of making development more equitable in how it
involves community organizations and long-term residents and keeps
gentrification in check, thanks to the hard work of advocates and
activists within Detroit who want to prevent exactly this kind of
dystopian, divided future for the city, but it is very much an uphill
battle against the tendency of the “reinvention” of cities to
lead to gentrification, and if there's an obvious supervillain plot
that could befall the city, the plot of RoboCop
is definitely it.
On the other hand,
the film doesn't really interact with the residents of its
fictionalized Detroit at all, or dive very deep into its
socioeconomic situation outside of the immediate action. For all
intents and purposes the only characters in the film are the cops,
Clarence Boddicker's gang, and the employees of OCP; the city is
basically just a backdrop, with the lives of its inhabitants left
largely offscreen. And for a movie that is supposed to be set in a
city as diverse as Detroit, most of the characters in the movie are
white. Add in the fact that the film was shot in Dallas (although it
at least opens with a helicopter shot of the Detroit skyline,
swooping in over the river and above until-recently-Cobo Hall), and
it becomes apparent that the movie isn't set in Detroit because of
any familiarity with, or affection for, the city itself, but just
because in 1987 it was a city with a bad reputation that made an easy
target for a sci-fi film to turn into a crime and corruption-ridden
wasteland. It definitely is no compliment that the film is set here.
But
still, even if it is largely unintentional, perhaps just as a function
of how Detroit has often in recent years acted like a microcosm of America itself in terms of economic and social issues, RoboCop's
social satire has only become more relevant with time. Present-day
Detroit certainly does not resemble the film's bleak and violent
futuristic wasteland any more than Manhattan resembles Escape
from New York, but a plot where
the bad guys are trying to take gentrification to supervillain-level
extremes certainly resonates as strongly as ever in a city where
anxieties over ethics and equity in new development are very real and
very justified. And it is shocking how many of the then-over-the-top
ways in which OCP shows its corporate evilness have actually come to
pass, and have been issues of major debates in Detroit and
nationally. For a Reagan-era social commentary with a decidedly
cynical view of the city that it uses for a backdrop, RoboCop
is shockingly relevant and
topical in 2019.
And
all of that doesn't even yet touch the film's philosophy about
humanity, memory, and consciousness, which likewise works shockingly
well. Every time I watch RoboCop
I am consistently amazed and impressed by just how sincerely moving
and emotionally resonant Alex Murphy/RoboCop's character arc is. It
works as well as it does thanks equally to the thoughtful writing and
to Peter Weller's excellent, career-making performance, which gives
the character a great deal of nuance and personal evolution. Upon
first awakening as RoboCop, he is purely robotic; a memory-wiped
empty shell that only knows his OCP programming. But as he first
becomes aware that he was once human, and as he starts to seek out
his stolen humanity, personhood and a sense of human ethics beyond
his programming start to creep back in. As he grapples with whether
he is still a human or merely a machine, and with the question of
whether Alex Murphy's ghost memories are his own memories or the
echoes of a dead man who was a different person, RoboCop
gets more philosophical than probably 98% of action films. The
questions of whether machines can achieve personhood, and whether
memories make us who we are or if there is a deeper intrinsic
humanity underneath, have certainly been explored by other great
sci-fi movies, but not many that also function as viscerally-intense
and bombastic comic-book origin stories. It is a testament to the
skills of Verhoeven, Neumeier, Miner, and the rest of their team that
this delicate balancing act between thoughtfulness and bloody bombast
actually works; a misstep in either direction and the odd tonal blend
could have easily fallen apart into an ambitious failure.
Which
takes us beyond RoboCop's
rich themes to the simple fact that it is a very well-crafted
thriller. In a 2001 making-of documentary (which is not on this set –
more on that later) Paul Verhoeven says that this is probably his
best English-language film, and I would wholeheartedly agree. It was
made on a fairly low budget for this kind of film, and suffered a
deeply troubled production full of delays, overruns, and horrifically
unpleasant working conditions, but a highly talented crew gave
excellent work all around. Director of photography Jost Vacano,
Verhoeven's go-to DP as well as Wolfgang Petersen's, shoots the film
beautifully, walking the movie's line between grim violence and sly
social satire with a carefully-crafted aesthetic that sells both. He
also makes excellent use of analog video technology, which appears
frequently in both the film's satirical news reports and RoboCop's
camera-vision. Special effects artist Rob Bottin likewise does
excellent work crafting the RoboCop armor, which is just as important
to capturing the soul of the character as Weller's performance, as
the mask hides Weller's face for most of the running time, and Phil
Tippett does just as strong a job realizing the ED 209 through
Harryhausen-esque stop-motion. Verhoeven also populates the film with
a very strong supporting cast. In addition to Weller, Smith, and Cox
as the three central figures in the film's justice-vs-corporate-evil
conflict, it features very strong performances from reliably good
actors like Nancy Allen, Miguel Ferrer, Ray Wise, and Dan O'Herlihy.
They all fully commit to the multilayered but nonetheless wacky
script, and there isn't a weak performance in the bunch.
RoboCop
is
one gutsy genre blend; and unpredictable cocktail that does not seem
on paper like it should work half as well as it does. As an action
movie, as a deceptively thoughtful sci-fi tale, and as darkly funny
social satire, it succeeds on all levels. It has got to be one of the
most multi-layered and thematically ambitious blockbuster films of
the 1980s, and a genuine modern classic. If you are one of those who
have underestimated RoboCop
because its reputation as a single film has gotten drowned out by the
ubiquitous pop-cultural legacy of the increasingly disposable
franchise that it started, you must go back to it for another
re-watch. Just pretend that the sequels don't exist – outside of
profit motives, they shouldn't; this film ends on a perfect note, and
Alex Murphy's story should have just been left there – and watch it
as a singular experience; a wildly ambitious tonal experiment that
transcends its genre trappings and achieves something pretty special.
Score for the film:
The Transfer:
RoboCop comes
to us on this Arrow Video limited edition in a 4k remaster which –
for the most part – isn't new for this release, but is nonetheless
a stellar presentation. Since the release uses an existing
transfer, it can't be said that Arrow gives us the film as we've
never seen it before, but it does give us what is likely the
definitive restoration. RoboCop has
had ups and downs in picture quality on its various releases over the
years, but really good transfers have always existed if you knew
which one to get. Ironically, for a long time – even in comparison
to the movie's first MGM blu-ray – the 1998 Criterion Collection
transfer supervised by Paul Verhoeven was the best-looking version of
the film in terms of color, contrast, and natural film grain looking
faithful to the theatrical presentation. The subsequent MGM DVDs
looked overly pumped-up in terms of their color and contrast, and
showed signs of some digital scrubbing, and that first blu-ray even
more so, making the Criterion transfer the genuine director-approved
article despite being a dated non-anamorphic letterboxed
presentation. The 2014 4k restoration, like that Criterion transfer,
was once again supervised and approved by Verhoeven, and that is what
is used here. However, one small but important change has been made:
as is so often the case, the gory extra bits that make up the
unrated-version footage only exist in a lower-quality element, as
opposed to the negative of the theatrical cut that was used for the
bulk of the 4k restoration. On the 2014 blu-ray the shifts from
R-rated to unrated footage at times looked fairly obvious, and Arrow
went back and tweaked the restoration and color-correction on those
scenes to help them match the rest of the footage as well as
possible. While a keen eye can still sense a minor difference in
quality, the unrated footage is now the most seamlessly-integrated
that it has been since the Criterion DVD, when the two source
elements used to assemble the unrated cut were less noticeable by
virtue of the format's limitations. With that minor added tweaking,
this is THE definitive visual presentation of RoboCop:
the clarity and detail are absolutely beautiful, and the film retains
a healthy natural grain structure that preserves the 35mm film look.
The audio is equally strong, with 5.1, 4.0, and stereo mixes that
sound crystal clear.
Crucially, this
transfer uses very similar color-timing and contrast/saturation
levels to the Criterion Collection transfer. Gone is the
oversaturated, digitally-cleaned-up look of the MGM DVDs and
first-generation blu-ray, and restored is Paul Verhoeven's preferred
color-timing, which is faithful to the theatrical presentation and
the previous much-loved release that captured it best. This is no
surprise, since this is the first transfer since the Criterion disc
to be supervised and approved by Verhoeven. One difference between
the two transfers is that Arrow (and the previous MGM blu) use the
film's theatrical aspect ratio, while the Criterion disc (per
Verhoeven's request) was matted differently in a ratio that showed
more picture information at the top and bottom of the screen.
However, Verhoeven has stated that that was his preferred ratio at
the time in part because it was best-suited to the viewing experience
of 1998's TVs; it was indeed his choice to return the film to its
theatrical ratio for this 4k remaster. Difference in framing aside,
this transfer looks the closest to an HD upgrade of the Criterion
restoration, and is thus the first transfer to dethrone that disc as
the definitive look for the film.
Score for the
transfer:
The Extras:
Since
the transfer used on this Arrow limited edition set is not a new one,
the question of whether or not the set is worth a double-dip for
those who already have the 2014 4k-remastered blu-ray comes largely
down to the extras and the packaging. The packaging, of course, is
stellar, as Arrow's limited editions always are: a hard outer box, a
booklet, a poster, and six art cards. The extras are very plentiful
according to the usual high Arrow standards, and a strong mix of old
and new, but not quite definitive. For starters, as Arrow tries to do
whenever possible, the set contains all three primary cuts of the
film: the unrated director's cut, the R-rated theatrical cut, and the
TV version which contains some alternate takes and scenes, as well as
featurettes which compare the differences between the versions. It
also features no less than eight brand-new interviews and/or
featurettes, most of which range from fifteen minutes to half an hour
in length, and which are reliably quite thorough, in-depth, and
entertaining. The interviews are with co-writers Ed Neumeier and
Michael Miner, co-star Nancy Allen, casting director Julie Selzer,
second unit director Mark Goldblatt, and special photographic effects
artists Peter Kuran and Kevin Kutchaver. Of these, the half-hour chat
with Neumeier may be the most interesting, and certainly the most
conversational and fun, but they are all strong extras. The other two
original featurettes are a tribute to the composer of the film's
score, and a tour of a collection of props from the film. It is very
disappointing that Paul Verhoeven and Peter Weller didn't return for
new interviews, but they are at least present in the archival extras,
so that can be forgiven. From past releases the disc ports over an
excellent 45-minute 2012 panel featuring most of the film's principle
cast and crew (Verhoeven, Weller, Nancy Allen, writers Neumeier and
Miner, and special effects artist Phil Tippett), three vintage
featurettes from the MGM special edition DVD, and an assortment of
deleted scenes, storyboards, and dailies. On the audio side of
things, the disc features new commentaries by a film historian and a
trio of fans of the film, and an older commentary from the MGM
special edition DVD featuring Verhoeven, Neumeier, and producer Jon
Davison. It is worth noting that it is not the same commentary that
the same three participants previously recorded for the Criterion
Collection DVD – that one remains exclusive to the Criterion disc,
and likewise always will, but the one used here is still a very good track.
Notably
absent from the release, however, are two crucial extras. The disc
for some reason does not include the 2001 40-minute documentary Flesh
and Steel: The Making of RoboCop,
which was made for the film's MGM special edition DVD and included on
the 2014 blu-ray. It also does not include the upcoming RoboDoc,
a 4-hour documentary currently touring the festival circuit, which
belongs to the same sprawling, definitive, leave-no-stone-unturned
school of behind-the-scenes documentaries as Never Sleep
Again, Crystal Lake Memories, You're So Cool Brewster, and
Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser and Hellbound. Arrow
tried to get the rights to include the new doc in this set, just as
they included Leviathan
in the Hellraiser Trilogy
Scarlet Box, but they were unable to secure such a deal. RoboDoc
is still a brand-new film, so it makes some sense that it would be
receiving a standalone release instead of being packaged with this
one, but it is stranger and more surprising that the set doesn't
include the older documentary. As such, the Arrow edition of RoboCop
contains a wealth of new and old
interviews and commentaries which makes it well worth picking up, but
is lacking a proper behind-the-scenes documentary, which is something
that Arrow usually excels at providing. That makes the special
features on this set very impressive and thorough, but not
definitive. It is a much more robust set of extras than the 2014
blu-ray in general, but that blu-ray has Flesh and Steel
and this one doesn't, so those
who double-dip will need to hang onto both in order to truly get the
whole package, and serious fans will want to leave a space on their
shelves next to this one for the future blu-ray release of RoboDoc.
These omissions are certainly a bit disappointing, but were probably
inevitable rights-wise; the extras that are here, at any rate, are
impressive.
Score for the extras:
Arrow
has assembled a very impressive package, as always, and the box set
that it is packaged in is absolutely stellar. For those who don't
already own the 2014 blu-ray of RoboCop featuring
the same 4k restoration, picking this disc up should be a no-brainer.
It is, however, unclear if the disc is really worth a double-dip to
those who do have that edition, given that it uses the exact same
transfer, and given that it doesn't include the making-of documentary
featured on that previous edition, though it does have plentiful new
extras to make up for it. It is overall a very good release, but not
quite a definitive one (it would need to include Flesh and
Steel and the upcoming RoboDoc
to be that). As such, it isn't an Arrow limited edition that all fans
of the film absolutely must buy, but a case where fans will need to
weigh how much Arrow's bells and whistles are worth the double-dip to
them. For those who don't have the previous blu-ray, however, this is
unquestionably the RoboCop release
to get. It is certainly one that's worth buying for a good deal more
than a dollar.
Overall Score for the Arrow Limited Edition:
- Christopher S. Jordan
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