I'd Buy That For a Dollar!

I lucked out a few nights back. You see, I've spent days thinking about what I'd like to say about movies, on the art of film, and what makes something both so fun and so good that you'll drop everything to watch just a little bit of it at any possible opportunity. What I'm not talking about are those brilliant works that you watch and love and appreciate and might never watch again. This distinction is different for everybody but for me it would entail titles like Breaking the Waves and Annie Hall. I've seen these movies, I've found a great appreciation for them but though I liked the movies for their respective brilliance neither one is something that I'd feel like revisiting again and again to study and enjoy for my amusement or just to pass a few hours. Robocop however, is just such a movie.

I love this movie.

Sometimes I am at a loss to understand my tastes. This includes not only why I like a movie but why I return to some over and over again: What constitutes a great work of art? - a subjective question if there ever was one. Do works of art define the filmmakers or the culture that spawned them or the people who like them. Hell, how much does "liking" a piece constitute "appreciating" it? And sometimes there are intangibles like "coolness" and fun factor that act like a bit of butter or cheese over a kid's serving of broccoli and camouflage the nutritious stuff with a tasty treat. Robocop is almost so good that you don't notice how smart and thought provoking it actually is.

To be blunt, I think Paul Verhoeven's Robocop is one of the best movies of the 1980's and one of the best science-fiction pictures that I've seen. In many ways, this movie is the 1980's. The action, the cars (yes, those are Ford Tauruses), the business executives, the coke, the fashions and whole "More is More!"attitude are very 80's. But yet Robocop is as timeless as it is of its time. And what's more, this sucker moooooves!

So much in so little time. Maybe the deceptively simple presentation helps make Robocop worth revisiting again and again. The plot is short and sweet: top cop shot and turned into crime busting robot while businessmen vie to be top guy, causing one of them to die. Robo attacks street crime but moves on corporate big time and nails the fat cat who falls out a window. Splat!

That is the framework that screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner use but they add layers to their screenplay and Verhoeven runs with their ideas and presents a sci-fi action movie that is not only a great grab-a-beer-and-order-a-pizza armchair thrill ride but a reflection of 1980's American consumerism and corporate culture, a Christian allegory of rebirth (No, really, Verhoeven really did see a link between Officer Murphy and Jesus) and a deeply black comedy that examined many facets of human behavior.

So, how did it do this? I'll write in a moment of the perfect storm of factors that make Robocop indispensable viewing.
Coming soon, very soon....part II of this post