RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

 

I can still remember the day that I saw RoboCop at the theatre. I was very young, only 8 years old. And maybe someone would say that I would be disturbed by the violence of the movie. And yes, sure I was disturbed by the violence of the movie... but that's a good thing, not a bad one. Disturbance is an "obligatory" element of interesting cinema in you are a true film goer. "Movies don't kill people, people kill people". The violence and disturbance of a movie is something that you take you with you at home and you think about it, you react to what you just saw, you start a conversation with yourself. And these are only good things and things that take you one step further in your life. And here is where I will make a big parenthesis and say that I am fully aware that my English are far from perfect. As I also know that I make many mistakes when I am writing... but the "thirst" of communicating my excitement and freeing my artistic expression are much bigger than fucking stupid grammar and spelling mistakes. And in that way movies are not meant to be perfect.  Perfection is a serious delusion that some people think that they can achieve. 

RoboCop is a movie that it is shot like a cheap, very expensive exploitation movie. It has all the elements of exploitation cinema. It has gory, almost humorous violence, a sleazy, pulp police story and a look that you certainly don't take for serious. But truth says that RoboCop is a very serious movie giving incredibly accurate comments about the society of the 80s. You know that glossy, happy, plastic happiness that people were living during the 80s. It pictures a world of heinous crime, cynical, deranged, decadent. The spirit of the movie, is of bad shit news. Bad people, ugly circumstances, deformity in all aspects of life. Television selling trash, bosses all crooked, a general atmosphere in the air that is genuinely foul, that movie is certainly not for the average happy American family to go out Saturday evening for the movie of the weekend. It's extremely bleak and dark. Even RoboCop, the hero of the movie and the miracle of technology is a broken man tormented by the ghosts of his previous, human life. Paul Verheoven, most certainly one of the greatest creators of the 80s and the 90s, is making a somehow dive inside the cruelty of the modern city and seeks for the lost values of humanity which are nowhere to be found. RoboCop is a movie that understands greatly the futility of Hollywood's glossiness and, in a way, it gives back what it got. It returns the plastic prosperity with a fist... full of steel.