ROBOCOP (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good* 
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Though Robocop remains an iconic figure in the world of eighties action movies, the character’s importance stems almost totally from the first film. Most serial-characters of comparable popularity manage to please their audiences with more than just one installment of their adventures. Perhaps, because the first film is all about the hero discovering the truth behind his re-creation, subsequent extensions of the franchise didn’t really have much of anywhere to go, in contrast to serial film-characters like Mad Max and John Rambo—or even Universal’s Frankenstein Monster.

Victor Frankenstein turns a bunch of motley body-parts into a monstrous being with no past. In contrast, the villains of ROBOCOP, the myrmidons of the coyly named organization OCP, want to use the dead body of cop Alex Murphy to create a mindless cop-cyborg. Yet, despite having his flesh merged with countless mechanical enhancements, Murphy’s consciousness re-asserts itself. For Mary Shelley, it was important that her creator-scientist should bring forth a “new Adam” with a tabula rasa personality. For Paul Verhoeven and his writers, OCP represents a far more insidious threat to human individuality than Frankenstein ever did, and thus Murphy’s recrudescence is vital to the first installment of the Robocop saga.

The future-Detroit of the first ROBOCOP is a classic dystopia, divided between callous “haves” and brutal “have nots.” However, the two extremes are mediated, at least in Detroit, by the nobility of the Detroit police forces, who are alone capable of resisting all forms of crime, despite the attempts of OCP to control the COPs. Verhoeven, despite his Dutch background, apparently understood that many audiences still wanted to believe in the archetypes of the Old West, in this case that of “The Sheriff Who Cleans Up the Corrupt Town.” Neither Robocop, his primary partner Lewis (Nancy Allen), nor the other cops can totally reform a city as far gone as Detroit. But in such a dystopic world, even maintaining a temporary peace counts as a triumph of sorts.

The first film benefits in that it presents OCP in a spectrum of attitudes: some of the businessmen are just average assholes trying to make money with approved capitalistic tactics, and others are active criminals like Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), who actually teams up with violent terrorist Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). These distinctions make it possible for Robocop to rage against at least part of the corporate machine, and to defeat the more extreme forms of societal breakdown. That said, another disadvantage of the hero is that in all three movies it proved rather difficult to match the lumbering robot-hero with opponents who could match him. In the first film, Robocop briefly contends with a larger mechanical adversary, but the robot ends up being defeated by its own inability to adapt to its environment.

By the conclusion of the first film, Murphy has more or less made his peace with being a cyborg policeman and leaving behind his previous identity as a man with a family. However, writers Frank Miller and Walon Green couldn’t leave that aspect of his identity alone, and so included a pointless scene in which Robocop has to tell his former wife that he’s not Alex Murphy, just a replica of the slain police officer. Thanks to the skill of the actors, this scene is far from the worst in ROBOCOP 2.