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RoboCop (1987)
200 Plays3 years ago
In the 101st episode, Perry welcomes new guest Shane Rogers of the Midnight Facts for Insomniacs podcast to talk about Paul Verhoeven's groundbreaking RoboCop! We discuss the satirical nature of the film and how relevant it still is 35 years after its release, how well most of the effects hold up, some of the great performances including Peter Weller and Kurtwood Smith, and we also talk a bit about the remake and some of the behind-the-scenes stuff. Also, we answer the question: is this really a superhero movie or not?
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Transcript
Directive 4 and OCP Officers
00:00:15
Speaker
I work for Dick Jones! Dick Jones! I work for Dick Jones! He runs OCP! OCP runs the cops! I may not, sir. You know, I don't usually see anyone without an appointment. But in your case, I'll make an exception. You are under arrest. Oh. On what charge? Aiding and abetting a known felon.
00:00:45
Speaker
Sounds like I'm in a lot of trouble. You better take me in. I will. What's the matter, officer? I'll tell you what's the matter.
00:01:12
Speaker
A little insurance policy called Directive 4. My little contribution to your psychological profile. Any attempt to arrest a senior officer of OCE results in shutdown. What did you think? That you were an ordinary police officer? You're our product. And we can't very well have our products turning against us, can we?
00:01:42
Speaker
Ah, still a little bite, didn't you? Maybe you'd like to meet a friend of mine.
Introduction to Midnight Facts for Insomniacs
00:02:01
Speaker
I had to kill Bob Morton because he made a mistake. Now it's time to erase that mistake.
00:02:09
Speaker
Welcome to the Superhero Cinephiles podcast. I'm your host, Perry Constantine, and welcoming to get today a new guest, and that is Shane Rogers. Shane, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for coming on. So like I told you before we started recording, one of the things I like to do is give especially new guests a chance to talk about themselves a little bit. So tell people a little bit about yourself.
00:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, I am a stand-up comic, or at least was pre-COVID, and now I'm kind of finally getting back to it. And I'm the co-host of Midnight Facts for Insomniacs, a podcast of fun facts and interesting topics chosen by our listeners, me and another comedian, Duncan McEwen, are the hosts of that. Okay, cool. What are some of the kinds of things you guys talk about on there?
00:02:55
Speaker
You know, we have covered so many topics. It's really kind of a catch-all. A lot of historical topics, some, like, biographical stuff, and then, you know, everything from cults, even some murderers. We've done QAnon. We've done the Manosphere. We've done the most recent one, I think, was, boy, what did we just do? Mormonism. And we did Scientology. And yeah, so we've been all over the map.
Impact of COVID-19 on Comedy Careers
00:03:21
Speaker
I'm surprised I've never come across your show before you just talked about it, because that all sounds like right in my wheelhouse of stuff I like to listen to. So I think I'll have to go dig in after we're done here. Yeah, you'll have to check it out. It's great. We have a Discord community. We have a few hundred people in there. They're always in there chatting, and they choose the topics. We do a poll, and they come up with the topic every week. So it's a lot of fun. It gives the listeners a chance to get involved. Oh, very cool. And you said you've been doing that for about two years?
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, the podcast's been going on for about two years. We started it right before COVID, so actually the perfect time. We kind of snuck in right before things got crazy. So yeah. I think we're pretty much started around the exact same time because that's when we started this show too. Yeah, I noticed that. Right before COVID and then a few months later it hit and everything went crazy.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yep. The things are finally starting to get a little bit back to normal, but I still feel like crazy is a good way to describe the world at this point.
Superhero Films: Highs, Lows, and the Golden Age
00:04:18
Speaker
Anyway, so this is the superhero cinephile. So what sort of familiarity or background do you have with superhero movies or superhero comics or anything like that?
00:04:30
Speaker
You know, I wasn't a big comic guy as a kid, although, like, Spider-Man, I was definitely into Spider-Man. I've always been certainly on the Marvel side of things. But, yeah, I did definitely get into superhero movies. I think, obviously, with Superman when I was a kid, the original Superman, big, big Christopher Reeve fan. And from there, yeah, you know, it's been an up and down ride with superhero movies. There have been some greats and there have been some lols.
00:04:57
Speaker
And I think now we're in kind of the golden age of superhero films. So it's been fun to watch. I've always been a fan, but I've certainly seen, you know, I've had to endure my share of terrible stretches of superhero movies. So now it's great to see this kind of Marvel renaissance. It's been fun. And yeah, so I'm a big superhero movie fan.
00:05:17
Speaker
It's brought me to you like graphic novels and things kind of late later in life I wasn't as much into it when I was a younger guy My co-host is he was a huge fan of like all these all these different graphic novels he's always been super into comics and like he got me into like Preacher and a bunch of stuff that he's really into so that's been kind of fun He's sort of been in some ways my my touchstone for a lot of a lot of this stuff
00:05:42
Speaker
Well, we should probably have him on at some time eventually as well then. Yeah, definitely. Definitely have some stuff to talk about there. But I think we're probably about roughly the same age demographic, just judging by what I'm seeing in the camera here, like, you know, mid-late 30s, early 40s, something like that. And yeah, I remember that stretch in like the late 90s, early 2000s when we were so excited to get all the superhero movies and it was just like,
00:06:11
Speaker
God, I want to like it, but it's got problems. Yeah. You know, we all had to, we all had our share of green lanterns in their own daredevils. Yeah. Now today, we're talking about a really
Is 'Robocop' a Superhero Movie?
00:06:25
Speaker
interesting movie. And I think some people will probably be wondering whether or not this really qualifies as a superhero movie. And I remember you kind of asked about that when you suggested this.
00:06:38
Speaker
Basically, I'm just going to say, you know what? It's my show, so I'm counting it as a superhero movie because I love
Satire of Corporate Greed in Robocop
00:06:43
Speaker
this movie. And that is Robocop from 1987, I believe, is when it came out. The original one, not the remake, which is not bad, but it doesn't really compare to what this original one did.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, they're different films. Both tonally and a lot of plot points. I actually, in preparation for this, just watched... I went back and watched the original because I hadn't seen it in a long time. And then I watched the 2014 version. And then I watched the... Because it's kind of a behind the scenes thing. On Netflix they have the movies that made us. Oh yeah, yeah. I was going to mention that too. I saw that a few months back. Yeah, and so that was kind of cool. But yeah, they're very different animals, those two movies.
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's I remember a lot of people said, you know, it was terrible, but it's not. It's it's a decent enough movie. It's it just doesn't reach the same heights that the original did.
00:07:39
Speaker
Yeah, and it has a different tone. I mean, I actually, I enjoyed it. I mean, I think it's perfectly watchable. It's entertaining. It's a little bit more kind of dour. It's a little darker. You know, it's kind of got his suit is black and everything. I mean, they went with sort of modern sensibilities in it. So I feel like they kind of tried to reinvent the wheel there for a more cynical audience almost. It doesn't have the humor that the original one had.
00:08:03
Speaker
But I enjoyed it. It was fun. The effects are great. It's cool to see, you know, although the original actually other than the maybe, well, we'll talk about it, but some of the effects don't hold up. But I think a lot of them do. I was surprised actually. I was too. Yeah. Yeah. But the new one was still a newer one. It was entertaining. It's just a very different film tonally, I think. Yeah. And it's got Michael Keaton just doing a great job too. So that's always a plus. Yeah.
00:08:33
Speaker
Now, the original one, I'm not sure what your association with this movie originally was, but I think I first came to Robocop because there was this weird thing that was happening in the late 80s, early 90s when they made cartoons of literally everything.
00:08:50
Speaker
including R-rated movies. So they had a RoboCop Saturday morning cartoon. They had a Rambo Saturday morning cartoon. There was like one that starred Mr. T. MC Hammer had his own cartoon, Louis Anderson. It was this really weird time in kids' animation.
00:09:06
Speaker
That's right. I actually, you know what? I don't remember that cartoon. I was racking my brain because I was around the right age for it. But I saw, I just looked at the Wikipedia and they said that it had an animated series. But I'm not surprised at all, because just like you said, they were just throwing everything into an animated series. It didn't seem to matter. Yeah, it was like Robocop and the...
00:09:26
Speaker
and the ultra police or something like that. And they had all the, and they had Anne Lewis in it as well as his partner again, and all of them had like tricked out cybernetic armor or something like that, I remember. I'm gonna have to download a couple episodes of that. I've got to watch that. You know, I actually, cause I don't have a memory of actually watching it. I don't think I ever actually, I'm not sure if I ever actually watched the show or not, but I did have some of the action figures. And I remember the Robocop one,
00:09:55
Speaker
This shows how little people cared about kids' safety back then,
R-rated Films Adapted for Kids
00:10:00
Speaker
but it had these firing caps you loaded into the back of the figure. It was really weird.
00:10:06
Speaker
That's amazing, yeah. We actually did an episode on dangerous toys and it was fun to look back at an era when they just did not care about children's safety whatsoever. At least they trusted kids to maybe be smarter than we were. They were like, here, good luck. Yeah, basically. It was definitely a kind of a Darwinist type of life. It was. So I can't remember the first time I saw this movie because, you know,
00:10:32
Speaker
also in the 80s just like you know our parents didn't really care about what kind of toys we were playing with at least my parents didn't really care so much about what kind of movies or tv shows i was watching so they see a movie it's like oh robocop that should be fine let them go and watch that yeah i saw it way too young i do remember when i saw it i was i think 12
00:10:53
Speaker
which probably, I don't know, it's not too young. Considering that violence is kind of mainstream these days, I don't think it's that much crazier than kids are looking at on the internet. But there are some shocking things in there. I mean, even rewatching with the guy who falls in the toxic waste and everything and getting run over. I mean, that's pretty graphic.
00:11:14
Speaker
Yeah, it is. It is pretty graphic. And I like, I've watched it at some point, definitely before I was 12. I was way too young about it. Which is why I don't care so much about what my daughter gets exposed to when I'm watching movies, because I'm like, I saw a lot worse stuff when I was her age.
00:11:32
Speaker
It's just like germs, right? I mean, we all rolled around in the muck when we were younger and it inoculated us against a lot of the stuff today. And it's basically the same thing. Like when you see stuff a little bit early, it's like it prepares you for life, what you're going to deal with later on. Yeah. And then I had fallen away from this movie. I hadn't seen it in years. And then they had released the director's cut. It was like this special two disc or like three or four disc set.
00:12:00
Speaker
in like a steel, you know, like one of those metal box containers back in the early 2000s, I think it was. And rewatching that and the director's cut, which is much more graphic. So like the especially Murphy's death, like they go into
00:12:16
Speaker
real graphic detail in that if you've only ever seen the theatrical cut. I mean, even the theatrical cut, it's kind of, it's torture porn, you know, he's just blowing off different parts of his body and making fun of it. Yeah. It's pretty rough. But one of the things that struck me is just how brilliant of a satire it is when you rewatch it when you're older.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, you know, there is I think that was a fun rewatch because I did catch some subtleties and nuance and stuff that I hadn't. It is more of a sort of and even finding out that the writers were like these kind of hippie guys who were very anti corporate and anti military.
00:12:54
Speaker
And it is, it's mocking corporations, big corporations, it's sort of mocking the militarism of the police. And yeah, I hadn't caught any of that subtlety when I was younger. I just, you know, big gun metal guy shooting stuff. This is great. Well, even the director, Paul Verhoeven, when he first got the script, he threw it out. And then his wife, I think it was his wife or his girlfriend or whoever it was, took the script out and said, maybe you should have another look at this. It's actually a lot smarter than you think.
Satire in Newscasts and Commercials
00:13:20
Speaker
And then he read it again and he started to notice all these things in it.
00:13:24
Speaker
It really plays and it's shocking that this movie was made in 1987 because so much of the stuff that we're dealing with now in 2022 was predicted by this movie.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just like I said, like the militarization of the police, like, you know, the police now, it's a big deal that police are getting like tanks and things. I mean, they're getting all of this, all of this military equipment that they now have access to. And that was something that I think he was, that movie was kind of predicting and alarmed about. But yeah, it was his wife. And I do think that's interesting. I mean, Verhoeven would go on to do like Starship Troopers, which has really the same themes. I mean, it really makes fun of the military industrial complex and he's
00:14:07
Speaker
You know, you can just see him and also him being a foreign director. I think is he Dutch or is he? I believe so, yeah. Yeah, I think he's Dutch and he has a very tongue-in-cheek approach to America. Like his idea of America is very much the European characterization, sort of the caricature of an American, right? We're all very militant. We're all very hyped up.
00:14:30
Speaker
And that's kind of what he likes to lampoon in his movies. And I just, yeah, I don't think I've been aware of how much humor there was and how much kind of mocking and under the surface criticism in the movie. It was fun to rewatch.
00:14:46
Speaker
crazy, silly humor. I buy that for a dollar stuff. It's zanier than I remember it being because I thought it was very badass when I was younger and now it's like, oh, a lot of this is just silly, intentionally so. Yeah. I think that's what works so well about it. I think that was
00:15:07
Speaker
Well, you know, talking about the remake, it's funny when you watch the remake because the remake takes the idea, the concept so much more seriously than even the original did.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I mean about it. It's sucking a little bit of the fun out of it, I think. It's still an enjoyable movie. Like I said, it's very entertaining. And they tried to sort of shoehorn a little bit of the humor in there with the Samuel L. Jackson character, kind of having the talk show that's sort of a spin on the O'Reilly factor or something.
00:15:40
Speaker
But that sort of, I don't feel like that works. It felt very out of place. It felt like they were trying to, you know, shove a little bit of the old sensibility in there. Because the rest of the movie is very serious and very grim. But, you know, still pretty badass. I mean, the effects were great. It was fun to watch. A lot of stuff blowing up. It works. On the level of an action film, it works really well.
00:16:02
Speaker
And then they did show, there was that one moment in the newer version where they show him what's under his suit. I thought that was really effective and that was something that you just couldn't do back in. I think they have some great effects in the original, some really good practical effects. His leg opening up and the gun coming out always looked great to me.
00:16:24
Speaker
Um, but they could not have pulled off something like, you know, just showing his, his brain exposed and just his one hand and just his lungs pumping, you know, and that that was all that was left of him. Um, was really, that was really shocking. I thought that was really effective to see how, how
Original vs. Remake: Tone and Satire
00:16:40
Speaker
terrifying that would be to realize you're just locked in this metal body. Yeah. And so that I thought they did really well in the new movie, but I don't know that that's necessarily a criticism of the old movie because again, I don't, that's just something they wouldn't have been able to pull off.
00:16:54
Speaker
Right. The only way we could really get that is the scene when we're when we're when they're putting him together and we see it through his eyes. And and Bob comes in and says, you know, lose the arm. Forget about trying to save the arm. That was great. Yeah, that was actually really good. You know, and again, another kind of dig at corporate America and being very heartless and just, you know, it doesn't. Who cares about his biological material? Just we need him as a machine. Yeah.
00:17:22
Speaker
So that stuff was great. All of the, you know, them throwing a party while he's just in the corner and they're just having this, you know, they're clearly like, they have their party hats on and everything and then she like kisses him on the visor. I mean, they're just, they're very cavalier about this man who's been completely disassembled and put together and his obviously, you know, this is a traumatic event for any human and they're just having a great time. He's just, he's just a, you know, for, he's just something to tinker on for them.
00:17:51
Speaker
Right. Yeah, there's, there's, yeah, that's a, that's, that's a good point even think about that because. And there's so much of that that dehumanization of workers and just like the, because he even says, I catch this now.
00:18:06
Speaker
when Bob is making his pitch to the old man. And he says, we've already put prime can, we've already restructured the police to put prime candidates in high risk locations. So they're actively trying to put these, the best people that they have to, to get them, to get them killed basically. So then they can tinker with their bodies.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, that was so sinister. I had not caught that in my original watching sense and viewing sense that, yeah, they were actually, you know, they wanted to get the best candidate and so they were putting good officers in danger hoping they'd get shot up so that they would have, you know, someone to use. I mean, that's just the ultimate, you know, shady corporate dealings. Yeah, yeah.
00:18:51
Speaker
also the talking about the prediction stuff, not only the militarization of the police, but the privatization of so much stuff, because Dick Jones even says that in his pitch, right? He's saying how, you know, we've this company has expanded into areas that were traditionally regarded as, as non are unprofitable. And he mentioned hospitals and, and, and prisons, and it's like so much stuff that all that stuff has come to pass now. And we're seeing how
00:19:21
Speaker
you know, corporations are constantly monetizing these things. Yeah, from the military. I mean, you have, you know, Blackwater and all these big, these big mercenary outfits that are, that the military is contracting to. The military is becoming more and more outsourced to corporations in America. And you're seeing that even on, you know, even on police levels.
00:19:41
Speaker
Yeah, it was really interesting to see the corporate takeover of, and we're even getting that with like spaceflight, you know, NASA doesn't fly to the moon anymore. They've seeded that to the private sector. And so this movie was really prescient in that way. I think it foresaw a lot of this stuff.
00:19:58
Speaker
Well, yeah. And even just like the corporate callousness, as long as it makes money, that's all they care about. Because Dick even says to Bob, right? You know, I had all these military contracts lined up for Ed 209. Who cares if it worked or not? And it reminded me of the funding. It was a big story a few years ago where Congress kept approving funding or like raising the funding for some
00:20:23
Speaker
really expensive aircraft that was not even feasible. And even the Pentagon is like, we don't want this money. This thing does not work. And Congress still kept funding it.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's so much of it goes back to, you know, these days, definitely a lot of it goes back to sort of which state is it being assembled in and how much, how many jobs are going to be created in that state and that, you know, that Congress person has to advocate for their state. And it doesn't matter if the thing is ever used or if it works, it's just, I'm bringing back the pork to my state. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, there was a lot of that in there. I also thought it was really interesting that one of the big
00:20:56
Speaker
the the villains in it are very interesting because there isn't like one major bad guy there's really one of the huge conflicts in the in the movies between two of the corporate you know two of the corporate bigwigs like this guy who's the the one guy who's who's very ambitious and the other guy who's already kind of
00:21:14
Speaker
set in his place and protecting his his his empire and I thought it was interesting that that you know instead of just having like the good guys versus the bad guys sort of there's nuance everywhere like the the police are corrupt a bunch of the police officers are corrupt a bunch of
00:21:31
Speaker
Obviously, you're dealing with the corporations and pretty much on every level, there's some level of corruption. Even within, there's a bunch of different criminals who are arguing and squabbling over the drug areas and things.
00:21:45
Speaker
It felt like everything in this was corrupt. There was no one other than, obviously, Murphy is kind of the one touchstone for, like, he's sort of the moral center of the movie. But other than him, and I guess his partner to an extent, but other than that, like, everyone is flawed. It's just a miserable place. Like, Detroit is just a cesspool. There's nothing good there, you know? Yeah, and to that point, too, is Murphy being the only
00:22:14
Speaker
the only really good person and and too as well is that they're constantly getting getting shit on because of yeah like yeah he gets he gets transferred into here he gets his he gets blown apart he gets put into this robot shell where they try they try to erase his memory um and and you know they try to at every single step of the way there's someone trying to you know fuck him up basically
00:22:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I just thought it was interesting. I mean, they really turned Detroit into like a Gotham in Gotham City. You know, it felt like it felt like the city itself was kind of menacing just because everything in it was bad. Well, that was especially the time period that this movie came out in because I remember that was the.
00:22:58
Speaker
like Detroit was, I'm not sure what it's like now, I think now it's not as much but back then it was like Detroit was considered like one of the most dangerous cities in America. Oh, it was and that was you know, that was the era of like Roger and me in Flint, Michigan with all of the plant closings and everything. So yeah, it was a huge economic crisis there and
00:23:16
Speaker
Tons of crime and so yeah, I mean they were just predicting kind of where things were gonna go luckily Like he said, I think Detroit has turned around to some extent But but yeah, it was it was it just felt interesting that they almost made the city feel Menacing to me and the map some of that map painting stuff was great. They did I guess they shot most of it in Dallas Okay
00:23:37
Speaker
Dallas was kind of an up and coming city at that point a lot of new construction it kind of felt modern and so they used like the the police or the Police headquarters or is it the corporate headquarters wherever he kills and 209 so it must be like the corporate headquarters. Yeah
00:23:55
Speaker
Yeah, they used the Dallas City Hall. The bottom of that is the Dallas City Hall. It was just this very weird, like, modernist structure. And then they did a matte painting above it. And it was really cool to see. And I think it came out great. I mean, I was really surprised at how well, other than the stop motion stuff, the ED-209, I mean, that looks very dated. It looks pretty silly when it's moving.
00:24:20
Speaker
But beyond that, I mean, I was surprised at how well, you know, the matte paintings looked great. All of the prosthetics were amazing. I mean, it really still held up. I was surprised to rewatch it and and feel like, oh, wow, you know, this is this isn't as dated as I thought it would be. Yeah, the effects are really good. And like you mentioned, the only one that really kind of
00:24:40
Speaker
is really kinky looking is, like you mentioned, especially that scene in the boardroom with Ed 209. Like when he's walking towards the boardroom table and everyone's backing off, that looks really, you can tell that's just like, okay, that's, you know, in front of a screen or something like that. Yeah. It looked like the stop motion from like those old dinosaur movies from the, you know, sixties or whatever. They had like the areas and stuff. Yeah.
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, or like King Kong or something, just that really cheesy stop motion. And it's interesting because that was, I guess, I think, what's his name? Phil Tippett, who did a lot of the Star Wars, like
Robocop's Movement and Sound Design
00:25:10
Speaker
the, you know, the Walkers and everything. And in most of the stop motion in Star Wars, still kind of holds up pretty well. It looks a little smoother, but for some reason in Robocop, that just stood out. Maybe because the rest of the effects were pretty good. The N209 was a little rough.
00:25:27
Speaker
I think it's also just the setting of it because in Star Wars, most of the time when you see like the walkers, stuff like that, you don't have a bunch of people in the background that it's in. But here it's, because the F-209 stuff, it looks a little hinky when there's not any other people in the frame, but it mostly works. When you have the other people in there, then it kind of, then the uncanny valley vibe really hits you.
00:25:52
Speaker
Yeah, Uncanny Valley is a good description of it because it is sort of, as soon as you take something into a pedestrian environment, like a very normal environment where we expect, we know how things should look in a boardroom. And so when something is so anachronistic and out of place and then it doesn't move right, it just throws you off. Whereas, you know, on Hoth or something, on some alien planet with only the sky in the background,
00:26:18
Speaker
it's a lot easier to fool us. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I think that was a big thing for me because that's really the only scene, the only shot that really kind of pulls me right out of the movie is that one. But other than that, all the other effects and the prosthetic work on the Robocop suit is unbelievably good. Even when they take off Murphy's helmet and his skin is pulled over and the
00:26:45
Speaker
Every time I watch that, I'm like, I can't figure out how they did that. It was seamless. I was really shocked. I actually paused it and looked at it from a couple different, you know, in a couple different angles. And I was because I was trying to figure out like, wow, back then I just felt like I didn't expect it to look as good as it did. It almost, you know, in those practical effects.
00:27:04
Speaker
There's something so tangible about them. They feel very gritty and real as opposed to, you know, now, like you can look at the 2014 one and it looks great. It's all very glistening and everything looks, you know, obviously a lot of CGI and everything looks really good, but there was something very visceral and like gritty and hands-on about those practical effects and it just looked great. Like, especially like you said, when they took the helmet off, I was blown away. I was like, wow, that is just expert. That's amazing.
00:27:30
Speaker
And something else, too, I noticed about this is the the constant cutting away to newscast. And this actually is a is a bit of a comic book connection because the dark and I'm not sure if it's just serendipitous or if they got this from comic books. But when Frank Miller did
00:27:48
Speaker
The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 was a year before this movie came out. He did a lot of that. A lot of this, you know, cutting away to news broadcasts and, you know, the whole idea of like the 24 hour news cycle and the punditry and all that kind of stuff was very, a very heavy, heavy feature in that book. And they use that to great effect in here. Like it opens with the newscast.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah, and there's newscasts kind of spread throughout and they're all sort of tongue-in-cheek and it's obviously, you know, it's very hyper real. It's all kind of intended to be mockery, but I think it's effective. Like it didn't, you know, it doesn't throw off the tone. It's a really fine line they walk here between the comedy and making it
00:28:32
Speaker
serious and you know, there's there's drama Murphy walking through his his house once he's Robocop and walking through his house and kind of all the memories and everything I mean, there's some very poignant stuff in here that would be it would be I don't know how it works because it kind of shouldn't on paper and
00:28:48
Speaker
I'm surprised that this script got green lit because I would read this and go like, there's no way you can pull this off. Like, you've got all this kind of tear jerky stuff in the, you know, shoved in here with all of this tongue-in-cheek silliness and satire, but somehow it just works. And Verhoeven can definitely misfire. I mean, he's had some terrible, you know, basic instincts. Showgirls is a great example of just like,
00:29:12
Speaker
You know, I don't know if you've seen it, but I mean, Showgirls had, it was just sex and violence and then they would try to have like this sad backstory for the character and you're like, this is, oh my God, it's so hard to swallow. But when it works, it works. He's just able to, you know, especially in this movie, just this kind of magical melding of all of the silliness and all of the seriousness and somehow it comes together and it just is effective.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, I've never seen Showgirls, but I have seen the infamous sex scene in the pool. Yeah, where she's having a conniption. It's like, I feel like that's it. It's so weird, because that whole scene looks like everybody involved. It looks like everyone it looks like that scene was constructed by people who have no idea how sex works.
00:30:01
Speaker
The whole movie is like it's like you have no idea how people work like there's there's this brutal rape scene that just has no reason to be there and then there'll be jokes right after it and it's just like this is like an alien made a movie it's none of it makes sense the wrong choice was made at every possible juncture you know it's just it's it's deliciously awful like it's really bad but
00:30:25
Speaker
But like I said, for some, you know, Starship Troopers, on the other hand, I think really strikes a similar balance to this movie, although a lot more on the kind of silliness side of it. But it just works. You know, it's just one of those things where when someone is really committed, like Verhoeven is, to going all out, he doesn't do, everything is over the top. You know, there's no, there's not a lot of subtlety in any of his movies. And when he's, when you're that committed, you're either gonna miss big or you're really gonna hit. And the movies that he's done that work, they just really hit.
00:30:55
Speaker
Well, yeah, I think Starship Troopers is a good example of that because that's a movie that's been so, that was so misunderstood for so long because it was so over the top that people didn't realize it was supposed to be. That was the joke. Whereas this movie, like, I cannot think of a single person who does not like this movie because it's just, it's because you can look at it in so many different levels. Like, you can look at it on
00:31:25
Speaker
on the cheese level and just like, which I think is probably how most of us of our age group probably grew up watching it. It's like, oh, it's cool. It's a it's a robot cop. You know, it's that's that's that's fun. That's badass. But but then when you get older and you watch it again, you're like, oh, my God, they're really they're really making some searing indictments about America in this movie. Yeah, I do think that that is one of the reasons it's so effective is that it can sort of hit a wide demographic
00:31:52
Speaker
and it works on a lot of levels. So you can sort of watch it. If you're just, if you just want to see a bunch of stuff get blown up and that amazing huge hand cannon that he's carrying around, which is just, you know, iconically badass with it's like multi shot and the flame kind of coming out from the sides. You know, it's just, it's just a badass movie, but obviously like you can watch it on a lot of other levels and that's what makes it hold up. I think that's why it's still, that's why it's still so watchable. I mean, I, I kind of was wondering, I hadn't seen it in a few years and,
00:32:20
Speaker
And I was definitely wondering how I was going to feel about it. And if I was going to go into this going like, oh boy, that didn't hold up as well as I thought. But it totally does. It was completely entertaining. And it's just just a great movie. It does. Yeah. And it's even like just like the Reagan era stuff of it, like the whole the whole idea of the they're going to the Star Wars platform. Right. Which is the big thing that Reagan was trying to push through in the 80s with the Star Wars missile defense system. Strategic defense initiative. Yeah. Yeah. And they get up there and
00:32:48
Speaker
it stopped working and they lose weight. Yeah, there were a lot of little subtle digs. It was interesting to see the kind of behind the scenes stuff and see how intentional all that was and how kind of, you know, political these guys were. And again, I think Robocop is another, it's another example of movies that do get somewhat misinterpreted, even though people, everyone loved it. I think it's like, you know, the song board in the USA or something. I mean, you talk about Robocop and people are like, oh, it's a badass action movie about like,
00:33:17
Speaker
you know, how amazing the super cop basically. But it really is an indictment of all that stuff. And so I do think that RoboCop is misinterpreted by a lot of its biggest fans, but
Corporation as the Antagonist
00:33:30
Speaker
that's what's great about it too, is you kind of, you know, you take what you want from it.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think the misinterpretation is really common with not only that, but a lot of movies you see a lot of that kind of stuff happening. But it is kind of amazing that, like you said, that this movie got greenlit. I mean, just like all the
00:33:49
Speaker
because Reagan was, you know, was like a sacred cow back then. He was still, this is, he was still the president at this time. So it's, and he, even for, I don't think there was a, there, even to this day, there hasn't really been a real reckoning with his presidency, but, so to put a movie out like this back then that so goes after him, I think was, this movie had, had balls on house to give it that.
00:34:14
Speaker
Yeah, you know, good on Orion Pictures for pulling the trigger on it. And I think that there is, you know, Hollywood always has been, I think, the one sort of bastion of leftism even during Reagan's years. You know, Reagan was incredibly popular, but obviously Hollywood is pretty liberal and I think there was
00:34:32
Speaker
there was full knowledge of what they were doing with this movie among the people who green-lit it. I think, you know, they were like, well, we're gonna, this is, this is also a little bit of a chance to, to, you know, stick some jabs at the, to take some jabs at the administration here. Well, I think too, the set, I think that's maybe one of the reasons why it was misinterpreted so much, because the satire almost works too well, because you can easily see this as, like you said, you know, you can enjoy it as just being like an over-the-top action movie, and
00:35:02
Speaker
It definitely does that part really well. So if you're not paying attention, you could easily miss the satire on it. I almost wonder if that's why Verhoeven went so overboard with Starship Troopers, because it's almost like, you know, like a lot of people who made Top Gun have talked about, like, you know, well, now we've been sort of pigeonholed as like being pro-military and so went on to do a bunch of other stuff to kind of counteract it.
00:35:25
Speaker
I wonder if he was like, you know, well, I think too many people liked that movie for the wrong reasons.
Verhoeven's Satirical Storytelling
00:35:30
Speaker
I'm going to make a movie that's so over the top that no one can misinterpret it. But then people still did. There's still people who think Starship Troopers is a gung-ho, you know, military fest, which is hilarious because it's so clearly a satire and so clearly intended to be mocking.
00:35:46
Speaker
I mean, you just can't win. That's always the danger when you're doing satire. There's always going to be someone who misinterprets it as being the thing that you're actually making fun of. Exactly. That's totally true. And also just like the commercials too. I love the commercials in this. As a kid, I think I may have actually thought they were real commercials like watching this on TV or something.
00:36:11
Speaker
Well, it was funny to see that they were, I guess, intentionally mocking, especially with that, I'd buy that for a dollar, that they were mocking Benny Hill in particular. And so they had specific targets for these. And that was something that I definitely didn't know when I was younger. I just thought like, oh, they're being zany. But no, they were like intentionally spoofing certain characters.
00:36:33
Speaker
Well, especially, I love the car ads, right? The SUX, the sucks. The sucks. Yeah. Everybody wants an SUX. And I guess that was, you know, Verhoeven is just, they talk so much about Verhoeven and his sort of classic, like, make it bigger, make it, make it louder, make it, you know, he has this, it's funny because he very much mocks
00:36:56
Speaker
the American mentality of make everything bigger and louder, but that became sort of his refrain, and it became a staple of his directing, too. It was just make it bigger, make it louder. And I was shocked at how much just absolute destruction there is in this movie. I mean, that whole scene where they're playing with the new guns, they have those new guns that are going to take out Robocop.
00:37:19
Speaker
and they just blow up everything in the vicinity. And they kept exploding more things. And I was like, are we really, we're still doing this? All right. I guess they're just going to blow that. And now they're going to blow up two more cars and now they're going to blow up this building. And it just, it was, you could just see Verhoeven going more, more, bigger, more. And it was, that must've cost a lot of money. And I guess the biggest explosion they had was that Texaco station. There's a gas station that explodes at one point. And the crew had said something about, because,
00:37:48
Speaker
You know, he kept saying more and bigger. They're like, all right, we're going to give him more and bigger. And I guess it like blew up. It blew out the windows, you know, three blocks away. They had to pay a bunch of money. They had to pay four hundred dollars extra for all the cast members for hazard pay for that day. Like it ended up being really expensive. But they gave him what he wanted and he was thrilled. He was like, that's what I'm talking about. It's huge. Well, I mean, that's the that's the amazing thing about this movie is just how much of those explosions are real explosions they actually set off. That's not CGI like you see now.
00:38:17
Speaker
And that's what makes it feel so visceral. You know, the same thing with the practical effects on his skull. It really feels gritty.
00:38:25
Speaker
And you can feel the concussions from those explosions because they actually happened as opposed to, you know, it is, I still, I'm not a hater of CGI. I'm really happy with what CGI has done for movies for the most part because it's been able, it's allowed me to be able to visualize some of the things that I could never have seen. You know, I remember Jurassic Park when that came out and just being like, I never thought I would see a convincing dinosaur on screen and imagine what it would be like to be next to a T-Rex.
00:38:52
Speaker
And so I think CGI is great, but there is something, you know, I feel like the old guy shaking my fist at a cloud, but there is something just more visceral about those old practical effects, that you really feel them and they seem like they're of the universe that we reside in, you know?
00:39:12
Speaker
Well, I mean, you also just have to respect the craft of doing that and just, you know, and just the risk you're taking when you're in golf. I mean, you got to respect the stuntmen back then. I mean, Jesus.
00:39:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. So the stuntman, that was another thing I didn't know that they had actually fired the lead actor on this movie and that the stuntman was they were actually going to use his stuntman, the stuntman, and they were trying to get him to do some acting lessons and things. They were going to have him be the new robocop.
00:39:45
Speaker
that all the stunt people were so involved in this production that I guess that's how interwoven they were with the production that they actually were just like, well, let's just have the stunt guy be Robocop then. That's a nice transition to talk about the cast in this movie.
00:40:04
Speaker
you know, some, you know, pretty interesting names in here. Like you got Miguel Farrer as Bob Morton, you got Ray Wise, who is just like basically a cameo in this movie that he goes on to do bigger things. Kirkwood Smith, of course, you know, everyone's favorite dad from that 70s show. Right. I love seeing him in these older movies. It's so funny to see him in these roles before because I'm mostly
00:40:29
Speaker
I think I really came to know him from that 70s show. And then I go back and I rewatch these old movies for my childhood. I'm like, oh, it's like, you know, where can you spot Kurtwood Smith in an old movie? Well, and that was inspired casting too, because, you know, I don't see him. He's not the typical villain. He's not, he's not some big mean looking guy, right? They even gave, you know, he had glasses. He was kind of nerdy looking. That was just, I think that was a really smart casting decision to, to kind of go a different route and not have the typical, especially this was 87 when,
00:40:58
Speaker
Every villain had like a leather jacket and a, you know, some cheesy hairdo and, you know, like the ponytail and all that kind of stuff. A switchblade, you know, it was that full. It was like the bad video or Michael Jackson. And they went with a with a kind of a nerd.
00:41:16
Speaker
You know, which I thought was cool. It made it. It gave it a little bit more. It made it a little bit more menacing because it was unexpected. And he played it very well, I think. I think the smarminess he he brings to the character, like the jokes he's making and all that.
00:41:32
Speaker
And now I'm watching it and I'm thinking now that this guy actually kind of created a new template for movie villains going forward because now we have like almost every single villain in every single movie is some smarmy smart ass character.
00:41:48
Speaker
I think you're right. I think that, you know, by sort of subverting in that expectation and seeing how successful that was, I think a lot of other people took notice and were like, oh, we don't need to have the cheesy eighties villain. We can we can go a different route. And I'm glad that they did. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely a much better choice because you watch some of those villains from some of those older movies and we just laugh at them now, which kind of makes you wonder, what are people going to be doing with the smarmy villains in 20, 30 years?
00:42:15
Speaker
Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Sure. Nothing ever holds up over time. Um, but Peter Weller, uh, you know, and, and like you mentioned, there were some, uh, there were some issues. I think there were some issues. I'm not sure. I can't remember exactly, but, um, it was the, like you said, they brought in the stunt man. And I think there were some issues with Peter Weller himself. Like I think he left and then he came back.
00:42:39
Speaker
So he was threatening to leave. There were a couple different reasons that he clashed with Verhoeven. And one of them was his movement style. Part of his contract was that he wanted them to employ a movement coach for him. This guy that he particularly had in mind.
00:42:57
Speaker
But the guy was teaching him this, like, very martial arts style movement. It was going to be, you know, it was staggered, but in this really smooth way. And then once he tried on the suit, none of that worked. And so there was all of this arguing about how he should move, and he was kind of refusing to do it differently. He was also super frustrated with just the process of the suit.
00:43:18
Speaker
It took, you know, the first time they put it on, it took 14 hours to get him in the suit. And he was just like, I'm not, I'm not doing this every day. And they were able to get it down to like four hours by the end. But it also caught, you know, it also weighed between like somewhere between 30 and 80 pounds, depending on the particular outfit for that day and what they were shooting. And he, they said that he lost three pounds a day with just water weight. So he was constantly having to.
00:43:44
Speaker
And this is a guy who was a marathon runner. And so, you know, he was a fit guy, but he was pushed to his breaking point there. He also was very method, which just strikes me as, I think that has to be one of the most annoying things. I understand that it has worked really well for some actors, but for other people on the set, he forced people to call him robo, which that's just, I mean, how can you take that seriously? Like, that's really annoying.
00:44:09
Speaker
Well, like Robert Pattinson had a really good quote recently about method acting when he says, you know, it just kind of seems like an excuse for you to be an asshole. You never hear stories about someone method acting and just being like a really nice person.
00:44:21
Speaker
Yeah, and it's like they never method actor. It's never their method acting for like a good hearted character. That's never the case. It's always some jerk. That's totally true. It's like, you know, I'm going to treat everyone like shit and you have to excuse that because that's what my character would do. And it's like, well, yeah, but that's, you know, that's why it's a character, man. This is a job. And if you can't act when they say action and then stop acting when they say cut, you're not much of an actor. Like you're just an asshole. Yeah.
00:44:51
Speaker
uh there was a the famous exchange between Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman. I'm not sure if you heard about this but no no so this was when they were doing Marathon Man and uh Dustin Hoffman had been like you know up for three nights or something to like really kind of get into character and Lawrence Olivier asked what was wrong with him and he told him and Lawrence Olivier he's like he's like my dear boy you should try this thing called acting
00:45:16
Speaker
I love that. I like hearing the behind the scenes drama between actors. I just watched this interview with Jim Carrey from another superhero movie. It was one of the Batman movies where Jim Carrey was the Riddler.
00:45:29
Speaker
Batman Forever with him and Tommy Lee Jones. And Tommy Lee Jones just could not stand Jim Carrey. He just hated everything about Jim Carrey. And at one point, he said this line that I've used a bunch of times on our podcast. It's kind of become a refrain. All of the insomniacs, they know this line because he was explaining, I guess, why he could not stand Jim Carrey. Jim Carrey said, why do you hate me? And he said, I cannot sanction your buffoonery. And that's just, that is a line that I love. And anytime Duncan's being
00:46:00
Speaker
a little out of pocket, I'll just be like, I cannot sanction your buffoon. It's so funny because he gets it when you watch that movie, it's almost like Tommy Lee Jones is trying to out Jim Carrey, Jim Carrey. Yeah, I think he felt really like Jim Carrey pushed him to a place that he didn't want to go as an actor, but that he had to to meet that match that energy, you know, and I think he was into that.
00:46:23
Speaker
Well, I mean, a lot of people should probably should resent that movie. Yeah. And what is interesting, though, because I felt like this movie has a little bit of that Joel Schumacher aesthetic because it sort of has that like a little bit over the top. But it's like if if it were done right, you know, like this is the way to do that sort of almost comically, like
00:46:49
Speaker
We know that this is over the top and ridiculous, but we're accepting it. Whereas in Batman Forever, you don't accept it. It's just ridiculous. It just all comes across as you roll your eyes. And it would be really easy to make a version of Robocop, especially with that script where you just roll your eyes through the whole movie. But he made it work.
00:47:05
Speaker
Yeah. And Peter Weller's, like, you know, the movement stuff, despite all the problems they had with him on set with that, I mean, he sells it really well, like what they eventually got out of it really works. You really feel like this guy's mostly a robot body.
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah, I guess the sticking point ended up being the movement and then he refused to say there are those those rope there I don't know what they're called but it's like the the robot cop commands basically which are like it's like the directives the directives right it's like the prime directives like kind of like in iRobot or something where it's like you know i will not harm such and such i will work for the good i didn't write them down or anything yeah it was um it was uh i remember them it was uh uh protect the innocent um uphold the law and
00:47:53
Speaker
defend the public trust.
00:48:10
Speaker
in the film and he wouldn't do it. And that's when they fired him. That was finally, I guess, the last straw. And I think Wellard sort of thought he was calling their bluff. He didn't think that they would actually fire him. And when they started shooting scenes with this other guy, he was like, oh, you know what? Let's talk. And he changed his tune and he agreed to do it. And I'm glad he did. But, you know,
00:48:30
Speaker
I mean, you have to say the guy has good instincts because whatever he did worked. And it's good that they rained him in a little bit, I think. But he does seem like he was the right choice. And when they asked Rovin what was so great about Weller, he said he's got that chin. His chin and mouth are just perfect for a real guy.
00:48:56
Speaker
You know what's kind of funny too is that all the problems they had with Weller, all the problems Weller had on this movie, like for the longest time, I thought he had quit after this movie and that they had gotten the, because I know in Robocop 3, they got someone else, but then I'd given Robocop 2 another watch recently and I was surprised. I'm like, wait, that's Peter Weller. I thought he quit after this one.
00:49:20
Speaker
I haven't seen Robocop 2 in forever. I don't think I ever ended up seeing Robocop 3. How is 2? 2 is much better than I think its reputation is. I'm not sure if it's good, but it's definitely better than I think people would remember it as. Robocop 3 though, I haven't seen that in a while, but I remember that as just being hot garbage.
00:49:43
Speaker
it usually you know it's usually by the third one they just it it all falls apart it's it's especially with with a movie where it's kind of like catching lightning and bottle like we said it was so unlikely that that first movie worked to try to recreate that magic two more times and not have it be
00:50:00
Speaker
you know, not have it go too far to the side of being tongue-in-cheek or too far to the gritty and kind of over-the-top violence side. It just seems like they shouldn't have even tried again. Yeah. Well, even just the way Weller delivers his lines as Robocop, like that kind of like...
00:50:19
Speaker
almost stopping and starting like he's got this very almost like staccato way of speaking, when he does it and it really, it really helps sell that idea of him being like all robot, and just like the way he delivers it almost completely without emotion, but then he transitions to when he's talking about when he takes the helmet off, and he's talking, he's asking about Murphy's family.
00:50:41
Speaker
It's like his speaking style changes too. It's really well done. It's a really understated effect that he uses there.
00:50:50
Speaker
I think you're right. I think that that is an element of the movie that doesn't get enough attention is that there is a character arc and there is supposed to be this idea, like it ends with him saying, you know, what's your name? You know, what should we call you? And he says Murphy instead of Robocop. And that is the progression of him going from this robot to kind of reclaiming himself. And that is very subtle, but it does work. And if you're watching on that level, there is kind of this
00:51:15
Speaker
gradual resurfacing of the humanity inside him. That's cool. It's a little bit overplayed at this point. It's the Pinocchio syndrome or something where he's becoming a real boy, but it works in that movie. He really sells it. I thought all of it just hit all the right beats. Another thing I thought was an interesting way to end this movie is
00:51:46
Speaker
Because I think in a movie like this where you've got basically the corporation is the bad guy, right? Because everything bad that happens in this movie is because of OCP. Like even Clarence and his gang, right? They're working for Dick Jones. And he even says like, you know, once the whole idea is to make crime actually only look like it's stopped. But really once the construction crews come in, you're gonna be giving them drugs, you're gonna be giving them prostitutes, you're gonna be giving them gambling and all that kind of stuff.
00:52:16
Speaker
Um, and so it's just like, you know, trying to cover it up with, uh, a veneer of civility is what, yeah. And every other, every other eighties movie, you know, especially the kind of Rambo esque raw, raw stuff, it was always the, the street hoods were the bad guys, you know, and then there'd be like a drug kingpin or something. But yeah, like you said, in this movie, it is, it's ultimately the corporation and
00:52:40
Speaker
And that was at a time in America when we had the CIA selling drugs to the, you know, the Contras in for the Contras in in Nicaragua and things. So, you know, there was again, a lot of there was stuff under the surface that actually was, I think, pretty
00:52:57
Speaker
uh pretty relevant at the time yeah absolutely yeah well also too is that and most of the time when you would have a corporation as a villain like and i think the 2014 one did this to an extent too where basically it's robocop taking down the corporation in the end in some form that doesn't happen here like the whole directive four which you know
00:53:19
Speaker
going back to the three laws of robot, I didn't even make that connection with the three laws of robotics. But you're right, it's very similar to that. But then you have directive four, which is very much a corporate idea where it's like, you know, you cannot, you cannot any attempt to arrest an OCP executive will result in immediate shutdown.
00:53:37
Speaker
Right. And that directive is still in place. And that stays in. They don't actually delete that until Robocop 3 is when he finally deletes it. And it's a weird scene because he deletes it by himself, which completely defeats the purpose of it.
00:53:52
Speaker
Yeah, it is interesting in this movie because you do have, I guess, the happy ending of these particular bad guys lose, but the bad system remains in place. Like, everything still sucks. It's not, you know, it's not, the world isn't, it's not a happy ending for the world, it's just that a couple guys who were bad got dealt with. But it is over, you know, still it's a pretty cynical
00:54:15
Speaker
movie all you know even even at the end it maintains that cynicism well yeah the other thing okay you've got um you know you've got dick jones holding the gun to the old man who is you know probably just as bad because he's he's the one who's running this you know and then and you know robocop saves him and then he even you know gives him a kudos yeah he's like oh that's nice shooting so i don't know that and so he's like i think that's it's really smart of that for hope and did it that
00:54:44
Speaker
you know what, this system is so big that we can't just destroy it with one guy. Yeah, absolutely. And there was, I think, you know, there's a lot of truth to that. Like it's, it's, you can have these little victories in these movies, but ultimately there's still, the system is still infected there. And they make that really clear in this movie.
00:55:05
Speaker
I thought you were about to say something else before I touched on the old man thing. It's totally different on a totally different track, but it occurred to me. The other thing that I think really sells not just his movement, his movement really works with it, but what I noticed on this viewing was the sound design.
00:55:22
Speaker
the sound of the weight of his steps, you know, is just really, really, there's a lot of gravity there, like literal and figurative gravity that just, you know, it makes him feel weighty. And then when he moves all the whirring and the, you know, the machinery sounds when he turns his head or turns his torso, it just that really, you know, if you take that out, it just, it's a guy in like a suit that could clearly be plastic or something.
00:55:48
Speaker
but it gives it that sense of heaviness and sense of solidity and makes it a really imposing figure.
Sound Design's Role in Robocop
00:55:55
Speaker
So yeah, I was really impressed with the sound design too. I think that's something that doesn't get enough. I think, yeah, I think it did get, it ended up being, the movie ended up being nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards and I think they were all technical stuff. It was all like sound design and things and they won a couple. I'm not sure which ones, but sound design should have won for sure.
00:56:15
Speaker
Yeah. And, um, God, the sound guys must have been going out of their minds trying to match every single little, little movement with a little war or a little stomp. I mean, you know, you got to give them credit for that diligence in that. Yeah. It's funny. Cause I, I downloaded a version of it. I was trying to get like an uncut version.
00:56:34
Speaker
And so I was like downloading different versions of it. And one of them, the sound was just a little bit off from, you know, which didn't bother me during speech. It wasn't that noticeable. But then when you walked, I just couldn't take it because his foot would come down and then it would be like thump and then his foot would come down and then it would say thump and then you'd get the thump. And it just, you know, that just takes you out of the movie wind because that's why I noticed that it was so important that that, you know, that that element be there.
00:57:00
Speaker
Well, speaking of the sound, too, I mean, this theme is so good that Basil Paladores did the music on this. That theme is so iconic.
00:57:08
Speaker
Yeah, the theme is great. And all of the score, I mean, it is a little overly dramatic. It's very, very, it's, you know, it's very orchestral and there's just a lot going on there, but it works in this movie. I mean, I think that's what you need. You needed that much, you needed to really sell it. This needed to be a big feeling film, especially considering it was so low budget. They, I think they sort of intentionally kind of
00:57:34
Speaker
spruced it up with things like sound design and the orchestra and everything to make it feel like a bigger movie than it is. And something that this is, and this is kind of a nitpick, but it's something that kind of jumped out at me on this last viewing is that as forward thinking as this movie is in so many ways about society, about culture, about politics, it's not so forward thinking when it comes to technology because you see like the
00:57:59
Speaker
the like I remember the the scene that really jumped out to me was when he's in his house and he has the memory of his kids sitting on the couch watching this like old like set box tv set with the little turn stop turn dials on it and yeah you think you compared something like minority report which
00:58:18
Speaker
One of the things that Steven Spielberg was really intent on with that movie was kind of predicting where technology would go. And he consulted a lot with people who worked in technology. And so that's why so much of that stuff seems like it was an accurate prediction of what we have now. But where's RoboCop? You see him with these really old box set, the old boob tube TV screens.
00:58:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think it was there was intended to be kind of just this feeling of almost magical realism That's one of the reasons I feel like it is kind of a superhero movie because it's sort of a pastiche of all these different You know, the the cars are a great example where like there's all this high technology for the buildings and things they're all very like futuristic and then the cars are like, you know old Detroit beaters and
00:59:06
Speaker
And I think part of that was supposed to be that the emphasizing that the cops, you know, that's all that they could afford or something. I don't know. But, you know, it seems like he didn't seem to care that much about the melding of technology. I feel like that was part of Verhoeven kind of saying, I'm not trying to make this real. I'm making an alternate, almost an alternate universe situation. Like, this isn't, you know, your city five years from now. This is what could have happened in a different timeline, right?
00:59:37
Speaker
But yeah, the technology is all over the map. What I did appreciate was it did subvert some of the other standard kind of action movie cliches, even superhero movie cliches. There's no romance between the two partners. You think when he gets a female partner,
00:59:55
Speaker
that there's gonna be some type of like she's gonna fall for him and he's gonna regain his humanity and then maybe they'll have some kind of romance or something but there's nothing like at all they're just they're just friends and that never changes and they said that they actually when they cast uh who was it Nancy Allen I think yeah Nancy Allen
01:00:14
Speaker
Nancy Allen, right? When they cast Nancy Allen, she had a reputation for being, she had like long blonde hair, she was very feminine and she had been kind of an ingenue style, you know, actress. And they really, they went out of their way to like, they told her to gain weight. So she, she quit smoking actually so that she would gain some weight.
01:00:33
Speaker
And then they cut her, they chopped her hair super short. They wanted her to be more, you know, a little bit more androgynous and less of a potential love interest. They didn't want any kind of sexual tension there because he's, you know, he's a robot. That's not what this is about. And I thought that was interesting. You know, I liked that they sort of didn't go the standard, the Hollywood action hero route where they, you know, find love at the end or something. Yeah, yeah.
01:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. I didn't even think about that. But that would be a standard plot line you would have or subplot you would have in one of these types of movies is, you know, she helps him gain, regain his humanity through the power of love or something like that. Exactly. And also, I thought that and like the 2014 one obviously took a different route, but I thought it was really cool that they
01:01:19
Speaker
just kept his past completely in the past, right? There's no effort for him to seek out his wife and son. There's no effort to, you know, they're only seen in these memories and that's it.
01:01:34
Speaker
in the 2014 version? No, I mean in the original one. Yeah, because I was going to say, because yeah, in the 2014, that's the opposite. Like they have his wife be this really active. She like seeks him out and tries to sort of bring him back to who he was. And she's a much more, you know, I think that was sort of symptomatic of the current trend of sort of making sure that everyone has agency. And I think, you know, I can understand why they did it in the newer one. They wanted his wife to be an active character.
01:02:02
Speaker
But I do like in the original that like you said, he's not, he doesn't like go, you know, in the newer one, they had him going back and talking to his son and kind of this whole, you know, he sort of reintegrates into the family to some point. And with this one, it's like, no, that's part of the tragedy here. Like we're, there's not, that's, he doesn't get a happy ending. He doesn't just get to go home and be daddy again. And, you know, that's part of the cynicism that, that the sort of overarching cynicism of this movie that like, there's not going to be a happy ending.
01:02:32
Speaker
the he might get the perp you know he might kill the bad guy but all the other the the real bad guys are still there and he's still a robot you know he still doesn't have he still doesn't have his humanity now the last thing i want to talk about is and you kind of mentioned this before is and what i kind of introduced this movie as is
01:02:53
Speaker
do you think this qualifies as a superhero movie or not? Because personally, I've always personally kind of classified it
Robocop's Superhero Qualities
01:03:01
Speaker
that way. Like even in my own personal Plex library where you can manipulate the genres, this is under the superhero genre category. I think it absolutely is. I mean, it's actually interesting. One of the things I learned was that there were two writers on this movie. There was the guy who had kind of had the original idea and he had obviously come up with the name Robocop.
01:03:19
Speaker
which that was something that I found interesting that they went with the name Robocop, which sounds so ridiculous. But the other guy who he ended up co-writing with...
01:03:29
Speaker
had an original idea. One of the reasons that they sort of collaborated was because they had both talked about their sort of ideas that they had had that complimented each other because the other guy had an idea for a movie called Supercop and it was basically a superhero cop. And so they sort of, you know, this movie was intentionally intended to be Iron Man meets Judge Dredd was how they described it. And so, you know, this was a comic book movie from the beginning. Like that's what they were envisioning.
01:03:57
Speaker
And so, you know, this is a guy who has a traumatic event and then gets superhuman abilities. He's given superhuman abilities and he kind of finds himself and he becomes more autonomous toward the end. And to me, this is absolutely a superhero. Yeah, I would agree with that. And yeah, I completely forgot about that, that it was originally, that was kind of the idea. And it is kind of funny because
01:04:22
Speaker
Growing up, there were, of course, Robocop comics, and I had always thought that for the longest time, I thought the comics had come first and this was an adaptation of them, but it was actually the other way around. The movie came first and then the comics ended up coming later.
01:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, all of the other spin-off stuff for Robocop, it was just through this guy's script. Where he got the idea of it was seeing one of the futuristic police cars on the Blade Runner set because the guy who wrote it was working on one of the sets and he would kind of sneak in there.
01:04:57
Speaker
and help out with stuff on Blade Runner and so he was really influenced by a lot of the Blade Runner aesthetic and then he saw this particular sort of one of the flying cop cars there and he just imagined like the kind of cop that would get out of that car would be a robot cop. Right. And that's kind of where it all came from.
01:05:14
Speaker
It's kind of funny because they do the opposite in both movies. In Blade Runner, you've got where you think it's going to be this big robot cop coming out of that futuristic car, but it's just Harrison Ford. Whereas in this one, you've got the old beater, and that has the robot cop in it.
01:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, in this one. That might just be a budget issue, but I do like that. The real technology is in the people in this one.
Blend of Futuristic and Familiar Elements
01:05:41
Speaker
Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, no. Well, that was something that he also found inspiring about. Blade Runner was that the robots in Blade Runner looked like people. They weren't all metal.
01:05:52
Speaker
And that was a kind of a nitpick that I had with the 2014 version Which is that they had all these robots running around and then they decided to create a robot Human hybrid and that just it felt very even I they say something about it in the movie where he's kind of like well this is a huge step backwards and that's kind of what it felt like it's like why are we going to
01:06:14
Speaker
I felt it was a little tenuous, their explanation for why you would switch from robots to a robot who now is a little bit more vulnerable. But I, you know, that was interesting. I got to rewatch the movie. I haven't seen it in a long time. But the way I remember it is it was it seemed like more of a public relations thing than anything else. Although that may not have gotten as gotten across as well in the story.
01:06:39
Speaker
They wanted, you know, robots that could make like moral decisions, I guess, in the moment and things, but that doesn't make sense to me because humans are programming the robots, humans are usually controlling, you know, it's like a drone, you still have a human who's making the decisions ultimately. So either way, if the human's in the robot itself or the human's making the decisions for the robot, either way, a human is, you know, determining what a robot's going to do. So, I don't know. It seemed like almost they were
01:07:07
Speaker
They had all this amazing technology in the beginning of the 2014 version, and then they sort of decided to shove in a guy into it. And it just felt like, well, this is unnecessary and a step backwards in technology and functionality. If I was doing a remake of it, I would have done it like a public relations angle to make the robot seem more human or something like that. I think it would have worked better.
01:07:32
Speaker
And I think there's a subtext of that in the first one where that's kind of, you know, they have all the kids running up to Robocop and everything that, you know, those kids aren't going to run up to Ed 209 and try to touch them and talk to them, you know. Yeah. Well, also just the whole police brutality thing too is also really, is really, really prevalent in this movie when you watch it in light of what we know now.
01:07:55
Speaker
Yeah, there's definitely that. That's kind of the Judge Dredd element, too, where it's just like cops just do whatever the hell they want. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Um, do you have anything else you want to mention about this movie?
01:08:08
Speaker
You know, I think we touched most of what I plan on talking about. I mean, I just, I really enjoy it. This was a good chance for me to rewatch it because I think that this is a movie that, like I said, super holds up. And, you know, it's, it would be fun to see some newer version of it, I think.
01:08:28
Speaker
with a little bit of the humor back in it. I would really like to see an updated version of Robocop, but I just don't know that, again, you can catch that lightning in a bottle. I think this was a product of its time, and everything kind of came together at the right time with the right people, and it worked. And so it's a little perfect gem, and I don't know that, you know, that it'll ever be recreated.
01:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, this is, you know, hands down one of my favorite movies. I when I rediscovered it when when I got that that uncut version on DVD, I'm just it just fell in love with it in a totally different way. It's it's a movie that holds up on so many different levels. And it's like anyone who has I don't know. I don't like I said, I don't know anyone who doesn't like this movie, but anyone who doesn't like it, I definitely suggest giving it a rewatch and trying to look at it from a different angle.
01:09:17
Speaker
Yeah, I'd be interested to know what their beef is with it, other than, you know, I guess, excessive violence. I think that's the only thing. And it did get an X reading to begin with, and that's why they had to cut a bunch out. But, you know, that's just for violence. I mean, obviously, there really isn't much else that you could be upset about in this movie, I think. Okay, Shane, thanks so much for coming on. You want to tell people once more where they can find you?
01:09:40
Speaker
Yeah, check out Midnight Facts for Insomniacs. It's a podcast we do weekly. You can actually vote on the topic too if you have something you're interested in. You can suggest topics in our Discord and come check it out. OK, great. Well, thanks so much for coming on. It was a fun discussion. And if you ever want to come back on again, you're more than welcome.
01:10:01
Speaker
Appreciate it, thank you for having me. That does it for this episode of Superhero Cinephiles. Superherocinephiles.com is the website and we are SuperCinemapod on Twitter and Instagram and also Superhero Cinephiles on Facebook. Please make sure to like and review us on Apple Podcasts, anywhere you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
01:10:22
Speaker
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01:10:38
Speaker
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01:11:11
Speaker
Thank you for listening and as always good night. Good evening. God bless.