I could argue with someone for hours about the importance of Robocop to the attitudes and functioning of our society, but all the arguments that someone could offer me would never change my opinion that Robocop is a goddamned amazing film.
There are so many elements of it that are just fucking perfect - everything from the sound design to the costumes is more perfect than it has any right to be. The actors are wonderful, the script is great, the music is SO FUCKING RAD, it's got great effects, a fantastic story, and is blackly, wonderfully, funny.
I cackle my way through every viewing of this film, so I guess the satire isn't as subtle as it could be, and am continually floored by the level of detail it reveals about Alex Murphy's Detroit and the very scary place the world has become. Everything from the background screens in the OCP conference rooms and the set design of Sal's drug factory show tiny hints at the way things have changed and the problems the people in the story are facing. It's a dystopia that's built on tiny, vital, changes in the way the world works and, shockingly, it's still too optimistic - in a lot of ways Murphy's Detroit is better than our Detroit and it keeps looking more appealing as time keeps passing. I've got ten examples (everything from gender and race relations to the viability of space travel and approximate fuel prices) that suggest Paul Verhoeven's nightmare might be our dream, but I don't think I have the time to really dig into them.
In fact I don't think that I can talk about Robocop without talking about it for hours so I suppose I'll just have to cut myself short and say, hell yes, I'd buy that for a dollar.
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