Double Feature: Robocop And Robocop 2

[00:00:07]Hi and welcome to Terry Talks Movies and welcome to Science Fiction Saturday again. And this time I'm doing the two Robocop movies as that first beat you saw tells you. Reason I'm doing them is I saw them in cinema last weekend. I went to the cinemiac session at the Ato Cinema. Fantastic cinema, 100-year-old cinema, the only single screen left in Melbourne. And so I went there. It was a double feature. They didn't have a talk beforehand because it's a double feature. But they do have and and I've got to tell you this before I talk about the movies. They do have the best chalk top ice creams in Melbourne. You know those ice creams in a in a flat bottom cone and you've got chocolate over the top of the ice cream. Good thing about them is it's ice cream all the way to the bottom of the cone. They don't like cheat you on the ice cream. So, I went there, got an ice cream, talked to some nice people, got a couch as usual up the back of the cinema, they've got couches.

[00:01:02]So, there's me on a couch, and I saw the two Robocop movies, which I hadn't seen for a very long time. So, I'm going to talk about them in sequential order.

[00:01:10]1987's Robocop, directed by Paul Verhovven, written by Edward Numire and Mike Miner, stars Peter Weller as the titular character, also known as Alex Murphy. Nancy Allen as his partner, police officer called Anne Lewis. Dan O'Hurle playing the old man, the head of the evil corporation, Omni Consumer Products. Ronnie Cox as Dick Jones, the senior president of OCP. Y Kurtwood Smith playing one of the best Kurtwood Smith roles ever. Clarence Bodica, the head of a cocaine cartel in the city of Detroit in the near future. and Miguel Ferrer as Bob Morton, an ambitious OCP executive who starts the Robocop plan.

[00:01:53]This movie was in development for a fair while. Science fiction action films are really big in 1987. So, they really wanted to make a strong science fiction action film out of this. And the weird thing is that casting was going to be really weird. They were talking about people like I'm reading off the list.

[00:02:11]Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Ironside, Rook Gahau, Tom Behringer, Amanda Santi, Keith Keredine, and James Remar, who by the way has a small role in the Odyssey, which just came out. But they went with Peter Weller for a couple of reasons. He was the only guy that wanted to do the role really because all the rest of them said, "I'm going to be in a mass car for the time. You won't see my face." And act as being the vain creatures they are. That was a no for a bunch of people and they didn't really want to get Arnold Schwarzenegger because he they said he was going to look too puffy in the Robocop costume which is a good argument. Peter Weller wanted to do the role. He was enthusiastic. He was cheap and he was also committed to the bit. He went and studied with a mime artist the physicality you would need to have to play Robocop. Like the fluid movement with a sudden stop and pivot that was slightly robotic. He did all that off his own back. He wanted the role and he successfully did it in two movies. The third movie, don't bother, would be my advice. The third movie isn't anywhere near as good, even though it does have Rip Torn in it. And then the thing parlayed into a whole bunch of other things like an animated TV series and a liveaction TV series and a 2016 remake that died in the ass. But the first two are your core Robocop. They're very much of the time. And there the 80s of big suits and brutalist architecture and greedy corporations, which is something, of course, we don't have now, and interesting special effects that aren't as smooth and and fluid and perfect as the computerenerated stuff we have now, but they've got a certain charm about them. Stop motion animation has a real charm about it that I really like. Omni Consumer Products, the big evil corporation in this movie has privatized the police force in Detroit. Cops aren't happy about it. Services are [ __ ] But they privatized it because the 80s was the peak era of privatization of neo capitalism, all that kind of stuff.

[00:04:15]>> All Detroit has a cancer.

[00:04:18]>> The cancer is crime.

[00:04:22]We need a self-sufficient law enforcement robot.

[00:04:26]>> How long will it take?

[00:04:26]>> We can go a prototype within 90 days.

[00:04:29]>> So Dick Jones, played by Ronnie Cox, who normally up until this point played nice guy characters. And then in this movie, he gets to play a villain. And he says it's a billion times more interesting than playing the nice guys. And he rarely played nice guys after he got this role. Dick Jones has an idea of using big chunky robots, the ED 209s, which are stop motion animation and are fantastic. They've got their own Funko Pop. And the raffle at the cinema when I went and saw this movie had an ED 209 Funko Pop like this big. And the guy who won it was nearly pissing himself. But anyway, the Ed 209's are fantastic.

[00:05:08]They're totally hopeless at um urban pacification cuz they can't climb up and down stairs. And the software is very very buggy as the demonstration of the robot shows at the start of the film. So Bob Morton, the Miguel Ferrer character, has an idea. He wants to make a cyborg.

[00:05:25]He wants to find a policeman who's been shot to pieces and build him a robot body. And in order to do this, and this is where corporations are sneaky [ __ ] he has a cop who is the perfect candidate, Alex Murphy, played by Peter Weller, family man with a wife and child, and puts him in the worst precinct in Detroit, knowing that when he's on patrol, chances are he's going to get shot up. And to hedge the bet, he get has a liaison with Clarence Bodica, the Kerwood Smith character, and decides to have Clarence shoot up Alex Murphy.

[00:06:06]>> Better alive if you're coming with me >> so that he can become part of the Robocop project, which indeed is what happens. Murphy gets shot up. His partner and Lewis finds him. He's had his limbs blown off by shotguns. He's had a bullet to the head. He's not in a good way. And the Robocop project resurrects him with a memory wipe. He doesn't know who he is. He knows he's Robocop. He's got the mask visor down to there. He's got that great chin that Peter Weller has, which is one of the selling points in Peter Weller getting the roll. Robocop goes on patrol in Detroit and starts knocking down the levels of crime in the city, which is not what OCP wants. They want crime to be worse. so that they can justify using military technology in a civilian police function. Meanwhile, in the movie, you got the world building in the background, which is mostly done through television. Television news about the city state of South Africa under siege, about nuclear power plants in the Amazon, about all sorts of bad things happening in the wider world. So, you get a bit of layering and a bit of world building done by television. We also get that I'll buy that for a dollar comedy show like the dumbed down media that people get in a corporatized world. Not that that would happen in our world of course. So you know the rest of it. Boom boom smash mash pow pow all that kind of stuff. Robocop prevails. And this is a interesting movie. It's got a little more depth to it than it would appear at first glance. It's pretty blatantly a criticism of capitalism of late stage capitalism. It's unashamedly that and corporatization in the way privatization is not a good thing for anybody.

[00:07:54]Privatization saves money usually for a couple of years and then becomes a lot more expensive than keeping things in public hands. We know that from any number of experiences. It's also a criticism of dumbed down media and dumbed down popular media. a pacified population will just accept any [ __ ] that they put on the screen. There's a lot of that going on there. It's a there's a criticism of consumerism with the 6,000 SUX car that everybody wants to own. All of that stuff's in there and it's something that Verhovven's also used again in the propaganda in Starship Troopers, that layering of the world with the media that the world contains.

[00:08:35]And I like that. That's a smart move to do that. And of course, the media that we get in Robocop and Robocop 2 is wildly satirical. It's over the top.

[00:08:46]It's not meant to be taken seriously at all, but it's meant to paint in the background to this world where Murphy and Lewis and the cops of Detroit are trying to stop Clarence and his gang continuing to sell drugs to everybody.

[00:09:01]Um, there's some interesting other aspects of this film as well. All the corporate guys and the good guys have really ordinary names. Alex Murphy, Anne Lewis, Dick Jones, Bob Morton.

[00:09:14]All of these guys have really generic white man names. Even the black OCP employee played by Felton Perry, his name is Donald Johnson. They've got these really kind of generic names to them. Whereas the bad guys have got names like Clarence Bodica and Emil Antonowski and Leon Nash and Steve Min.

[00:09:41]They've got a lot more interesting and and multicultural names for them. So the good guys and the corporates get the bland names. The bad guys get the interesting names. Don't know whether that was a deliberate choice, but that's how it played out. Of course, Peter Weller had already had a hit with The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonsai and was already making genre films, so he knew how to play in a genre film. And he does well as Murphy. Murphy as a human is is like charming. He's a family man. He's an ideal cop. And he does really well when he has to play Robocop, who is the ultimate stoic. No facial expressions, no personality until he rediscovers his own personality. He embodies the physicality really well in the movie. I like the way Peter will play this even though he's not the first guy you would think to play a tough guy cop. The other thing I found out about the movie which is kind of interesting is before they gave it to Paul Verhovven who' already had a number of hits. They offered it to David Croninberg and Alex Cox and Monty Helman which is kind of wild. Imagine what a David Croninberg version of Robocop would have been but Croninberg was doing his own projects at the time and wasn't interested. Alex Cox was a bit random and delightfully so, but he was a bit random. He ended up making Repo Man and movies like that. So, all credit to him for those. The other star of the movie is the special effects of course. The physical um gore effects by Rob Bing. Phil Tipper worked on it, Craig Davies. The stop motion animation is great. Physical special effects where people have to be blown up or burnt in toxic waste and then splashed across the windshield of a truck. All of that stuff works well. It's beautiful 1980s gelatin gore, and I really like that. I think that works really well. It's a fun movie, and watching it on the big screen was a was a great experience. Just seeing it with a crowd of people who laughed at the right bits, who gasped at the right bits. So, most of them had already seen the movie before, but there's something about seeing it with a crowd of people on the big screen that really lands. And it was a fun experience because of that. [laughter] And it was a fun experience because of that in the interval between the two movies. I checked. I don't have copies of Robocop or Robocop 2 at home, which is a shame. I'm going to have to look into that. It's going to have to go onto the list because I think they're rewatchable. And then we got Robocop 2, which wasn't directed by Verhovven. It was directed by Irvin Kersner. It was the last movie Kersner made as a director. He died a couple of decades later, but he didn't make a feature film after this one. And Irvin Kersner of people know because he made Never Say Never Again, the only good James Bond movie to come out in 1983. And he also directed a thing you might have heard of called The Empire Strikes Back. So he knew what to do with action cinema. Now again, it stars Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Dan Hurley. He's back. Dan Hurley, interesting actor. He was in a really good movie called The Cabinet of Caligari in 1962 with Glennus John's which is a hidden gem horror film. He was also in Bunwell's Robinson Cruso in the 1950s playing Robinson Cruso and he's god tier in that as well. We get a couple of extra characters laid in the second film. Got Tom Nunan playing Kane, the bad guy, who is selling a new drug called Nuke, which is in these little curettes that you put in your neck and squeeze and the drug goes into you. And he is a combination of a drug lord and a cult leader. He's got a little bit of the Manson in him. His assistant, a kid called Hob, played by Gabriel Damon, is a psychotic little kid who will shoot you. And on the other side, on the OCP side, Omni Consumer Products, you've got a new character, a psychologist, psychologist called Dr. Juliet Fax, F Ax, played by Australian actress Belinda Ba, who is the fat child of the piece, the sexy evil person who ends up in a Japanese onend with the old man played by Dan Hurley. She has this idea that what they need, they're they're trying to make Robocop 2, as indeed they are for the movie, but they're trying to create an upgrade to Robocop cuz Robocop's doing his job. He's calling himself Alex Murphy, and I'll tell you more about that in a moment. But Dr. Fax wants Robocop, too. And OCP wants Robocop, too. And they're testing out people. They're putting all the cyborg stuff on these people, but they're going mad and ending themselves in some very funny ways. Dr. Fax decides what they need to do is find someone who's motivated to stay alive. And so when he's captured, Robocop catapults himself to the windshield of the truck that Kane is driving and he ends up in hospital and Dr. Fax tells him they're going to fix him up.

[00:14:38]>> I got good news for you. you're going to have a chance for immortality. [music] >> And in order to do that, they take out his spine, his eyeballs, and his brain, and put it into the Robocop 2 robot, which is big, has claws, is totally nasty, and has run on nuclear power for some reason. Meanwhile, Robocop isn't being his best self.

[00:14:58]Murphy keeps stalking his ex-wife and his son who have moved house and his wife gets a legal document to stop him from stalking them. And Murphy comes to this realization that that part of his life's over. He's a he is who he is now.

[00:15:14]And it's only cruel for him to keep stalking his ex-wife. And his ex-wife doesn't know that he's Murphy. He tells her when he finally comes to the point of accepting the changes in himself, he tells her that his face looks like Murphy's because they're honoring a dead cop and that he is not Alex Murphy and she doubts it, but she kind of accepts it and she's out of the way now for the rest of the plot to happen. Tom Nunan is great as Kane. Tom Nun, fantastic actor.

[00:15:44]I love Tom Nunan in almost everything I've seen in. He was the first Francis Dollarhide, the first Silence of the Lambs movie, Manhunter, where Brian Cox was playing Hannibal Lectar. He was the serial killer in that and did a fantastically creepy job at it. He played Frankenstein's monster in the Monster Squad, another movie which is fantastic. He was in Heat. He was in the Last Action Hero playing the Ripper and did a fantastic job in that. Love Tom Nun as an actor. He died in February this year. People who like cult movies love Tom Non. And even though he isn't given enough to do in this movie before he becomes a special effect, he still gives us kind of lowkey creepy charismatic cult leader, which I totally loved. I was very much there for that.

[00:16:33]There's also a girlfriend for Kane, a woman called Angie, who's um kind of creepy when she finds out her boyfriend has become a giant military robot. So, there's some interesting stuff in there as well. The script for this one was actually written by Frank Miller. You know, Frank Miller, who created the Dark Knight comic books, didn't get on with the studios fantastically well, but the production design in this really lands [snorts] Frank Miller type touches.

[00:17:02]Kane's headquarters where he creates the drug and runs his cult is fantastic.

[00:17:09]He's got a shrine to Elvis Presley which includes the skeleton of Elvis Presley in it. And the streets of Detroit as we have it in Robocop 2 are full of fluorescent graffiti. It's not just plain pink graffiti. It's fluorescent graffiti backlit by UV light so that it really pops and it gives a futuristic kind of cyber punky look to the wild streets of Detroit. There are touches in Robocop 2 that really land and Robocop 2 itself with Kane in it is an interesting creation. There are some computerenerated special effects when the screen on the head of Robocop 2 has a snarling insane cane in it and they create computerenerated images that look kind of like Tom Nun. This is you got to remember this is 1990 computerenerated effects particularly emulating human beings. We're at a very rudimentary stage, but you get this weird flat screen with a creature that kind of sort of looks like Tom Nan snarling and yelling, terrorizing people from their screen. To be honest, it's not as good as the first movie. The first movies are very rarely superseded successfully by sequels, but it's an honest one. Again, you've got the great special effects. You got the stop motion animation. You've got the brutalist architecture of OCP. You got the street level crime. You've got Kane's business model, which is to create a whole bunch of different versions of Nuke so that people can moderate their moods as they want to. He wants to commercialize and make and make this drug consumer friendly so that people can pop one of these little ceretses in their neck and have whatever emotional state they want to have.

[00:19:03]It's an interesting concept that the movie doesn't follow through on. It's an honest sequel without being a better sequel. I'll put it that way. And that works for me. I think it's good fun.

[00:19:16]It's got good actors in it. And it completes successfully the story of Alex Murphy. Him coming to terms with who he is, overcoming his trauma, and moving on with whatever life he can have. The movie was kind of successful. The first one made three times its budget, but Robin Cop 2 cost about 30 million and made4 million, which means usually with Hollywood, you double it to see whether it's a successful movie. So, it wasn't successful necessarily, but it didn't make a loss. And seeing the two of them back to back in the cinema was a great experience. and reminded me that there were interesting science fiction action films in the 1980s that didn't involve lightsabers and binary mor moral codes.

[00:20:01]Here's the problem I have with the Robocop universe. It's very unnuanced on crime. Crime is a function of disadvantage and poverty and mental illness and all the things that they knew then and we know now. Crime isn't at at least at the street level. I mean, top level crime is a different thing.

[00:20:19]Top level crime is a whole different beast. But street level crime is usually people with mental illnesses, people who are poor and want to get ahead, and people who are incredibly desperate.

[00:20:33]Those are the three categories of low-level crime. Governments tend to ignore that much more than they try to deal with it. Yes, there are attempts to deal with it, but in Robocop, criminals are bad. Robocop and the cops of Detroit are good, OCP's bad, and the big criminal gangs are bad. So, there's still that binary morality, which is a very nuanced complex behind this movie.

[00:21:02]And again, that's a function of the 1980s, I suppose, though it does appear to this very day in a lot of um cop related media, let's say, and a lot of military related media. that binary thing of you commit crimes, you're automatically bad. You're automatically evil under the Christian binary morality thing. So, that's a bit disappointing.

[00:21:25]Would have been nice to see a bit more nuance in the world on why people are criminals. Instead, you get a rich person's view of why people are criminals. Will poor. But having said that, great fun to watch. Do want to get physical copies of them. And I will look into that in the future. I'm going to hunt around the op shops until I find even DVD copies of these movies are going to be fun. Blu-ray would be better. 4K be perfect, but I do want to get physical copies of Robocop and Robocop 2. The rest of them, including the remake, not interested. So, that's what I got for you this time, Maria. The two Robocop movies. A lot of fun. Let me know whether you've seen them recently, whether you like them or whether you saw them back in the day and loved them.

[00:22:09]There was so much merch to do with Robocop as well. It was just fantastic the amount of merch that was put out for Robocop in the past. And when I'm looking for copies of Robocop and Robocop 2 in thrift stores and things like that, I might look and see if there's any Robocop figures around. That might be fun to do as well. As always, thanks a lot for watching and thanks to the patrons who support this channel.

[00:22:31]You can become a patron yourself on patreon.com/terryalksmov.

[00:22:36]You become a channel member on YouTube as well and you get access to the Discord server where I'm posting a whole bunch of movies I found on YouTube that you might not know about unless you subscribe to particular channels. Things like Captain Kronos Vampire Hunters on YouTube now. Hammer have put that out and I'll post links every time I find one of those to the Discord server so that people who support the channel can find out about them and enjoy them. You can also like, subscribe, hit the notification bell, leave that comment, and tell me what you think of Robocop and Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 and Robocop the animated series and Robocop the live action series and Robocop the 2016 remake. Let me know all of that stuff.

[00:23:22]Next up, we've got the live stream on Monday morning, which is going to be Groovy. And then on Wednesday, I've got the latest releases from Imprint, and there's some really, really cool stuff in that. So, until then, watch some good movies, watch some bad movies, watch some cyborg movies from the 1980s, and have a really good time with them. And I'll catch you next time.

[00:23:47][music] >> [music] [music]