Canon Watch: RoboCop (1987)

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Watched:  04/10/2026

Viewing:  ha ha ha ha ha

Format:  BluRay (Arrow Deluxe)

Director:  Paul Verhoeven

For some reason my Threads.com algorithm kept showing me people discussing RoboCop (1987), and I realized that it had been some time since I'd actually watched the movie.  Not that I have to.  It's one of the movies I've seen so many times I have recall of every scene in the movie - if not the exact dialog, I have the imagery of each scene locked in my brain.  

Why RoboCop?  I know I've mentioned this, but when I was 12, we were visiting my grandparents and my mom wanted us out of the house to talk about something with my grandparents, so we were taken to a one-screen theater in Ishpeming, Michigan where my brother and I watched the movie. 

I don't remember not knowing this was satire, even if I didn't fully grasp the word at age 12.  I got that this movie wasn't just having a cool action hero make quips.  The movie itself was making fun of *everything* it seemed.  It was 1980's capitalism run amok, the joke at the time being money was being made in what were non-profit fields like police and prisons.  

And, man, the last forty years really showed OCP was forward-thinking.

It's a movie about the dehumanization of unfettered capitalism, where the bodies of the dead can be brought back and animated and made corporate product and boardroom skirmishes and jockeying for new positions can have a body count.  Setting the movie in Detroit in the 1980's - a once vibrant city gutted by the decision to save some money and move production out of the city that built the American auto industry, seemed pointed.  And in an era where we were more concerned with Michael J. Fox making it to the top of the business world and maybe Gordon Gekko futzing about.  

I don't think it's a mistake RoboCop visits a school named Lee Iacocca Elementary.  

Maybe the one thing that hasn't aged so well in the film is that cops are under-armed and under-budgeted, which doesn't appear to be a real thing anywhere in the US in 2026.  

I'm not actually sure what to write about this because I feel like everyone has seen this movie and we all basically get it.  

Future Nancy Allen will bring your coffee in square cups - which is how we'll drink IN THE FUTURE

But, yeah, it's a weirdly grounded film.  Budgetary reasons meant that the changes from the world of 1987 to represent "the future" are minimal.  The cars look basically like cars.  People wear flannel, not silver jump suits.  The suits worn by the corporate folks may be tailored slightly different.  What seems to have changed is made pretty plain with things like walk-through tours of homes on the market, larger guns, and cybernetics about to be the next big thing.  Only ED-209 and Robo really break us out of a very familiar world.  

And then they do things like the square coffee cups.

But, yeah, it's another Verhoeven movies about the absurdity of power structures and how they inflict violence, and treat people caught in the gears as the cost of doing business.  And in the case of this movie, it really is about any and all business.