Robocop (film, 1987)

The near future. In Detroit , Michigan , crime and violence have long captured the city. All this happens against the backdrop of a severe financial crisis. The city government is contracting with the powerful Omni Consumer Products Corporation (OCP), which is committed to fine-tune police and municipal infrastructure. In fact, OCP is eager to replace Detroit with a modern corporate utopia called Delta City, the "city of the future" completely controlled by OCP. To start this construction project, OCP needs to end crime in the city. At the same time, the board of the corporation understands that this task cannot be assigned to the understaffed police department and dissatisfied police officers.

Bob Morton, a young executive, offers his RoboCop program directly to the head of OCP, The Old Man ^{[K 1]} , and the latter accepts it. Soon the project manages to be implemented - OCP receives the body of Alex Murphy, a young policeman who died at the hands of drug dealer Clarence Boddicker and his gang. The team of Bob Morton, led by Dr. Mary Lazarus, restores the dead Murphy in the form of a cyborg . He gets a reinforced titanium case and Kevlar prostheses that can break through concrete walls. In fact, all that remains of Alex Murphy is his face, hidden by a helmet, the brain and some internal organs. At the presentation of his project, Morton calls him "Robocop."

At the shooting range, Robocop shows phenomenal results. He patrols the city and is extremely effective at catching bandits. Robocop is becoming the backbone of OCP city improvement policies, and Bob Morton is promoted to vice president of the corporation. All this is not pleasant to Dick Jones - the vice-president of OCP. He once proposed his own law enforcement tool: the ED-209 robot , which was supposed to end crime in Detroit. However, his robot got out of control by firing junior leader Kinney from heavy machine guns. Jones' plans for a contract to supply the ED-209 to the police and the army failed. Overwhelmed by hatred, Jones, with the help of Boddicker, organizes the assassination of Morton.

Meanwhile, a successful project begins to malfunction - memories of his past life begin to return to Robocop, and then his last memories of the Clarence Boddicker gang begin to return. He goes to his old house, remembering the son of James and wife Ellen, whom he loved most. The house is empty, because after the funeral, the young widow and son moved to start all over again. Murphy wants to find Clarence Boddicker to avenge his death. He goes to Boddicker and makes an independent raid on a cocaine refinery. After a lengthy shootout, a cyborg kills almost the entire gang and brutally beats Boddicker. Crippled Boddicker reports that all this time he worked for Dick Jones. Robocop wants to kill the drug dealer, but Boddicker is saved by Directive No. 3. He brings his killer to the police station, where all the officers are already talking about the upcoming strike, despite the sergeant's weighty arguments that chaos would sweep through the cops of Detroit Street.

Robocop heads to OCP to detain Jones, whom Boddicker has already warned. Arriving Robocop wants to arrest Jones, but then closes him, and he falls to his knees. As it turned out, Dick Jones programmed Directive No. 4 in cyborg, which in a rough definition sounds like "Never speak out against employees of Omni Consumer Products ." Jones confesses to Robocop that he killed Bob Morton and sets ED-209 and special forces on him. Robocop is subjected to massive shelling. The seriously wounded Robocop is saved by Anne Lewis, former partner Alex Murphy. Lewis brings Robocop to the same abandoned steel mill in which he was killed when he was a man. There she helps him recover. At the same time, a police strike begins, which brings chaos and unrest to Detroit. Boddicker bandits freely outrage the streets, trashing and robbing everything around. The Boddicker bandits who arrived at the plant are trying to kill Robocop, but in vain. In a brutal meat grinder, both policemen manage to destroy a gang, including to kill Boddicker. Robocop is badly damaged, and Lewis is seriously injured, however, both survive.

Robocop arrives at the OCP skyscraper, where Dick Jones continued at the OCP management meeting to prove that the Robocop program did not pay off, and the ED-209 can work well in its place. Robocop rises into the courtroom, where he openly accuses Jones of organizing the murder of Bob Morton. Jones takes the Old Man hostage and demands a helicopter to escape from Detroit. Directive No. 4 prevents Robocop from acting against Jones, but the “Old Man” shouts that he has been fired and Directive No. 4 is automatically turned off. Robocop kills Dick Jones and leaves the department. The OCP leadership is quite leftover.

Edward Neumeier worked on the set of Blade Runner as a simple assistant. Being very impressed with what he saw there, he conceived the idea of ​​a film about the world of the future, in which corporations rule, the main character of which was the android-policeman, which was originally created by the powerful corporation that owns Detroit as a cold-blooded guardian of order, but in the course of the development of the plot the electronic consciousness of the robot gradually began to develop compassion and the ability to think critically, so the first idea for the script was an alternative to Ridley Scott's film.

Initially, Robocop was a lot like the Human Machine from Marvel comics. Detroit was not chosen as a scene because of its criminal and abandoned environment, Neumeier believed that Detroit was a symbol of American industry, and Robocop was his brainchild, like a beautiful car. Neumeier wanted to depict Detroit's future like a city from Blade Runner, since for Detroit such an industrial-futuristic landscape was much more relevant than for Los Angeles , and the very first scene for the script that appeared in his head was Robocop emerging from the blue Spinner, the machine eventually still appears in the animated series "Robocop" in 1988. But Edward needed help: in a couple of years he managed to write only 40 pages, but a complete script did not work. In 1984, when he worked as an editor at Universal Pictures, he met novice cameraman and director Michael Miner, who at that time came up with and shot clips for bands playing in the genre of hard rock and metal. In the next video, Michael wanted to use the robot and told Ed about it, he realized that it was their creative fate. Inviting Miner to dinner, he laid out all his material to him. Miner really liked the universe, invented by his new acquaintance, but he believed that the character should be something like Tony Stark , a police officer, he said that shortly before they met, he himself wanted to make a film that would combine imagine the basic ideas of Iron Man and Captain America , but in a police setting. He called the manuscript “SuperCop”, but the plot did not represent anything special, so it would be relevant to place this hero in the dark future of Neumeier and continue to work on the script together. Thanks to this, the plot has a hot topic in the commercialization of artificial organs and mechanical prostheses.

Michael Miner also developed in the script the theme of Detroit's collapse in relation to reality and what could happen to the city in the near future. He came up with the idea of ​​dividing the city into Delta City - the central part for the rich and Old Detroit - the remaining outskirts for the poor, in which everything is still very bad. As a result, this idea was fully realized only in the 1994 Robocop series.

When Paul Verhoeven came to the project, he changed two things in the script: a love line appeared between Murphy and Lewis, and Boddicker and Jones were in one bundle. This version of the story was already the third version of the script, but upon reading Verhoeven realized that such a close relationship between a cyborg and a partner would look too implausible and stupid, so the fourth version was written, in which of the innovations there were only tied up Jones and Boddicker, and between Robocop and Lewis again had no love feelings and intimate scenes.

The main theme of the movie was written by Basil Pleduris , who used both synthesized and orchestral music as a mirror to the theme of man versus machine. The musical theme of the film is based on the music from the 1935 Frankenstein Bride movie. The soundtrack is available on CD and has been reprinted several times.

In a scene from the movie when Robocop arrests Nash Leon at a nightclub, PTP performed the song “Show Me Your Spine”. PTP was a short-lived project consisting of members from the Ministry and Skinny Puppy groups. However, this song was not available in the official release for a long time and could only be heard in the film. Ultimately, it was only released in 2004 on the Side Trax album.

In 1987, the fully finished film "Robocop" received a rating of X (18+), which cast doubt on the rolling expectations of Orion Pictures . As a result, Paul Verhoeven was forced to remount part of the film, reducing the amount of blood and violence in several episodes. Particularly cruel moments were cut out for the wide distribution from the scene of the shooting of Alex Murphy, and humorous shots were added to the scenes with the news show to distract the viewer from violence. Verhaven’s efforts were not in vain, after several attempts, Robocop received a sparing R (17+) rating, and on July 17, 1987, the picture premiered in the United States.

BAFTA , 1989
Nominations (2)

• Top visual effects
• Best makeup

Oscar , 1988
Winner (1):

• Special Achievement Award - “for editing sound effects”

Nominations (2):

• Best sound
• Best installation

Saturn , 1988

• Winner (5): best director (Paul Verhoeven), best script, best special effects, best science fiction film, best makeup
• Nominations (3): Best Actor (Peter Weller), Best Actress (Nancy Allen), Best Costumes

• The shooting took place from August to October 1986. The film was shot in Dallas , Detroit , and in several cities in the state of Pennsylvania . Many city scenes were shot in downtown Dallas due to the futuristic look of the buildings. As the building of the OCP Corporation, the building of the Dallas City Hall was removed, to which the special effects artists “increased” the number of storeys ^[3] . Scenes at an abandoned steel plant were filmed in Monessen , Pennsylvania. The inside view of the police station was filmed in the Sons of Hermann building, which is also located in Dallas. ^[4]

Due to the fact that due to various reasons the shooting was slow, many important scenes were never shot. Mostly the storyline was completely thrown out of the script about how, during a police strike, marauders, led by a punk named Ike Bander, rob shops, in particular, they mock the owner of one of them by shooting him with his leg and hanging him upside down. Robocop and officer Lewis soon arrive on this street, they disperse the looters and neutralize Bender with his accomplices. Gathering to move on to put things in order, they see the Boddicker gang approaching them in cars, which found Robocop on the navigator. This is followed by a large shootout with explosions and a chase to a closed metallurgical plant, at which the final battle will take place. It should also be noted that in the script there are three places in Old Detroit (abandoned city outskirts), these are abandoned storage facilities where Murphy died, industrial ruins, where Robocop takes off his helmet, and a closed metallurgical plant, in the film these three locations merged into one to a metallurgical plant.

In 2012, MGM began work on a remake of Robocop . The new version of the film was directed by Brazilian film director Jose Padilla - the winner of the Berlin Film Festival 2007, known for the films " Elite Squad " and " Elite Squad 2 ". The role of Alex Murphy / Robocop was approved by Yuel Kinnaman .

The film was released in the world on January 30, 2014 ^[5] and received mixed reviews from critics.

In January 2018, it was announced that the original author of Robocop, Edward Neumeier, stated that he was writing a script for the sequel to the classic 1987 film, which would ignore both the sequels and the remake of 2014 ^[6] . In July 2018, it was confirmed that Neil Blomkamp and Justin Rhodes, rewriting the original screenplay of Neumeier and Michael Miner, would direct a new film called “The Return of Robocop”. ^[7] However, Peter Weller refused to return to the role of Robocop ^[8] .

• Metacritic Police Robot
• Robot Policeman on the Internet Movie Database
• Police Robot on allmovie