With a rather unimpressive budget of US$13 million, RoboCop premiered in the United States on July 17, 1987.

At the time, Walter Goodman, writing for the New York Times, called the film a police drama, and chose to focus on its violence and spectacularity though, fortunately, he also observed that humour glimmers amid the mayhem. This couldnt be truer: in the very first scene we are introduced to pitiable piece of mock news about the possibility of nuclear war in South Africa, immediately followed by a comedic report on a bumpy visit of the president of the United States to a space station.

Thus, RoboCop, with its hyperbolic, over-the-top style, can be viewed as a satire. As Sue Short, in Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity (2005), puts it, the film is filled with satirical stabs at American culture, using SF as a veil by which to ridicule cultural mores.

RoboCop blends science fiction and action, yet its also a buddy cop film, that genre so beloved of the 1980s. Think of 48 Hours (1982), Lethal Weapon (1987) or Tango and Cash (1989), where opposite pairs such as black/white, good/bad, funny/serious, compassionate/brutal or liberal/reactionary are essential to the plot. In RoboCop, these oppositions are shown through a police officer who in his double nature of man and automaton must face corrupt businessmen, psychopathic gangsters and a deadly, but clumsy, antagonist robot, and a motherly, rather sweet girl, The beauty in The Beauty and the Beast, according to Peter Weller, who plays Alex Murphy, our hero in a metallic shell.

Paul Verhoeven tried his luck in Hollywood with Flesh+Blood (1985) a medieval adventure charged with eroticism that came after The Fourth Man (drama/thriller, 1983), his last Dutch film. His tale of a robotic policeman is tinged with elements of auteur cinema, as there seems to be a personal trademark in the motifs hes exploited: urban and rather obscene violence, excess, decadence, and a tone of kitsch. The director commented that he wanted Murphy to have an extramarital affair with officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), but a puritan code mostly to be found in (American) science fiction stopped him from digressing in that direction.

In Flesh+Steel (2001), a documentary that shows the making of RoboCop, Verhoeven mentions intertextual connections which he drew upon as influences for the film, including Metropolis (1927) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). From Langs classic he took the futuristic, metropolitan architecture filled with skyscrapers in which the plot unfolds and from Wises admonitory film the design of the robot policeman, similar to the helmet and the visor that Gort, the alien guardian robot, wears. Additionally, in an interview published in Christine Corneas Science Fiction Cinema, Between Fantasy and Reality (2007), Verhoeven states that he had been studying comic books (he mentions specifically Judge Dredd) since his childhood, and that RoboCop owes much to that influence. He also connects his film with James Camerons Terminator, which he studied thoroughly before shooting RoboCop.

Like its successful predecessor Terminator (1984), RoboCop has elements of Christian theology. The director comments in the cited documentary that he wanted to show Satan killing Christ, although hes probably likening Jesus to the type of mythological hero that returns from the dead to avenge his killers, rather than to the Christ of orthodoxy that forgives his murderers. Murphy is trapped in a kind of hypostatic union between man and machine: his mortal frame, with memories and feelings that make him thus human, ends up being revived. In his role of incorruptible protector, but of mortal flesh, Alex Murphy dies to be resurrected, in this case by a greedy corporation and in the form of an android. Just as Jesus is part-God, part man, Murphy/Robocop is part-man, part-machine.

In RoboCop, theres still law and the officers in charge of enforcing it suffer as much as the rest of the working-class. Detroit, once the cradle of the auto industry in the United States, is now a dystopia plagued with crime and drugs. The RoboCop becomes a machine that rages against the machine in a recognisable age, of wild capitalism and vulgar upstarts and yuppies.

Ours is an era in which corporations dominate the political scene of the world, and in which minuscule pressure groups lobby such a first world concern! for social rights for cyborgs. Theres talk of Transhumanism, of post-humanism, of the obsolescence of the human body as weve known (and experienced) it for centuries. Considering the anticipatory function of speculative fiction (another name for sci-fi), it wouldnt be outrageous to conclude that our times are quite like those depicted in Verhoevens film.

For this, and for the way in which it satirises the world of business and media, RoboCop is a masterpiece that hasnt lost its force. Set up that dusty VCR and watch it again, even for the sake of nostalgia.

You wont be disappointed.

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Of robots and men - Buenos Aires Herald