As every generation needs its own Hamlet, perhaps every 20 years or so the advanced film technology needs its own Robocop. It exercises the state of the art, even as it yet again assumes the inevitable loss of compassion and emotion in modern humanity’s thirst for progress. The loss of humanity is imaged in the passage from the Francis Bacon twisted human triptych behind the villain's desk to three unrelated abstractions.
Certainly Jose Padilha’s version has impressive effects. The Samuel Jackson rabble-rousing TV show is amazing, as is the Robocop’s conversion from heart, lungs and brain into fully functioning super machine. Why, the cop hero’s kitchen even has one of those hangers to keep bananas fresh! The technology is, for once properly speaking, awesome.
The film closes on two statements. One affirms the robot lawman’s ultimate triumph: the song over the end credits is “I fought the law and the law won.” The second is the Jackson character’s closing assertion: America is the greatest country in the world and always will be. That line is both American bravado and an ironic undercutting of itself. Coming from such a vainglorious fool, the line reads sarcastic.
For the film functions as a kind of national wish-fulfilment. The giveaway is the early scene where America patrols the streets and alleys of Teheran using drones and robots to keep order without risking US lives. This, of course, when Iran has been running circles around American diplomacy and has brazenly challenged the US on its nuclear monopoly. In another magical detente, the American company developing the man-in-a-machine is operating amid the rice-fields of a docile China. As if the US and not China held all the other’s IOUs. Then, too, the film imagines a crime-free and prosperous Detroit. Did I mention wish-fulfilment?
And who is the US senator who pushes through a bill to prevent the deployment of human machines? To deploy robocops in America that bill has to be repealed. To the raving right wing he’s obviously pro-crime, anti-progress and therefore a traitor. But we’re supposed to know he’s a good guy because he’s named Dreyfuss. True, that was Inspector Clouseau's maddened boss, but the name mainly evokes the Jewish general falsely accused of being a traitor in 19th Century France. That allusion seems to undercut the TV commentator’s raw rah-rah jingoism. But the spectacle of the robocop’s impressive mass justice outweighs that liberal sentiment altogether. Amid such thrilling fireworks it's hard to stick to the quiet irony.
And who is the US senator who pushes through a bill to prevent the deployment of human machines? To deploy robocops in America that bill has to be repealed. To the raving right wing he’s obviously pro-crime, anti-progress and therefore a traitor. But we’re supposed to know he’s a good guy because he’s named Dreyfuss. True, that was Inspector Clouseau's maddened boss, but the name mainly evokes the Jewish general falsely accused of being a traitor in 19th Century France. That allusion seems to undercut the TV commentator’s raw rah-rah jingoism. But the spectacle of the robocop’s impressive mass justice outweighs that liberal sentiment altogether. Amid such thrilling fireworks it's hard to stick to the quiet irony.
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