Hacker Cinema
Commando
1985 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Mark L. Lester
John Matrix, the former leader of a special commando strike force that always got the toughest jobs done, is forced back into action when his young daughter is kidnapped. To find her, Matrix has to fight his way through an array of punks, killers, one of his former commandos, and a fully equipped private army. With the help of a feisty stewardess and an old friend, Matrix has only a few hours to overcome his greatest challenge: finding his daughter before she's killed.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
If you have centipedes in your house then de facto you have other bugs. They’re strictly carnivores.
So as cool and helpful as they are, their continued existence indicates you have other problems as well.
Best to consider them like Sully in the movie Commando: “I like you. I’m gonna kill you last.”
I feel this article misses a lot of the historical context when RoboCop was created, it's themes and why it fit this time. I don't see how you can talk about RoboCop without mentioning the cultural climate at the time.
Rewinding to the 1980s.
Reagan was president for two terms, Giuliani was cleaning up the mob using RICO during these time periods. The War on Drugs was raging. Communism was still enemy #1 (See: Rocky IV). It was truly a very right-wing time. For whatever, themes around individuals taking power into their own hands to "Reform" corrupt systems (cities). Like Frank Miller's Sin City, these are absolutely right-wing themes. "Cleaning Corruption" is one of the most conservative motivations from a psychological standpoint.
Others here have mentioned the slate of 80's action movies but it felt like 100% of the culture was heading this direction. Frank Miller's Batman approaches at the time, for example, were strongly echoing similar themes: Vigilante justice in the backdrop of political deterioration. Rambo, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Scarface.
I think it all started with movies like Dirty Harry and Serpico and then just got more and more extreme leading into the 1980s.
You also cannot leave out Judge Dredd comics. There are similarities between Judge Dredd and RoboCop, I have a hard time believing there was no influence. Judge Dredd also had this magic gun that could do different tricks like shoot through walls etc, lived in a corrupt mega city of the future.
I feel in some ways RoboCop was almost like "Serpico + Dirty Harry if you turn everything up to 1,000." Serpico also had this theme of the good cop who is nearly killed and sent to the hospital due to corrupt system etc.
30 years later Aliens looks like a cliché action movie. I think it looks that way because it set a lot of standards for action movies. Poke around at popular action movies from the early 80's. Aliens has no Star Wars mysticism. Aliens lacks Star Trek optimism. It's not 'a guy with a grudge' like Rambo or Commando or any of a dozen others.
It certainly pulled from old westerns and war movies, but did it in a (imho) pretty innovative way.
I typed in a few ARNIE quotes:
Terminator: "nothing clean right" - no results "fuck you, asshole" - one result for Terminator, but the phrase occurs twice in the film. Predator: "If it bleeds, we can kill it" - Predator came up, and a few others (interesting). Total Recall: "Sue me, dickhead" - it got that one. Commando: "You're a funny guy Sully, I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last." - no results.
I'm probably gonna spend all night on this.
EDIT: reformatted.