Hacker Cinema
RoboCop
1987 · Film · 102 min
Part of RoboCop Collection
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
In a violent, near-apocalyptic Detroit, evil corporation Omni Consumer Products wins a contract from the city government to privatize the police force. To test their crime-eradicating cyborgs, the company leads street cop Alex Murphy into an armed confrontation with crime lord Boddicker so they can use his body to support their untested RoboCop prototype. But when RoboCop learns of the company's nefarious plans, he turns on his masters.
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148 comments on Hacker News
The commenter above seems to be describing late stage capitalism, where businesses exist mainly to milk investors, as told by bad boy tech executive Dick Jones in the 1980's action movie RoboCop.
> Starship Troopers movie
This movie is so misunderstood. It's basically disliked by Heinlein fans who took offense, and by people unfamiliar with both Heinlein and Verhoeven who thought it was actually Beverly Hills + Space Fascism without irony.
I like it for what it does, but I'm more of a fan of Robocop.
AI has been the “next industrial revolution” since the 70’s and 80’s. We’ll have a few more RoboCop movies and then things will be as they always are after hype cycles
> Have you seen RoboCop?
Out of curiosity, why cite a 1980s action film?
> “Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA, is either a parody of a RoboCop film, or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organisation,”
Why not both?
For some reason that also reminds me of the TV shows in Robocop.
e.g. Climbing for Dollars and It’s Not My Problem!
When I first saw Robocop these looked so crass it was obvious satire.
Now...? Well, I'd buy that for a dollar.
I'm feel old.. My library of childhood games in my head are from the 80s, for the Spectrum. Dizzy, Jet Set Willy, Operation Wolf, R-Type, and original movie/game conversations for Robocop, Batman etc.
What's odd is the apparent chasm between those games and the earliest flash games, but really it's just a few years. That's just a trick of the mind. When you're a kid, turning into a young adult, a few short years feel like a lifetime. Man, it speeds up after that...
I'm not very familiar with this model series but tried it when prototyping a potential 'Vibesbench' (my eval) conversation I tried it. Here's Kimi on a Robocop scene
kimi k2 thinking turbo
"He’s not being poetic; he’s weaponizing nostalgia. Quoting Casablanca—the ultimate “beautiful sacrifice” romance—to taunt Morton about corporate backstabbing is pure executive sleaze. It’s the same move as his mahogany desk and flag pin: draping sentimental Americana over naked power. He’s essentially saying, “Isn’t it romantic, Bob? You fought the good fight, now you die.” "
grok 4.1
"So when Dick Jones smirks and says, “Time goes by, it’s the same old story… the fight for love and glory, huh, Bob?” that’s pure Ed Neumeier flexing his love of old Hollywood while simultaneously mocking how these psychopathic ’80s execs think they’re in some grand cinematic drama instead of just murdering a guy for market share."
chatgpt-4o
"The reason the Casablanca reference matters is RoboCop itself is partially a noir—and also a tragedy built inside a genre engine. [… ] So yeah, calling back to Casablanca is not just some meta-joke—it’s a knowing wink that RoboCop is a noir trapped in cybernetic skin. // Even Clarence Boddicker, for all his cartoonish sadism, plays like a twisted stand-in for a noir heavy—talking smooth, dropping nicknames, throwing out casual violence like it’s a punchline."
opus 4.5
"Jones is performing avuncular menace. He's the kind of executive who'd quote old movies while having you murdered, because it's all performance to him, all style. The substance is just power."
The end of anonymity online basically means an end to the internet era itself. We will effectively be rewinding time to the 1980s, when the only news sources were controlled by oligopolies, and dissident voices were simply not given a platform.
That might be fine in a world where every country is on-board, but now that the internet exists, countries with anonymous free speech will come out ahead.
Here's a darker thought: The pre-internet US and UK had a crime problem. Crime was spiking through the 1980s and 1990s. People were disaffected, jaded, they felt that the halls of power were captured by corruption and their voice didn't matter. This is the environment that gave us the original Robocop movie, a hyper-violent celebration of the commoner over both criminals and corrupt government institutions.
The internet economy revitalized the western world and helped us pull out of the crime doom spiral. Without that miracle, we were probably on track for ruthless Duterte-style governments, if not something worse like fascism.
Anyway, I predict that the EU will stop short of actually passing this into law. They're not stupid, and they just want "good boy points" for trying (not from the voters, of course, but people with real political power).
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
Nope, it was entirely due to the prompt they used. It was very long and basically tried to cover all the various corner cases they thought up... and it ended up being too complicated and self-contradictory in real world use.
Kind of like that episode in Robocop where the OCP committee rewrites his original four directives with several hundred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr1lgfqygio
Trump has always been a caricature of the rich asshole. They even made fun of him in a Robocop movie, if I remember correctly.
At 18, I went to see the movie "RoboCop" in the theater and walked out because I had never been exposed to such gratuitous violence before. This was long before the internet, cell phones, or social media.
Would I have been as shocked/traumatized if I had previously been even a little bit exposed to something much less intense? Now that kind of stuff is passe.
I don't want my children traumatized; obviously I'm going to do whatever I can to prevent them from premature exposure to lots of extreme content.
But we live in a different world than I grew up in, and I'm worried that kids need SOME exposure, especially to positive experiences but also just a little to mild bad experiences, in order to build up life skills like getting along and interacting with others, even with people who aren't nice to you.
I'm struggling with how to do that and where to draw the line but it definitely involves limits (that change over time), supervision, and communication.
Our Robocop Remake is a scene by scene remake, made in the same spirit as this FreeBee Movie.
Worth a watch with friends present: https://vimeo.com/85903713
I find AI to be fascinating because of humankind's old dream to create intelligent life in a machine. Just watch the countless old and new movies and animes or read the novels².
With big advances, the current wave of AI is finally promising to turn this dream into reality.
Besides, it's already quite useful even with its current shortcomings.
--
² here's a short very incomplete list:
The Matrix, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop, Her, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell (1995, 2004, 2017), Data in Star Trek, Star Wars, ...
It’s more in the line of Robocop but I could imagine a dystopian reality TV show where the show clips from people’s unguarded cameras.
I know hackers already do this but this would be the TV companies doing it without any shame.
I just posted some historical info about Chuck Moore's work for HOMER and Associates on a real time visual mixing console that produced many music videos that ran endlessly on MTV back when they actually played music videos, and special effects for blockbuster films like RoboCop and Total Recall to the discussion about abstractions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42532404
The real time visual mixing console that produced many music videos that ran endlessly on MTV back when they actually played music videos, and special effects for blockbuster films like RoboCop and Total Recall, wasn't a "simple thing".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868
DonHopkins on Nov 18, 2021 | prev | next [–]
Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission:
Peter Conn:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230516102928/https://imgur.com/a/4Bmb4xu
Homer & Associates (1982):
http://leftbrain.us/rotherHistory/homer.html
Peter Conn Papers at Stanford:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190603111701/https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2019/05/peter-conn-papers-available-research
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8n303pn/entire_text/
George Clinton - Atomic Dog (Official Music Video) HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMVZ36VA0wg
Steve Miller Band - Abracadabra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY8B0uQpwZs
Steve Miller Band - Bongo Bongo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NrsRZdMI-A
Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc
>First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan.
>Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show that year. The year before the conference committee decided that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the film show.
>Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together.
----
Peter Conn and I [Coco Conn] had a company called HOMER & Assoc. which was located at the Sunset Gower Studios from 1977 until we closed shop in 1997. We made music videos, commercials & computer graphics/special effects for feature films. One cool note, we worked with Paul Verhoven on both RoboCop in 1986 and the x-ray scene for Total Recall in '89.
HOMER was actually a real time visual mixing console that our in-house engineer spent 1978 - 1981 designing and building, from scratch. The name HOMER stood for "Hybrid Optical Montage Electronically Reproduced." I helped as well, soldering the LEDs on the console and running cables. Peter built his own optical printer and three years into the build we also bought an early computer paint system. Our engineer finished building the console and promptly decided to move to England. We hadn’t used it because we still hadn’t found the right software to run the system. Luckily that’s when Paul Rother joined the company.
The joy stick on our console would bump you to the next line of code (being a command or sequence of events: fade, cut, dissolve, etc.) The console had touch sensitive fader pads. There were no dials. I think they were made by Allison? Each channel (which controlled either a slide projector or a film projector) was touch sensitive. After recording a sequence we could then tweek the current version using additional effects the channels offered such as momentary, additive, on/off, etc. For instance if you wanted to crossfade two images, you could either program it or perform it. Of course everything you did was recorded and would play back on the next round. You literally performed a sequence of visual effects with your hands. Peter would do countless passes until everything was perfect. This performance would then be played back to IP film on the optical printer. Each slide tray or film real would be individually run, one by one, to IP film. Sometimes there would be 10-15 or more passes to get all the elements transferred. Once that was done we would then convert the IP film to video and do additional video editing and effects. A totally nuts analogue system. But it worked.
---------------
HOMER Explained by Paul Rother, in-house programmer, (1982):
The photo is Paul sitting in front of the Optical Printer 7-bit Paint system, Homer and Associates, circa 1982. Homer and Associates was really one of a kind kinda of company. Founded by Peter Conn, originally I got hired to program Homer II, a visual realtime mixing console. Homer I is another whole story, but before my time. Homer II consisted of 16 slide projectors, 4 movie projectors, a 4 track tape recorder, 24 visual channels (each with its own Z80) touch sensitive sliders, a master Z80 S100 bus system and featuring "the joy stick bumper " control, which looked liked the gear shift right out of a 1964 mustang convertible.
The idea was that you would program a visual sequence, then play the sequence in sync with the sound track on the joystick, including cascades, bumps, cuts, etc. The whole thing would be recorded, and if you wanted to, like an audio mixer, go back and do over dubs, making corrections. Then once you had the perfect "hero" recording, you take the 8" floppy disc with the hero recording and the trays of slides to the optical printer, and record it to IP motion picture film, making multiple passes, one tray at a time. Now that I think about it, it was a crazy idea. We actually got the whole thing to work. And it worked great!
Forth & Charles Moore
We hired Forth, Inc. and got Charles Moore, the inventor of FORTH to program the console host computer. I learned FORTH and worked with Charles. I programmed the 2K byte EPROM in each visual channel. On the Master Z80 system we ran PolyForth a multi tasking system in 32K bytes. We had an extra 16K RAM for buffers and things. If I remember right, the system ran four tasks, but that was 20 years ago, my memory may be hazy.
Anyway, I learn not only FORTH from Charles Moore, but also how to factor code in to small reusable routines, WORDs they're called in FORTH. I learned Object Oriented Programming without knowing it. Also a lot of use of vectors. Its a cool language. Charles Moore was a great inspiration to me, and really taught me a great deal that they never taught me in computer programming school.
CAT-700
After we got the basic Homer II working and were able to record on the optical printer, Peter had another idea. He wanted to be able to see the movement of the optical printer, and see a prior frame compared to the current frame. We already had a video assist on the Fries Mitchell 35mm. What we needed was a Frame Buffer. We heard of S100 video board called the CAT-100, which was 1-bit frame buffer, good enough for what we needed. Somehow we never found a 1-bit version, but we found 7-bit version in the recycler!
We flew to Reno, rented a car and drove to a log cabin up in the hills of Truckie California. We got a demo of the thing. The guys were super secret and didn't want us to see the controlling program. It worked, so we bought it, and then flew onto Palo-Alto and met the French guy who designed it. They checked it out and it was OK. This was the days before computer designed boards, and all the traces on the board were curvy, kinda like a Van Gogh painting. We learned that it was 7-bit (CAT-700) because it would have been an 8-bit, but they could not get the 8th bit to work. We spent the night in Palo Alto with a Stanford friend of Peters working on a crazy secret Apple project, the Lisa. 32KByte Paint System
So I got the CAT-700 frame buffer to work, programmed in FORTH. So in that 32K we had an optical printer control system, and a paint system, all in one. (Also the OS, compiler, debugger, etc.) We later hooked up a Summigraphic Bitpad (before the Watcom tablet) and were able to draw on top of digitized frames. It got to the point where we needed TWO optical printers, one to digitize from film, and the other to record to film. Rube Goldberg is not strong enough descriptive to describe the system, with the filter wheels and all on stepper motors, it made music. The first use of the system was effects for Steve Miller Music Video, Abracadabra. I also remember using it on the George Clinton Video, Atomic Dog.
This photo was taken right after we got the system to work. I had hooked up an analog slider box, which controlled things like color. There were 4 color maps we could switch between instantly We did a lot of work in planes, using 2 planes for the original image to be rotoscoped, and the other 5 planes to draw onto. This photo was taken for an article in Millimeter Magazine. The photo ended up being a two page color spread, and I think Peter was pissed, cause I got premier exposure.
TTL logic
At Homer and Assoc. I also learned TTL logic and designed a number of computer boards for the S100 bus. One that controlled stepper motors with a timer chip (Motorola 6840). Another to control the Slide Projectors also using the same Motorola timer chip to control the lamp triacs. My favorite thing, about the system, was the use of the cassette storage interface as a cheap timecode reader/writer.
RoboCop (1987) - IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/
Total Recall (1990) - IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100802/
Must watch, from The Making of Robocop (1987)
https://youtu.be/COCz6psPmU0?feature=shared&t=1107
This explains the design of ED-209
This reminds me of the droid in the 1987 Robocop movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsulVXpgYg
What could go wrong?
> The argument goes: liberal democracies are partially captured by capitalism
My argument was that corruption can collapse any society, no matter the economic or political system.
In reply to your post: In an autocracy, the corruption is obvious to everyone and concentrated in a branched tree starting at the top leader. It is (was * ) very easy to remove it all in a revolution (though, that doesn't usually lead to a corruption-free society after). In a democratic capitalistic system, corruption is hidden, dispersed, systemic, very difficult even to demonstrate it's existence, much less remove it.
So, in a democratic liberal society, protests against corruption can't target the corrupt structure of government, because it's mostly invisible. When times are hard people want an autocratic leader to solve their problem in an autocratic manner ("iron fist", Hitler was actually voted!). The protesters only demand the removal of current corruption, not it's replacement with a top-down autocratic corruption, which is inevitable in an autocratic system, but even so, when the new corruption gets bad enough, it will be removed in a revolution and the process starts over again in a democratic system.
* This cycle is probably not functional anymore. With surveillance tech, protesters can't organize to bring down an autocratic governemnt anymore. The same surveillance can transform a democratic government in a fascist corporate-led one (think society in Robocop movies). No real examples yet, but I'm sure we'll get there.
I have a similar relationship to MiniDisc. I will never sell my collection and I still use it now and again when the urge strikes me.
I remember in the mid-1990s a friends brother was a big film buff, he showed us RoboCop on LaserDisc - the original directors cut. I remember being very shocked at the scene of Clarence Boddicker and his cronies shooting up Officer Murphy. But on the upside, I do remember being impressed with the sharp picture and Dolby Surround mix compared to VHS tapes.
EG robocop showed lots of police brutality, but it wasn't a movie about how great and normal police brutality was.
Thank you for the interesting write-up.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
Los Angeleno here: There are any number of guys with money who look at Blade Runner, Robocop, and such films and say, "That's what I want!" Then they make it happen.
When gigwatt billboards all-in-a-row light up a foggy night, the city looks like the nightmares presented thirty or more years ago.
Robocop is wonderful how it both faithfully embraces the hollywood action flick / stereotypical "fear of crime" (not sure how to say that) film ... and seems to satirize it all at the same time.
Robocop walking on water is both hilarious and fun.
I watched Robocop again this weekend after playing the game released last year. The PS5 version is a bit glitchy, but I really enjoyed it otherwise, watching the film again and it was surprising how faithful the video game was to the film.
I thought the film would show it's age more, but it actually still holds up quite well. Also brought back memories of music that sampled many of the lines and effects from the film.
It's not always a tradeoff. Americans made big budget, artistically accomplished, highly successful movies in the 60s and 70s.
As far as the rest of your comment, I'll just repeat my view that Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies are far better than MCU. And Robocop/Unbreakable are the best the genre produced.
> Through Endgame, it was an unprecedented undertaking involving the hard work of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of talented artists and technicians across the globe, marshalling untold resources over the span of a decade
Just imagine what those artists could have accomplished working in the service of an artistic vision instead of churning out corporate slop.
Live action super hero dramas started with Superman and reached maturity in Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies. Highlights are Robocop and Unbreakable (throw a Batman adaptation in there, probably The Dark Knight). By the time the MCU rolled around, the genre was well past middle age. Despite billions of dollars of life support, it will be remembered as the last tortured breaths of a somewhat embarrassing cultural episode.
> Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk
Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that <i>Snow Crash</i> is satire, I recommend reading <i>Headcrash</i>, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to <i>Snow Crash</i>. If <i>Snow Crash</i> is the original <i>Robocop<i> (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then <i>Headcrash</i> is Paul Verhoeven's <i>Starship Troopers</i> (completely over-the-top).
> like Gibson.
It's easy to assume Gibson's work is serious, but I think anyone that does is subconsciously glossing over a lot of little details that - in sum - make it pretty clear that Gibson is also a satirist, just extraordinarily deadpan and casual about it.
Almost everyone gets a gritty <i>Blade Runner</i> image in their mind when reading his Sprawl stories, but consider that a key plot element is a space station built by weed-smoking Rastafarians. i.e. they are "so high they're in orbit", and that there are offhand references to an "Aryan reggae band". The military veteran - abandoned by an uncaring government - that happens to be a dolphin.
Then consider that the film and TV projects directly involving Gibson have typically featured plenty of comedic elements, and most have a bright, colourful look. <i>Johnny Mnemonic</i> (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of <i>The X-Files</i>.
I love Verhoeven’s work (though haven’t seen it all).
Did you know that Robocop was an allegory for an American Christ?
Troopers is a wonderful pastiche. With half an analytical brain you see the anti-propaganda, anti-militarism, anti-jingoism, and general poking of fun at Heinlein’s ideas in what on the surface appears to be yet another brainless action movie.
I think the world would be completely fine without a copyrighted C3PO or Robocop. George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind when working on his wild and thought unlikely to be successful science fiction movie in the 70s. Robocop was also a labor of love. We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits. The art form could be healthier overall.
Dall-E on the "animated sponge": The rights to the character depicted in the images, which is reminiscent of SpongeBob SquarePants, are owned by Nickelodeon, a subsidiary of ViacomCBS. The character is from the animated television series "SpongeBob SquarePants," created by Stephen Hillenburg.
Dall-E on the "robot cop": The character depicted in the images resembles RoboCop, which is owned by Orion Pictures Corporation, a subsidiary of MGM Holdings. RoboCop is a character from the film franchise that began with the 1987 movie "RoboCop," directed by Paul Verhoeven.
Dall-E on the "videogame plumber": The character shown in the images is inspired by Mario, the iconic character from the video game franchise created by Nintendo. The rights to Mario and related intellectual property are owned by Nintendo Co., Ltd.
All of these are in the first go. No retries or rephrasings of the question.
lol,this is basically dialog from the original Robocop movie
To each their own, I guess. To me it appears like a toy. I also love RoboCop movies (and live in Detroit, yeehaw)
weird, that's my favorite thing. I like old RoboCop movies though.
Unrelated in all but name, but for those who enjoy the robocop movies and are gamers, the new game (delta city) feels very true to the movies. It's not really a challenge, and the gameplay is pretty linear, but it's an enjoyable ~12hrs if you want to be a bullet sponge cleaning up the criminal slime.
> The US/Hollywood is far more prudish since my youth.
The prudishness manifested differently. I recall a lot more nudity and at least as many sex scenes in movies I watched as a kid (under 18).
Highlander
Lethal Weapon
Robocop
Life of Brian
Even OG Batman had some nudity and referenced sex in it as a PG-13.
Exposed breasts and sex scenes were pretty common. Full frontal nudity was even relatively common. And sometimes wouldn't even garner an R rating.
It was satire by someone who absolutely understands how satire works. Starship Troopers, the film, is brilliant.
The same director did Robocop, and if you don't get the genius satire of that, then I can't help you.
They literally made a movie about this in the 80's called Robocop.
We had a whole series of films (RoboCop) warning us about exactly this particular Torment Nexus[0]
[0] https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538
Seems so: https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Pretoria
Only in the movies though. No country would risk a tactical nuke in their own territory, that's self-defeating.
I have to imagine that movie night at Stanford CS consists of Demolition Man, Judge Dredd and Robocop, followed by a hackathon where they try to build imitations of what they saw.
At least it can walk and balance at a reasonable pace. The Tesla robot can barely stand and shackes like a toy. Reminds me of those failed robocop successor robots in the movie.
It's almost completely gone in the US on Netflix also. I've had better luck watching older movies on Youtube 'Free with Ads' service, especially 80s and 90s movies, than I've had on Netflix. And there's no ads if you get Youtube's premium service (I currently don't, but don't mind the ads).
Currently on there is Wrongfully Accused (funny Leslie Nielsen movie), Glengarry Glen Ross, Robocop (1987), Ghost in the Shell, The Mask, License to Drive, The Neverending Story, Tombstone, Leon The Professonal, The Amityville Horror, Over the Top (some Stallone movie), Miracle on 34th Street, Con Air, Edward Scissorhands, Gone Fishin', Look Who's Talking, While You Were Sleeping, The Craft, Red Dawn, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Secret of Nimh, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Mad Max, Das Boot, Little Shop of Horrors, Hackers, .... okay, I'm just going to stop now, but t keeps going, I'm only a third of the way though the list.
Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.
I'd say its a fine suggestion. A dystopian movie portraying a futuristic, overly bureaucractic government which is highly dependent on unreliable whimsical machines paired with a hyper consumerist society.
Robocop and Running Man portray similar scifi futures / society.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
Like Dick Jones says in the Robocop movie about the failed ED209: “I had a guaranteed military sale with ED209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!”
Robocop is an Android, and the spike extending from his knuckle was used in the film as an authentication device.
Capitalism is a wishy washy term here. Making bank is possible under a variety of systems more or less as evil as ours. It just depends on how gamified and legally privileged you are relative to others. Since the "others" here are not my peers or yours I find it necessary to make some distinctions. We were a country of laws that once applied to only people. But corporations are not people and you don't send whole corporations to jail when they kill people on purpose or accidentally. Or defraud the public for billions of dollars. You can't outbid a corporation jacking up 3 bed room houses to multimillion dollar levels for a lot of reasons. At zero percent interest rates they can do anything they want. You? You get to be homeless in a state that will eventually have no water to drink.
The American dream has changed from freedom to have your own religion, free speech, democracy, opportunity, to home ownership. One by one these have been stomped into the ground. The rate of stomping has increased 7 percent every year since 1987 to 2014 since the deregulation push, where after that, the rate has increased 21% per year. Freedom of religion is probably the last to go. The all powerful church burning people at the stake for conflicting views will eventually simply replaced by a jack boot taking undesirables away in the middle of the night like it did in places where corporations achieved total unified power. Give anyone enough power and this is always what happens.
The solution was always regulation. Since that is a dirty word for some reason we have to pay huge amounts of money for mortgages and rents with our land lords who are not people, but algorithms design to game the market millions of times more efficiently than you or I ever could. Perhaps you are a billionaire and don't care. If so I apologize.
This has nothing to do with capitalism. Its about power creep in institutions that were a very long time ago limited to performing a known public good for a limited time (see canal projects), and then being disbanded according to a charter set before it was established. It did not matter if they were successful or not.
Where is the public good in ensuring we can't afford shelter? The American revolutionaries (I realize we tend to demonize these people for some reason now, hmmm) saw what the east India trading company did and were dead against that happening to them. What is going on is not some kind of invisible hand. The hand is quite visible and it is not afraid to throw you out of work, on to the street with no job, an expectation to compete against machines and no way to ever be able to afford sky high rent if we let it get that powerful.
I don't personally like the thought of living in a world like that envisioned by the movie RoboCop and the all powerful OCP. But we're pretty close already.
Thanks for allowing me to vent. I am doing this now while I can because I'm certain in the future I will not be able to.
My prescription to this problem is to bring back regulations rolled back rapidly since Ronald Reagan. I'm not suggesting that corporations be dealt with colonialist style. But allowing them unlimited power at the expense of pretty much anyone poorer than a billionaire will eventually destroy any economic, political, or even religious liberty people fought and died to protect.
Every generation has to decide: Do we like liberty or do we not care? Economic liberty, being able to afford a simple dwelling, is something that a lot of people struggle with. It isn't fair to give preference to companies that want to shake the rest of us down for in the name of stock holders. Besides the vast majority of them are also getting shafted also in ways that are not even easily identified. Only board members and majority holders have power. It isn't rare to find board members sitting on multiple boards. So there is way too much power concentrated in hands that work against the needs of the public.
I guess now that the switch in blackrock has been flipped from suck to blow we could complain about home prices crashing and destroying the majority savings of the entire public. It is hard to keep up I think..
So forget everything I just wrote. Home prices are falling and it is good for some but not for all (just like any other time). The rate of the fall and the rate of the rise is just not easy to survive if you are not backstopped by the Federal Reserve private bank.
I think quite a few people would say otherwise: https://www.arrowfilms.com/blog/features/is-robocop-the-ultimate-cyberpunk-film/
Robocop was hardly a cyberpunk movie
You're correct that Dirty Harry was an explicitly right wing, and borderline fascist, movie. It was originally offered to Paul Newman who passed because it wasn't a good fit for him, but he suggested his friend Eastwood (a Republican) would be better for the role. The bad guy is a "dirty hippie" type, who's played very effeminate as a contrast to Eastwood's hyper masculine Harry.
I don't think that Serpico fits in that tradition at all. It's a story about a whistleblower fighting corruption within the police, and is directed by Sidney Lumet (not exactly a right wing director, thematically). The institution is corrupt, but Serpico is trying to uphold the law not take it into his own hands.
I think RoboCop is taking aim at techno-enabled state power and the military-industrial complex, not celebrating it.
RoboCop: The Oral History (from about 10 years ago): https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a27322/robocop-oral-history/
I always thought RoboCop was a sober documentary from the future showing the outcome of current and future US policies? Only half joking :)
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.
Robocop was part of a unparalelled series of action films that came out in the mid-80's. The sequence started with Aliens, then the next year we had Predator and Robocop and then finally Die Hard. They're still making the sequels to these films in one way or another today. The sequence has never been equaled, though I really wish it were.
RoboCop is the greatest stunt anyone pulled on Hollywood.
It was supposed to be a movie about someone "part man, part machine, all cop" but it was in fact one of the most anti capitalistic movie Hollywood ever produced.
Verhoeven is a true genius.
For me, one of the coolest thing about the Robocop movie series is that, each Robocop movie is about the next Robocop. Robocop 1 is about Murphy being the first Robocop, Robocop 2 is about Cain becoming the second Robocop, and Robocop 3 is about the asian looking Robocops -- the third generation.
> my friends call me murphy you call me robocop
Watched it for the first time a few weeks ago and found it fascinating. Just like his later film Starship Troopers, I love how Robocop works on two levels, and I'm amazed how many people don't (immediately) understand the underlying satire.
>Wouldn't call it fascism though
If you focus more on the kind of world Robocop occurs in rather than the plot, it's easier to see elements of it. Robocop is celebrated in-world for his violence (see, those normal cops weren't able to be violent enough without head-to-toe bulletproof armor and full-auto pistols) as a solution to social frustrations (high crime and corporate greed) and reinforces their hero culture through his sacrifice. There's even a secret conspiracy/plot between those two frustrations and a sub-plot about labor organizing.
But, at the end of the day, it's hard to have an action-focused cop movie without some of these things so we're sort of desensitized to it.
Starship Troopers (also directed by Paul Verhoeven) is even more on the nose about it. The plot itself is just a goofy sci-fi military movie but the human culture in it is absolutely terrifying.
The Peter Weller RoboCop movie was the first true Cyberpunk movie.
I have to say I appreciate their choice of green display. It has a lovely retro ASCII-terminal vibe that brings back memories of long hours in front of a terminal. Also ties into the films of that era (robocop-ish -- not sure that was green -- and even the Matrix).
Blade Runner is one of those movies that are remembered more for introducing interesting questions and world-building than presenting a truly engaging and highly efficient narrative.
Like Star Wars and Robocop, it is not flawless and hardly a masterpiece. But, like the above, it also has a significant place in the history of film.
I'd recommend another Verhoeven film, Robocop, over Starship Troopers.
And as far as sci-fi movies which are deeper than one might expect, I'd also recommend the original Planet of the Apes and its early sequels.
>I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop).
I absolutely love that Robocop is the specific movie that you felt needed to be mentioned. :)
What you’re describing is data hoarding. I pirate a ton too, but you know what I do with a movie or TV show after I’ve watched it?
I delete it. Poof, gone. But it’s still in the most important dataset I have. My memory. To help with the metadata of my own memory, I write down a list of the films I’ve seen. I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). That TV show I just finished that was great but I won’t rewatch. Boom, gonzo.
Your piracy is an excuse for data hoarding, which is a problem.
One thing I've noticed is that is seems more recent movies lack character observations. Everything is done is in service of the plot.
I think it was in Doctor No there was a conversation between Q, M and Bond. Bond's favourite weapon was the Beretta, and Q explained their downsides. Bond was ordered to use the Walther (IIRC) as a replacement. It was in a box. At the end of the scene, Bond picks up the box, surreptitiously hiding the Beretta underneath. As he is about to walk out, M, continuing with his writing and without looking up, says to Bond, "Oh and Bond, leave the Beretta behind on your way out." (Or something like that).
It's a small scene, but it tells you a lot about the characters. It just adds to storytelling, even though it isn't a key scene.
Another example is the difference between the original Robocop and the remake. In the original, the villain Boddicker is hailed into the police station. Battered and bruised, he spits blood on some paperwork on a desk and says "Just give me my fucking phone call."
How badass is that? The villains in the remake were much less interesting, and it made for a weaker movie. I guess modern screenwriters /could/ write decent if they wanted to, but I assume that gunning for a 13 certificate really neuters the possibilities. I also suspect that there is more influence by the producers, who insist that certain things need to be in certain ways "for the demographics". So what you end up with is a story that's bent to suit the demographics, rather than just telling a good story.
Stallone movies don’t apply. Minority Report is the future mixed with Robocop.
I think I agree with you, in fact it gave me a few movies I hadn't seen that are now on my to-watch list (and a couple to rewatch, like Tango & Cash). But at least it's a better list of action movies that haven't aged as well than Terminator 2, Robocop, and Die Hard.
> Half the tentpole movies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were my niche, so it's not as though I'm a difficult audience.
I know what you mean - but is that Hollywood, or is it us becoming grown-ups?
I mean, it's possible all movies are aimed at the tastes of teenagers, and the reason Terminator 2 and Robocop and Die Hard seemed like great movies is because I saw them when I was a teenager.
The innumerable superhero movies we have nowerdays may seem like a snoozefest in comparison - but maybe that's just because I'm no longer a teenager.
90's Movies
Matrix Terminator 2 Robocop Total Recall
Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission:
Peter Conn:
https://imgur.com/a/4Bmb4xu
Homer & Associates (1982):
http://leftbrain.us/rotherHistory/homer.html
Peter Conn Papers at Stanford:
https://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2019/05/peter-conn-papers-available-research
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8n303pn/entire_text/
George Clinton - Atomic Dog (Official Music Video) HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMVZ36VA0wg
Steve Miller Band - Abracadabra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY8B0uQpwZs
Steve Miller Band - Bongo Bongo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NrsRZdMI-A
Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc
>First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan.
>Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show that year. The year before the conference committee decided that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the film show.
>Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together.
----
Peter Conn and I [Coco Conn] had a company called HOMER & Assoc. which was located at the Sunset Gower Studios from 1977 until we closed shop in 1997. We made music videos, commercials & computer graphics/special effects for feature films. One cool note, we worked with Paul Verhoven on both RoboCop in 1986 and the x-ray scene for Total Recall in '89.
HOMER was actually a real time visual mixing console that our in-house engineer spent 1978 - 1981 designing and building, from scratch. The name HOMER stood for "Hybrid Optical Montage Electronically Reproduced." I helped as well, soldering the LEDs on the console and running cables. Peter built his own optical printer and three years into the build we also bought an early computer paint system. Our engineer finished building the console and promptly decided to move to England. We hadn’t used it because we still hadn’t found the right software to run the system. Luckily that’s when Paul Rother joined the company.
The joy stick on our console would bump you to the next line of code (being a command or sequence of events: fade, cut, dissolve, etc.) The console had touch sensitive fader pads. There were no dials. I think they were made by Allison? Each channel (which controlled either a slide projector or a film projector) was touch sensitive. After recording a sequence we could then tweek the current version using additional effects the channels offered such as momentary, additive, on/off, etc. For instance if you wanted to crossfade two images, you could either program it or perform it. Of course everything you did was recorded and would play back on the next round. You literally performed a sequence of visual effects with your hands. Peter would do countless passes until everything was perfect. This performance would then be played back to IP film on the optical printer. Each slide tray or film real would be individually run, one by one, to IP film. Sometimes there would be 10-15 or more passes to get all the elements transferred. Once that was done we would then convert the IP film to video and do additional video editing and effects. A totally nuts analogue system. But it worked.
---------------
HOMER Explained by Paul Rother, in-house programmer, (1982):
The photo is Paul sitting in front of the Optical Printer 7-bit Paint system, Homer and Associates, circa 1982. Homer and Associates was really one of a kind kinda of company. Founded by Peter Conn, originally I got hired to program Homer II, a visual realtime mixing console. Homer I is another whole story, but before my time. Homer II consisted of 16 slide projectors, 4 movie projectors, a 4 track tape recorder, 24 visual channels (each with its own Z80) touch sensitive sliders, a master Z80 S100 bus system and featuring "the joy stick bumper " control, which looked liked the gear shift right out of a 1964 mustang convertible.
The idea was that you would program a visual sequence, then play the sequence in sync with the sound track on the joystick, including cascades, bumps, cuts, etc. The whole thing would be recorded, and if you wanted to, like an audio mixer, go back and do over dubs, making corrections. Then once you had the perfect "hero" recording, you take the 8" floppy disc with the hero recording and the trays of slides to the optical printer, and record it to IP motion picture film, making multiple passes, one tray at a time. Now that I think about it, it was a crazy idea. We actually got the whole thing to work. And it worked great!
Forth & Charles Moore
We hired Forth, Inc. and got Charles Moore, the inventor of FORTH to program the console host computer. I learned FORTH and worked with Charles. I programmed the 2K byte EPROM in each visual channel. On the Master Z80 system we ran PolyForth a multi tasking system in 32K bytes. We had an extra 16K RAM for buffers and things. If I remember right, the system ran four tasks, but that was 20 years ago, my memory may be hazy.
Anyway, I learn not only FORTH from Charles Moore, but also how to factor code in to small reusable routines, WORDs they're called in FORTH. I learned Object Oriented Programming without knowing it. Also a lot of use of vectors. Its a cool language. Charles Moore was a great inspiration to me, and really taught me a great deal that they never taught me in computer programming school.
CAT-700
After we got the basic Homer II working and were able to record on the optical printer, Peter had another idea. He wanted to be able to see the movement of the optical printer, and see a prior frame compared to the current frame. We already had a video assist on the Fries Mitchell 35mm. What we needed was a Frame Buffer. We heard of S100 video board called the CAT-100, which was 1-bit frame buffer, good enough for what we needed. Somehow we never found a 1-bit version, but we found 7-bit version in the recycler!
We flew to Reno, rented a car and drove to a log cabin up in the hills of Truckie California. We got a demo of the thing. The guys were super secret and didn't want us to see the controlling program. It worked, so we bought it, and then flew onto Palo-Alto and met the French guy who designed it. They checked it out and it was OK. This was the days before computer designed boards, and all the traces on the board were curvy, kinda like a Van Gogh painting. We learned that it was 7-bit (CAT-700) because it would have been an 8-bit, but they could not get the 8th bit to work. We spent the night in Palo Alto with a Stanford friend of Peters working on a crazy secret Apple project, the Lisa. 32KByte Paint System
So I got the CAT-700 frame buffer to work, programmed in FORTH. So in that 32K we had an optical printer control system, and a paint system, all in one. (Also the OS, compiler, debugger, etc.) We later hooked up a Summigraphic Bitpad (before the Watcom tablet) and were able to draw on top of digitized frames. It got to the point where we needed TWO optical printers, one to digitize from film, and the other to record to film. Rube Goldberg is not strong enough descriptive to describe the system, with the filter wheels and all on stepper motors, it made music. The first use of the system was effects for Steve Miller Music Video, Abracadabra. I also remember using it on the George Clinton Video, Atomic Dog.
This photo was taken right after we got the system to work. I had hooked up an analog slider box, which controlled things like color. There were 4 color maps we could switch between instantly We did a lot of work in planes, using 2 planes for the original image to be rotoscoped, and the other 5 planes to draw onto. This photo was taken for an article in Millimeter Magazine. The photo ended up being a two page color spread, and I think Peter was pissed, cause I got premier exposure.
TTL logic
At Homer and Assoc. I also learned TTL logic and designed a number of computer boards for the S100 bus. One that controlled stepper motors with a timer chip (Motorola 6840). Another to control the Slide Projectors also using the same Motorola timer chip to control the lamp triacs. My favorite thing, about the system, was the use of the cassette storage interface as a cheap timecode reader/writer.
Fully agreed on the sports movie vs action movie note.
Saying that Robocop isn't about a conspiracy strikes me as bizarre - the whole thing was a government contractor abusing its power.
I think your take on Terminator is a little weird - Arnold isn't the hero, and the gang fight is a complete throw away; that doesn't make it a conspiracy movie. T2 is more so, with the secret use of future tech.
Terminator is an easy one. The terminator at the beginning has done nothing wrong, and fights a gang[1] of bikers who antagonize him and gang up on him, and fight him together, for being naked after traveling through time.
Karate Kid had the Cobra Cai, I think it was called, the rival school. I didn't see it, but I believe they were bullies. Maybe you're right about that one, although I think Daniel-san triumphs against a bully, there might have been several, or the bully had little supporters. It's a coming of age movie, though. It's also a sports movie, they do Karate-Do, which is for decorative, spirital, and sport purposes, not Karate-Jutsu, the military or let's call it "action".
Robocop, there's that company that makes the robot that Robocop has to fight in the end, there's a lot of people working in that company and together they built an automatic murder machine, which they then set loose. And IIRC they're doing a housing development and have ties to the criminal activity in the city Robocop tries to clean up. And like that evil robot had missiles coming out of its back I think, the special effects were glitchy, which made it look like an even greater monstrosity. Companies are groups of persons so absolutely can be guilty of conspiracy if the facts warrant it, incorporation documents don't give permission to traffic heroin. So it happens to fronts for drug dealing and it almost happened to Abbott Laboratories, also basically for drug dealing, only with a drug patients hated instead of craving.
Rocky does not involve a conspiracy, except of course the conspiracy that Rocky works for, the mob, as a debt collector. Which is the reason behind his conflict with Mickey, while Rocky says "it's a living" Mickey replies "it's a waste of life!" But I think I can hand you this one. One catch: this is a sports movie, not an action movie.
I haven't seen the others.
[1] gang is a well-marketed and very glamourous word for conspiracy, which is the term courts use when there's the formal elements of a conspiracy: meeting of the minds, two or more participants in a crime acting in coordination, there's a third one [EDIT: secrecy, and illegality or bad faith are others] but that's the gist of it, it just means criminal teamwork. Some things you do alone, some things with others, same goes for crime...at any rate, don't accuse someone of being a conspiracy theorist to a judge. Judges deal with conspiracies continually, sometimes multiple different ones per day, and there absolutely are people trying to play that judge by "covering" for each other. You will curry zero favor with that judge by putting the word "conspiracy" in your opponents mouth and then claim he must be delusional. That always works on talk TV, but not in court. Judges simply don't have the luxury of being able to pretend criminals never cooperate, like none of them had a single friend.
Just rattling off the action movies I can immediately think of, I don’t believe any of which include a conspiracy in their plot/synopsis. The only action movie I can think of about a conspiracy is the movie Conspiracy with Mel Gibson, got any others?
- The Last Action Hero
- Robocop
- Karate Kid
- Baby Driver
- Rocky
- The Revenant
- Mad Max
- ConAir
- Terminator
> I was more thinking about Robocop.
> Your head just explodes after the third infraction.
Was that in the 1987 movie? I'm failing to remember anything like that.
My favourite example of this is.. Robocop!
https://dejareviewer.com/2014/04/29/cinematic-chiasmus-robocop-is-almost-perfectly-symmetrical-film/
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
Sickening. It's like a commercial from a movie like Robocop where freedom to travel is contingent on being injected with... well, whatever the government declares you have to have to be "fully vaccinated". Doesn't matter how tested or under-tested it is. Doesn't matter how many adverse reactions there are.
If you don't think this is dystopian, I'm afraid you have some very difficult and painful lessons ahead of you. Someday in the not-too-distant future it could be you being declined entry to the grocery store for being fed up and refusing the 10th injection.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4980 ^ I live on the opposite side of the planet from my family. If something like this passes, I will not be able to visit them without getting an injection I believe to be not merely medically unjustified, but very dangerous. If you support stuff like that, we're enemies.
US private corporations maintaining roads implies a society like the one depictive in the Robocop movies. It's fun to see you prosing that unironically.
Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.
Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.
It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.
I saw the Robocop (2014) remake on telly the other day. I couldn't help but wonder why the movie even existed. Its production values were vastly higher than the original, but it was just a completely boring movie. It's like the Total Recall remake. They just have no soul. There's just nothing there in terms of writing. Nothing witty, no great lines. In the original a guy rips his face of revealing his skull, and collapses. Completely daft to be sure, but it was funny. There's a creative spark that current films just don't seem to have. The characters have no personality. The actors have no charisma. Let's face it, Arnie is not a great actor. But he does have onscreen charisma.
There's just a different level of acting in the original Total Recall. Arnie, Ronny Cox, the growling Michael Ironside, Sharon Stone. The other supporting actors bought something to the table. With the remake? Nothing! Colin Farrell was boring, and his wife was leagues behind what Stone portrayed.
Maybe the problem is with the film certificate. RoboCop was a 12A, so I guess the executives thought "to hell with the writing, writing is hard."
Hollywood occasionally gets it right, I guess. Joker (2019) was pretty good, despite being a 15. I thought it was a very cohesive film in the way they chose characters like the dwarf, why Fleck committed the murders he did, and how the whole thing developed. You could tell there was a whole lot more thought put into the script.
It's why we don't see many satirical films in the same vein as Robocop and Starship Troopers anymore. It would be something that the Chinese censors would never allow. Whether it's the over the top violence or the skewering of the state and corporate power structure. Stuff like that annoys the Chinese govt more than most, so Hollywood would just bow out on such a film
It's funny how many strange one off films and games are being made online through crowd funding now (not all are good but a few are decent) due to this global pleaser approach to film making.
RoboCop comes to mind, which is ironic since the movie was obviously a parody. Also, isn't this what reality shows like Cops were about?
There is a large market for morbidity.
This was the backstory in Robocop (1987), btw.
Detroit was going broke so they privatised Detroit police, OCP made the winning bid, then their plan was to replace expensive human police with cheap-to-run Robot-cops. That’s why the film was satire /first/, Hollywood-action-film second.
Unfortunately I don’t think Paul Verhoven can save us from this...
I feel the same way, but isn't it just us getting old?
Perhaps I merely think RoboCop was better than Superhero Movie #35 because they both target 14-year-olds, and I was only 14 for the first one.
> an end to practices like sunbathing
Thanks fo making me chuckle as I remembered the Sunblock 5000 ads[0] in the original Robocop movie.
It's interesting to see how nobody worries about the ozone layer anymore, but somehow we may end up in the same place.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCTSCAQzY9k
It is actually kind of frightening hilarious to see movies like Predator 2's depiction of the future. Robocop, as well. It is stark how violent things were back then, it seems.
>When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.
No, the late 70s-80s gave us Terminator, Alien, The Day After, War Games, RoboCop, Cyberpunk, and on and on. There was definitely a palpable distrust and fear of technology even back then. Under the shadow of the bomb, you had people coming to terms with more and more of their world being run by big mainframes in far-away office buildings, whose arcane workings you could maybe get a glimpse of through text on a abyssal screen. I actually wrote a short essay exploring this and the notion that people haven't actually become any more comfortable with technology as it really is, only the increasingly friendly interfaces we interact with. I'd post it, but a few months after I wrote it, I realized that the file had become corrupt and that the first weekly back up of it had come a couple days after when that corruption was likely to have happened.
I don’t think it’s a crime to find a woman’s body sexually arousing.
I just think we to chill the fuck out if we see a boob.
It’s titillating... so what? Is that such a bad thing?
A great example was when I watched a YouTube video on Robocop a while ago. Robocop is a great movie, but it’s insanely violent. Yet YouTube was fine with all the violence and gore. But show a nipple? Bam... instant demonetisation.
For the people who have not watched the movie, the hilarious thing is that RoboCop is anti-police, anti-corporate, anti-autoritarian and anti-dystopian.
But since woke people are corporate, authoritarian and dystopian, I can see why they would object to the name.
Yes there are some other tropes that are into play, but those aren't always important - e.g. there are Cyberpunk works where you do not play the antihero or villain. E.g. in movies Alex Murphy in Robocop isn't exactly an antihero and certainly not a villain. Similar in games with JC Denton in Deus Ex (though of course in such games this particular aspect isn't clear since it is up to the player - but you are essentially playing as a glorified cop).
That some popular works in the genre share some of these tropes doesn't mean that the genre is all about those tropes.
Honestly my theory here is that my hand is probably clean, but I am disinfecting to reduce harm to others or myself. Once I touch that bottle, standing in a public place for days touched by hundreds of random hands, I think my hand is not merely unclean, but looks a lot like Emil in Robocop after he gets smashed into that green goop at the end of the movie.
I prefer to use the soles of my shoes frankly - and if I prefer it I suspect most others would hence increasing the likelihood of use and so efficacy of the solution.
My first thought was that this proposed name change is a bit silly, because "RuboCop" is clearly an homage to RoboCop, a movie that -- yes -- portrays a "good cop" but overall is very critical of the police system in America.
My second thought is that as a white, middle-class American, I can't rely on that kneejerk reaction.
I'm very lucky in that I live someplace where my group is not disproportionately targeted by the police. There are a lot of people in America and elsewhere in the world who can't say the same.
Will changing the name solve anything? No.
But is it a tiny positive step with very little cost? That is the bar that needs to be cleared.
What a ridiculous argument to be having in times like this. It's clearly named for the movie Robocop, and even if it wasn't: not all countries suffer from an abusive militarised police force like the USA does.
I can understand the appeal to move away from master/slave and blacklist/whitelist naming conventions, but you have to draw the line somewhere and I think objecting to the name of a project just because it contains the word "cop" is way past that line. We use the term "cop" in a different context in the UK (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/cop_2), so why should someone in Bulgaria care about the American usage of the word? Should I be abusing someone to have "fanny packs" renamed because the term could be deemed sexist in the UK?
Good that the author did not succumb to such frivolous requests from delicate sunflowers in changing the name when it is only and only based primarily in context to the 'Robocop' film and nothing else.
This PC-nonsense has to stop.
The author actually says the same about the movie in his ps.
> P.S. I haven't seen RoboCop in a while, but I have a vague recollection he was a good guy, who was fighting against the oppressive system.
I'm actually dumbfounded that nobody has brought up the themes of the movie RuboCop is (almost) named after. RoboCop (at least the original movie) seems pretty in line with many progressive ideology criticizing privatization of police and other government functions, criticizing militarization of police, and lampooning gratuitous violence.
Spoiler Alerts: The story of RoboCop is the story of a police officer overcoming systemic corruption within the police force after he is literally dehumanized and turned into an excessively violent killing machine. The main crux of the finale is that RoboCop needs to get around his programming that prevents him from arresting other members of the police corporation which pretty poignantly mirrors the many issues involving police policing other police. While the main character is a "good cop" in this movie, I don't think anybody will walk out of that movie thinking that police systems are not deeply flawed and corruptible destructive.
RuboCop as a linter is very much in line with the ideals of what a cop should be, and what a cop will be after reform (hopefully). RuboCop finds structural problems, gives out warnings, and helps the community of whoever works on a codebase work together in harmony.
Back in the day (the 80's) we already had memes, but they looked like other things.
The movie Robocop came out in 1987 but the gag about "I'd Buy That For a Dollar" was indicative that meme culture was enough of a thing to be worthy of satire.
Back when SNL was in its 80's prime it seemed like every skit turned into a meme. For example the Jon Lovitz "pathological liar" skit was pretty big for a while.
It's unfortunate the NBC keeps such a tight grip on all the SNL content. Lot's of 80's cultural history is locked up like that.
We seem to have learned from Robocop that turning critically injured humans into cyborg enforcers is awesome and any problems in the system will self-correct via clever word lawyering and the power of the human will. Unless I saw a different Robocop movie. ;)
Your examples prove my point. Those are all wonderfully creative movies (not sure about Robocop since I don't remember it much) I never said I wanted to be surprised. I said I wanted creativity which is something I personally find lacking in many movies these days and especially in the comic book movies.
I'm not sure why you're getting voted down when that's a perfectly valid point.
I watch GalaxyQuest, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Robocop, Fight Club, and other films almost every year. They're predictable to me but I still find them to be fantastic films with a lot to say and they help remind me to look outside of myself.
I give it 3 months before someone with a mask on shows up and shoots it 8 times in the "head". Same result with a drone. That's why the ones in the movie robocop worked, because it had guns, and a mind of its own (usually a brain from a convict too). This is more like a roomba with a camera.
I don't think anyone will steal it for fear of GPS tracking.
I remember the quote from the RoboCop movie of the 80s when the CEO of OCP said: "We practically are the government".
That movie was ahead of its time.
Dutch prisons are currently leasing space to Belgium because of low occupancy rates. This low occupancy is the result of various policies to cut costs. Prisons are not cheap so cutting sentences a bit and using alternative punishments for lighter offenses helps keep cost down. People still get caught doing stuff they are not supposed to. Locking them up is one of the punishments and it's used if needed. But it is used in moderation. Occasionally this is unpopular when high profile criminals end up back on the streets a bit sooner than people would like. Particularly when it involves e.g. sex offenders. But mostly this works out fine. This has not resulted in a massive crime wave and most people in prison are neither sex offenders nor psychopathic murderers.
The US is a great example of how prisons don't help prevent crime. It has the largest prison population per capita in the world and crime and murder rates to sustain that (i.e. notably much higher than other countries and also much more violent). Locking up people in the US apparently does not seem to lower crime rates. If anything, prisons actually help perpetuate this problem. The people who come out of them are likely to end up coming back. That's why it is important to keep young offenders out of prisons. Locking them up all but guarantees they come back for more. Locking them up for really minor offenses is simply counter productive and just locks them into a life of crime.
Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business. Big as in trading on Wall Street. E.g. CoreCivic is worth about 2.5B $: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/
I used to regard movies from the eighties like Robocop as pure satire but you have to admit that this company, it's name, and it's sameless corporatism and hollow marketing makes it look like OCP quite a bit. Straight from their website: "CoreCivic's effective, high-quality reentry programs are at the center of our mission to reduce recidivism and help better the public good.". Yeah, right. Comes with a photo of a friendly smiling prisoner (black, naturally).
NIMBYism in metro Atlanta keeps the mass transit lines from expanding. They're afraid more consistent buses and trains will bring inner city drugs and violence to get in the way of good, wholesome suburban drugs and violence. Way too many people grew up on and internalized '80s movies. Real life cities in 2019 USA are not like Robocop, but try telling that to the people around here.
I have a better name for it, "Delta City".
Check out the pop culture classic, RoboCop, which besides being a popcorn chewing action film, contains a rather cynical, but prescient, view on the future of corporations and privatization of public interests.
For those unfamiliar or don't recall, in the film, the mayor signs a deal with the mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) will be allowed to turn the run-down sections of Detroit into a high-end utopia called Delta City. Much fun, crime and corruption ensues.
Sidewalk Labs wants to make a better world for us. Ha. "I'll buy that for a dollar."
I'd love to be a minimalist, but pretty much all of my hobbies include me collecting something or require a bunch of stuff.
Yes, I could go digital with some of my collecting hobbies (books, comics, movies), but we all know how DRM and digital services are nowadays.
My Criterion Collection Robocop DVD can't just magically disappear from my shelf one night because of some legal issues. Same with my books and comics, barring a large scale house fire, they're not going anywhere.
I'm not very knowledgeable, I'm an 80s kid.. so US comics === super hero (also movies to an extent, Donner's Superman was a massive event, Robocop, TMNT ..).
So my answer would be .. no. US comics = Disney + Marvel + DC. I actually struggle to remember anything else. I'd be happy to know more though..
Something I've grown to appreciate about the film is that poses similar challenging questions in its own way. In hindsight, the film is much more in conversation with the book than it seems at surface level (more than just setting), because the film is dripping with satire and asks dark questions about fascist authoritarianism. I feel like a key to the film is that it is the best, most direct sequel to Robocop, which is also dripping with satire and dark questions of authoritarianism that are often overlooked in pop culture (Robocop's other sequels for instance misplace/misunderstand the satire pretty quickly).
>and I definitely didn't get the impression they were trying to be ironic and channeling PKD's social commentary on the advertising industry
not sure why you think that. It's a Paul Verhoeven movie and Robocop had similar themes.
On the IRC bot note, I have a petty-unethical story of how I made an IRC bot that would pick up movie titles, search for them on IMDB and respond with a randomly chosen spoiler marked trivia bullet.
My most benign bot simply played back the subtitles of Robocop in realtime on a loop.
> It is darkly humorous to contrast Hollywood's or scifi's "killer AI robots" that methodically hunt you down to these real world demonstrations of emerging AI. Maybe the first "killer AI robots" would exhibit similarly bizarre behaviors while they methodically hunt down the unlikely hero. :-)
That sounds very much like ED-209 in RoboCop (a film whose satire and themes in general are far more on-point and prescient than one might expect from the premise).
Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action (about groundwater pollution) are both good examples, yes.
I guess it depends when the article starts its timeline. I was trying to think of movies from the 2010s or so, because I can think of a lot of tech CEO villains in that span but not many non-tech CEO villains. My best guess at why is that action films with corporate villains look better with tech companies. (For instance, Robocop is way older than the article's timeframe, but fits the same villain narrative.)
Please see OCP from the original movie Robocop.
So, if somebody "stole" your identity, and was able to drain your bank account and credit card, would you no longer be able to report that your car is stolen, since you lack the funds to do so?
Or, do you ask your family and friends to borrow money, so you can file a police report?
Subtle RoboCop reference (this movie is now old enough that lots of HN-ers probably haven't seen it). ED-209 [1] [2] is an AI-driven competitor to RoboCop (cyborg/zombie).
"Your move, creep."
[1] http://robocop.wikia.com/wiki/Enforcement_Droid_Series_209
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrXfh4hENKs
It was the exact plot of the movie Robocop. There was also a bit of Aliens in the mix.
I thought Starship Troopers was a great movie. It was a satire in the same style as the original Robocop.
Verhoven did not share in Heinlein's militaristic vision of the future where only citizens are granted the right to vote. The movie so blatantly portrayed humans as fascist that Neil Patrick Harris was wearing an SS uniform.
ED-209 wants to have a word with Robocop + I decreased frustration and societal unrest by massively funding Entertainment:
http://bit.ly/2mwwO7T
Basically, "Running Man" was entertainment / fiction when I read it as a kid, and it will be a documentary by the time I'm dead.
I think this goes for many Verhoeven's movies - lot of them contain a non-negligible amount of parody. But as the common wisdom says, working parody must be a good example of the genre it parodies and Verhoeven's movies are excellent examples of their genres.
At least, I think it works with Starship Troopers, Total Recall and Robocop. I'm not sure what to make of Basic Instinct and Playgirls.
Just like in that movie RoboCop lol.
Comparing to Citizen Kane seems unfair as it's not an action movie. So here are some other action movies. (NB: There are multiple entries for some of these but I'm not listing them all).
Die Hard 4.5 Die Hard 2 3.1 Die Hard 3 1.8 Armageddon 2.2 -- at least he's ben consistently on the quick side Total Recall 3.7 -- original, 1990 Robocop 3.7 -- original Haywire 6 And I keep trying to search for movies they don't have in the database. So certainly for action movies (1980+), at least for some popular ones, the ASL isn't out of the ordinary.
But then I searched for Alfred Hitchcock and got some interesting results. This database has many duplicate entries and some wildly different values. The Skin Game had 3 entries at about the same time (17.1, 17.3, 17.4). However, Rear Window has an entry at 3.7 and another at 8.8, and several at 10.5. I suppose I need to read about their methodology to understand why there's so much variance.
None of the reboots have the spirits of the 80s. Technology changed the way "art" is produced and feels, too much details, backstory, less ~onirism. In Robocop's case, far too less cyberpunk, flesh and metal.
In these days a Cyborg was a thing to imagine, nowadays it's a possibility, and the ethical comments : 'should we really pursue robotics' and 'is man playing god', aren't just a sci-fi story anymore, it felt like watching the news.
If movies are correlated to societies subconscious, dreams have changed and the way we express them too.
Your logic makes sense, but there's something special about visual imagery - the way the images go directly into our brains without being filtered through our imaginations - that gives it true power.
When I was a kid, I read a lot of horror. Mostly Stephen King, and Clive Barker, which were far more than my 8-year-old self should have been reading, but for the most part, I could handle it, just fine. (Stephen King's It was really the only book that scared me beyond the moments I was reading). On the other hand, the violent films I saw (Aliens, Robocop, etc) proved much harder to shake off. Remember the end of Robocop where they guy gets toxic waste dumped all over him, and his flesh starts dripping off? I spent weeks trying to get that image out of my head. Hell, even the end of Raiders, or the Ceti Eels from Wrath of Khan disturbed me far more than anything I read.
As an adult, I watched Devils Rejects - a truly great film that I cannot recommend to anyone because of how disturbing I found some of the imagery in that.
Or, to take a real life example - plenty of us are fine with reading accounts of terrorist beheadings but purposefully avoid watching the videos of the events.
Yes, Robocop did do this to me. It was one of the weirdest movies I had watched at the time. It's been a long long time since I've seen it though, I'm probably due for another viewing.
I watched the remake a few weeks ago. It was ok but it didn't leave an impression on me like the original did.
Some movies will leave beautiful scars in your minds. The atmosphere of Robocop and Alien still pull me back.
I think there is also an element of how we watch movie scenes today, compared with how it was done in the past.
For instance, if you want to see the ending of Terminator with the stop-motion animation, today you'd just go to youtube and watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KeniFoiT-0
It looks pretty decent, but that's not really terrifying anymore like people remember it.
In the past though, if you wanted to see that scene, you probably sat through the entire movie. When you do that, I think the effects in that scene work much better. That is because the rest of the movie was conditioning you, getting you excited. Setting the stage for how things in that universe work and look. Seen within the full context of their movies, old special effects hold up much better IMHO.
Another movie where I think this is in strong effect is the original Robocop. ED-209 in the boardroom is much more effective after sitting through the opening of the film.
I think it's a combination of video games and fake corporate videos from movies. This seems like something that would be playing on a TV in a near-future sci-fi movie. Something out of RoboCop or those cut bits of Terminator 2 with the guy who invented the things. Hell, short-circuit for a more lighthearted take on it. We've been bombarded with these sorts of videos being a precursor to bloodshed since at least the 80s.
Maybe the protagonists of a movie are in a research lab that's mysteriously gone silent, everyone seemingly having disappeared without a trace, and they watch this video, trying to figure out what's gone wrong. They flip through a couple more before finding the one where these things start killing everyone. Other 'bots drag off the bodies, and cleaning robots spin across the floor, wiping up the blood. While the characters' eyes are glued to the screen, the viewer sees the "dead" half-disassembled dog-robot on the workbench behind them start to silently shift, then slowly stand up.
See:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ApocalypticLog
I guess it depends to what extent you think TV drives culture versus reflects it.
It is kind of amusing to look at certain old movies and see how much less-believable they've become, particularly the ones that implied urban crime was going to get much worse before getting better (if ever.)
Ex: Robocop, Judge Dredd, Escape from New York, the introductory portion of Demolition Man...
Interesting read. It starts off showing a nightmare scenario of capitalism gone wrong ... similar themes with the original Robocop movies (without the violence and gore). It finishes with a dreamy scenario of communism gone well, though it ignores many issues, hand-waves others, and ends rather abruptly.
It was interesting to see where one futurist believes we could go.
There's a movie about this exact subject called Robocop.
> And the robocop might win just based on the fact that he's less likely to have a "respect mah authoritai" chip on his shoulder that results in me being tazed or shot for no good reason.
Concerning the film "Robocop", it was interesting that you discover most of his character traits after he has been transformed into a cyborg, and my opinion is that he was a brutal copper.
I watched Robocop as a boy, a film about a cop that gets "killed" and comes back as a robot. Awesome.
I watched Starship Troopers as a Uni student, a film criticising the military-political attitudes and that prevail in [Western] society. Awesome.
If however I'd watched ST as a child then it too, I imagine, would have merely been a film about soldiers who go in to space to fight bugs.
The inability of a viewer/reader to understand the message being conveyed doesn't mean that a writer should dumb it down. It's grown-up food.
Presumably the ability to read Animal Farm as a story about farm animals means, for you, that Orwell failed?
The central characters in Robocop were treated empathetically, the scathing social satire and black comedy were not central to the main storyline of heroes and villians, so there was still an engaging film even for those viewers lacking the social awareness needed to appreciate irony.
In Starship Troopers, every character was disposable, hence the gigantic 'whoosh'.
I recommend 'Hollow Man', Verhoeven's last, and largely forgotten Hollywood film, released in 2000. It's even more subversive, and the subversive message is even more subtle. So subtle in fact that I doubt even the film's producers were aware of what was going on. It's either a terrible B-grade hollywood sci-fi thriller, or brilliant black comedy, depending on whether or not you latch on to the subtext.
I agree with your analysis of Robocop, but I'm not looking forward to the remake at all. There's no need for a remake. There is nothing that feels old about Robocop. Watch it again and it still stands as a great movie altogether. The remake will just put more nonsensical special effects and you can bet there will tons of crappy acting in it.
Here is an in-movie ad for a product that exists in the Robocop universe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmSSVt7Mfkk
I have to wonder if the failure of so many people to pick up on the blatant satire in, for example, Starship Troopers and Robocop is due to something akin to Poe's Law as applied to so many other films which were not satirical muddying the waters.
Dirty Harry is, seemingly, not satirical, yet it is every bit as ridiculous as Robocop.
It's not just a different story; the book has some political points to make which, I think, the movie is trying to directly rebut. Feels a bit tasteless to use the book license for this purpose, to me, but then again I'm a Heinlein fan and I thought Robocop was dumb.
One of the big issues in the book is that patriotism isn't just a rhetorical trick to get naive young boys to volunteer for a meatgrinder (though of course Verhoeven and Neumeier are right, it does that too). If no one stands up for a society, then that society is vulnerable to predators. Sometimes it's foreign invasion, sometimes it's internal predators like corruption and profiteering. I think this call to have a little backbone is relevant in every era. (This position is straightforwardly argued by the mouthpiece character, Dubois.)
And another issue, a little less prominent but often-criticized, is the idea of only giving the franchise to those who earn it. Heinlein later wrote that he wasn't so much advocating this particular plan for the franchise, (e.g. forwarding an alternative: only give the franchise to mothers!), but that he felt that democracy was going in a bad direction (bread, circuses, demagoguery, and holy-war-style partisanship), and that maybe this "franchise-for-all" premise should be revisited.
Why do I think Verhoeven was spitting in Heinlein's face? I probably shouldn't try to paraphrase Heinlein, because he was a complex guy with complex political opinions, but I think he generally favored military strength (though he generally did not favor a strong central government). I'm not as familiar with the Verhoeven oeuvre, but seems to be focused against military-industrial complex (though that's more straightforwardly a Robocop thing), and his anti-war rhetoric is so un-nuanced (it's so slapstick that some people thought it was pro-war) that it's tempting to believe he's anti-all-war (contrasting with people who think the phrase "just war" is meaningful, a group I feel confident includes Heinlein). As I said earlier, I think it's a bit tasteless to try to make a franchise work into a direct attack on the original.
For some contrast: IIRC, Haldeman wrote The Forever War in part as a direct reply to Starship Troopers. Haldeman had lots of direct combat experience, too (as contrasted with Heinlein, who I think never saw combat), which partially informed his views on books like Heinlein's. Personally, I think The Forever War is too good at raising new issues to be seen entirely as a reply to anything, but I understand that was a motivator.
"Roger Ebert, who had praised the “pointed social satire” of Verhoeven’s Robocop, found the film “one-dimensional,” a trivial nothing “pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.”
I was about that age when it came out. Still one of my favorite movies, sci-fi, satire and all. I think I'll sit down and watch it this weekend.
"I remember when I first saw the movie Robocop, and I thought: Privatized police force? Come on, not even in the USA the "markets will fix everything" ideology could go so far."
The CCA logo (as seen on the flag) even looks vaguely OCP-ish, like something out of the particularly '80s vision of the corporate future as envisioned in the original Robocop.
"spending less on rehabilitation doesn't just save money now, it also brings higher recidivism and so makes for a healthier future market for these corporations..."
Exactly. And let's not forget that these same corporations who run prisons also lobby for harsher sentencing, mandatory minimums, looser prison labor laws, and so forth.
It's a sticky subject because nobody -- politician, man on the street, mother of children, or law-abiding citizen -- wants to come right out and say that he or she is advocating for prisoner's rights. Nobody's ever won an election being "soft" on crime (at least not to my knowledge). So the prison-industrial complex has it pretty easy, as far as built-in political incentives are concerned. Ultimately their agenda is self-fulfilling, and the social externalities are highly negative. Costs may be cut in the short run, but as you suggest, recidivism means nobody in the system is ever really going to escape it -- hence, we're shortchanging the future to save pennies in the present.
I remember when I first saw the movie Robocop, and I thought: Privatized police force? Come on, not even in the USA the "markets will fix everything" ideology could go so far.
Well, this isn't very far from that.
By the way, spending less on rehabilitation doesn't just save money now, it also brings higher recidivism and so makes for a healthier future market for these corporations...
> (unrelated but I personally found the censored version of The Osbournes to be much funnier than the uncensored version)
...and perhaps that's why it's important to keep the language in? Bleeping it reduces the effect.
Something similar happened in Robocop; the scene showing ED-209 machine gunning the junior executive was originally very long. The MPAA gave the film an X rating, so lots of the the movie was cut. The machine gunning was now short, efficient. That turned a scene which was darkly comic, totally ridiculous, into something much more chilling.
The original Blu-Ray version of Robocop was pulled off of the market for its horrendous transfer from film.
I think he meant ED-209 from the movie Robocop, so not a GOOD thing.
with that title, I half expected to see a video of Robocop...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/quotes