Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” (1987) felt like a crazed, positively cracked masterpiece when it first arrived.
Once audiences got past the B-movie moniker (surely no one at Orion Pictures thought we’d take the title seriously, right?), there was the film itself, a tortured hero’s journey dolled up in science fiction and presented as an uncompromised, state-of-the-art popcorn flick.
It begins in the not-too-distant future, in which the population is obsessed with television, surrounded by outbreaks of violence and at the mercy of corporations with far too much access to power. In other words, just like today. No date is given for the setting and none is needed.
The future is now.
Peter Weller’s Officer Murphy is a “transfer from Metro South,” immediately put on the streets...