Paul Verhoeven’s Dirty-Harry-Frankenstein’s-monster goes clanking and wheezing out into the Detroit streets once more, with his humungous exo-skeleton, thigh-mounted handgun case, killer-marionette walk and the balletically defined 45-degree head-swivels that precede a change in direction. This sci-fi action satire from 1987, wittily scripted by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, is now rereleased in its original director’s cut, with the gruesome violence and its attendant black-comic queasiness restored.
But the gore was never, for me, entirely the point. RoboCop looks more than ever like Verhoeven’s masterpiece, a classic of 80s Hollywood and apart from everything else a brilliant commentary on the city of Detroit; hi-tech RoboCop is a harbinger of the decline of the automotive industry and the ruin-porn wasteland to come. And America’s automated “Star Wars” defence system of the Reagan age comes into discussion: in a throwaway aside, the film imagines it accidentally zapping Planet Earth, killing two former presidents as it does so.
