The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 9-15
RoboCop (1987)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
In a dystopian near-future, less-than-benevolent corporation Omni Consumer Products, having won a contract to operate the Detroit police department, decides to expand the city’s tradition of automation to include law enforcement: killed in the line of duty, Officer Murphy (Peter Weller) is rebooted, via “total body prosthesis,” as the cyborg prototype of the title. Working for the first time without screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, Verhoeven brazenly alternates tones to suit his varied ends, eager to hawk a satirical loogie into the morning-in-America o.j. but also insisting on his robo-protagonist’s underlying humanity. He understands this technological resurrection as a kind of living death, consciously rendering the policier as passion play. The robot-POV shot, a creaky gimmick in The Terminator a few years before, becomes in Verhoeven’s hands a vector of existential dread. A popcorn riot that remains distressingly topical thirty years after the fact, RoboCop is a testament to the powerful synergy of the director’s considerable talents with Hollywood’s inherent tastelessness. I’d buy that for a dollar! Eli Goldfarb (November 11, 7pm; November 15, 6:30pm; November 17, 4pm; November 22, 9:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Total Verhoeven”)
