Welcome to Part Seven of my Celluloid Heroes series. What began as a website-only project has since bloomed into a massive 140,000 WIP non-fiction book currently being revised. And revised. And revised. Did I mention it’s still being revised?
Of course through that constant revisions some chapters written did not make the final cut and this is one of them. As we move through the hottest months of 2024 I continue the theme with another entry on the summer movie, in particular one that would have actual career repercussions for me less than ten years after seeing it. So on that note, we hop into the DeLorean and rocket back thirty-four years to the summer of 1990 and:
Summers always seem endless when you’re younger; moving slowly at first as you shake off the still-fresh memories of school and look ahead to two – sometimes three – whole months of rest and relaxation, summer jobs, summer fun, and of course, summer movies. For me the best part of summer was always that first week of vacation when the memories of school are still fresh in your mine as you embrace the temporary freedom being a teenager in summertime can only bring. Even with jobs and responsibilities in that first week the summer truly feels endless. And in that similar vein summer movies are, I think, a part of why moviegoing is so beloved in general. Summer movies are fun, are frequently brilliant, and anticipated through the year as winter becomes spring.
They were not all winners, those summer movies. For every solid sequel like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Aliens there was a Star Trek V, a Die Hard 2, and a Ghostbusters 2.[1] Stand-alone original films too had the capacity and potential to disappoint; Dick Tracy, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and every Pirates of the Caribbean movie post-2004. Some stories just concluded naturally at the end of their tale when the music swells and the credits roll. The characters’ journey should always have an arc leading to a conclusive moment, from John McClane reunited with his wife Holly to Jack Sparrow reclaiming his beloved Black Pearl to the titular cyborg from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi masterpiece Robocop regaining his humanity.
A sequel by its very nature must undo that conclusion. It needs to reset the board so to speak so the hero or heroine has to suit up to do battle again. Sometimes this works brilliantly; Ripley in Aliens is a notable standout, with her arc in that second film centered about conquering the traumas she endured because of the first. Sometimes, as in Die Hard 2‘s case, this doesn’t work quite as well; fun, yes, but it’s certainly no Die Hard.
But even the mediocre summer movie entries hold particular delights as well. And while sometimes a sequel fails the original by trying to be what everyone assumed that original would be; a loud, dumb action movie, they can also reinforce what made that original movie such a momentous piece of art. Put bluntly, a Ghostbusters 2, Die Hard 2, and The Mummy Returns will only make you appreciate Ghostbusters, Die Hard, and The Mummy all the more so. I discovered this in June of 1990 when I drove to Kingston to see what was then my most anticipated film of that summer; Robocop 2.
Now, much of the excitement on my part was because I never got to see the first Robocop in the theater when it was released in 1987 though I desperately wanted to. I had wanted to ever since reading about it in Starlog Magazine.
As to why I never saw it, well, we need to delve into a little bit of semi-obscure Ontario history. In 1981 the Adult Accompaniment (“AA”) rating was introduced by the Film Ratings Board, which allowed films to be classified so that children under the age of fourteen were restricted from seeing unless accompanied by an adult, naturally. Unlike most other jurisdictions in Canada and the US, in Ontario a movie rated “R” was off limits to anyone under eighteen. Put in simpler terms, The R in Ontario was equivalent to X in the US and 18 in the UK. This AA classification was developed to open films of “social significance” to younger audiences who would otherwise be restricted from seeing a film of merit like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What it meant though was that if you wanted to see nudity, swearing, and violence and could get an adult to take you, you were in like Flynn.
Robocop was not one of those movies of “social significance” as far as the Ontario ratings board was concerned despite being one of the most razor-sharp satires ever made (or maybe that’s why it was rated R – can’t have impressionable teenagers questioning our corporate masters can we). Even if my dad wanted to see it – which he did – he couldn’t take me with him. It’s the same reason my most anticipated summer movie of 1989 – Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing – was similarly off-limits. R-rated movies like these you pretty much had to wait until they reached home video where those restrictions no longer applied. I mean, I’m certain technically the owner of The Video Place on King Street in Brockville wasn’t supposed to rent either Robocop or Do The Right Thing to me but he did anyway because he was a cool guy and one who knew I was a genuine movie maniac.
I wouldn’t see RoboCop until it arrived on video in early 1988 and I think I watched it four times over the course of that weekend. I later managed to acquire a used VHS of the film and watched that endlessly in the years following. RoboCop holds the distinction of one of those films like Star Wars that I saw so many times I could pretty much run it in my brain from the opening frames to the final shot. I knew every music cue, every gunshot, every sound-effect, and could quote its many great lines, using several in every-day conversation (I’ll buy that for a dollar!” being the most useful – what can I say? I was a nerd). Robocop was the epitome of the movies I discovered on video that soon became favorites (The Thing, Die Hard, and The Shining being notable others) with all those advantages to pause, rewind, fast-forward and just experience over again.
Robocop was a masterpiece. A dark, violent parody of life in Reagan America masquerading as a dumb sci-fi film. I mean even the title – “Robocop” – sounds like any number of low-budget schlock (Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, Yor: Hunter From The Future, Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone ) the type of which cluttered the shelves of video stores throughout the 1980s. The satire of Robocop was razor-sharp; much more so than the “message” movies of back then and even today, where there is a tendency to make the subtext of a film the actual text; in making the message the story. Despite Robocop’s genuinely progressive politics nobody would accuse it of being “woke” or “political” because those politics are what frame the story rather than act as the driving force behind it. Like John Carpenter’s They Live, Robocop turned a mirror onto the audience and said “this isn’t who we’re becoming; this is who we are”; A nation obsessed with purchasing the new 6000 SUX with Blaupunkt, and with nuking them before they nuke you, all the while corporate America represented by the insidious Amazon – I mean Omni Consumer Products – works its tentacles into every aspect of their lives, raiding their retirement savings and bleeding them dry.[2]
But at its core Robocop’s story was a human one and it was that humanity that elevated it above others of its genre. Few scenes in movies of the 80s and indeed in movies period are as heartbreaking as Robocop’s cyborg Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) wandering through the now empty home he shared with his wife and son as those memories of his former life intrude themselves upon him, “I can feel them but I can’t remember them” he tells Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen) later in the movie. Robocop was the story of a man who’d had this humanity torn away from him only to discover some of that humanity still remaining. It’s one of those movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark that has almost no right being as good as it actually is. It could have toppled into comic book silliness and absurdity but it never stumbles, thanks to the assured hand of director Paul Verhoeven and screenplay by Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner. Bolstered by committed performances by Weller, Allen, Kurtwood Smith, Ronny Cox, Miguel Ferrer and Dan O’Herlihy, thirty-seven years on Robocop remains a genuine classic. Despite the absurd premise everyone treats the story of Alex Murphy with a gravitas that elevates it. It never winks to the camera; it never acknowledges its own ridiculousness. It takes itself seriously but no so seriously that it isn’t one hundred per cent fun.
So needless to say I was stoked for Robocop 2 despite troubling signs on the horizon. Verhoeven was out; screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner were also out. These twin losses would ordinarily give one pause, but instead we were getting two heavyweights to me at least; director Irvin Kershner (director of the best of the Star Wars sequels – The Empire Strikes Back – if not the best Star Wars film which was of course Star Wars), and a screenplay co-written by Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) … and Frank Miller.
Miller was a comic-book writer at the time, widely regarded even then as being one of the best in the business. His run on Marvel’s Daredevil was legendary and he just seemed to keep knocking them out of the park, giving us not one but those two all-time great Batman stories in Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns. Along with Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, Miller was a certifiable comic book writer as rock star and my anticipation for Robocop 2 accelerated with that knowledge. This was Frank Miller writing a Robocop movie. It had to be good. Right?
I wish. Robocop 2 was quite possibly one of the first truly disappointing movie going experiences of my then young life. The first time (certainly not the last ) I can recall really anticipating a movie so much only to have it fold like a house of cards set atop a three-legged table being kicked by a half-blind dog.
RoboCop 2 is not a bad film per se – it’s actually quite entertaining and certainly has its admirers (definitely more than admired my own take on the character years later to be perfectly honest). As a dumb fun summer action flick it hits all the right notes. Action? Check. Violence? Check. Clever satire? Uhh, well “clever” isn’t the word I’d use; where the original was slyly subversive the sequel has all the subtlety of a two-by-four whacked across the face. So why am I even bothering to devote roughly three thousand words writing about it?
I honestly feel it’s because what you learn from a negative experience is much more valuable than a positive one. I can still easily recall the cheers that erupted in a movie theater in Edmonton when Indiana Jones mounted that white horse to pursue the Nazi convoy carrying the Ark of the Covenant. I can recall the uproarious laughter when the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man made his “terrifying” appearance in Ghostbusters. And just as strongly can I recall the slowly deflating balloon feeling I had as Robocop 2 unspooled in that theater at the Cataraqui Town Centre in June of 1990.
There were three of us; my friend from Toronto Mark had again driven up to Brockville that summer as was his habit once high school was done for the year; to go boating, to hang out, to see movies. My Brockville pal Elliott – as much of a Frank Miller and RoboCop fan as I – was just as keen to go. We all were. Why? Because RoboCop was awesome!
Would that we could say the same for its sequel.
If you just turned your brain off and watched Robocop 2, there was nothing truly wrong with it; it was and is a perfectly serviceable action film. But Robocop hadn’t required the lapses of intellectual engagement its sequel does; in fact it had benefitted from that engagement. It compelled you to watch by focusing on Alex murphy, the man in the machine. In Robocop 2 it’s Robocop the easily merchandisable action figure who is the focus. Nonetheless there’s a really interesting movie buried deep within Robocop 2 and watching at the time I felt like I could almost see the movie it was trying to be, but it wasn’t trying hard enough (or more apropos, it wouldn’t allow itself to). It didn’t want the subtext, it didn’t want the tortured soul of Alex Murphy imprisoned within a mechanical shell. It just wanted action and lots of it. It was as though the execs at Orion looked at their successful original film, at the action, at the violence and said “more that” without taking into account the Human Equation of Alex Murphy/Peter Weller that really made that “dumb action” mean something more than state-of-the-art bang-bang.
The story of Robocop 2 is simple bordering on simplistic; Robocop must take down an insidious drug dealer flooding the streets of Old Detroit with a designer drug called Nuke. Through a tangled web of events said drug dealer Caine (Tom Noonan) is rendered comatose just in time for a devious OCP scientist Dr. Faxx (Belinda Bauer) to pluck his living brain right out of his body and stick it in a mechanical nightmare dubbed Robocop 2 which resembles a cross between a walking tank and a Swiss Army knife. Chaos ensues, Robocop saves the day, the movie doesn’t so much end as stop Gone is the Electric Frankenstein-retold tech nightmare of the original. In its place is a bog standard police procedural with Robocop – who everyone calls “Murphy” even though his identity is supposed to be a big secret – tasked to take down this nefarious drug dealer with a Messiah. Throw in OCP’s attempts to create another Robocop, its battles with the mayor of Detroit to bulldoze the city and replace it with a slick corporate community called Delta City, loads of violence and profanity, a pre-teen drug lord (Gabriel Damon), a sidelined Officer Lewis (Allen), and symbolism so ham-handed and obvious you’d think a teenager, certainly not comic book legend Miller and The Wild Bunch screenwriter Green wrote it.[4]
The movie manages to avoid crashing into the mountainside in its final twenty or so minutes when the Phil Tippett created “Robocop 2” battles with our hero, and what we get is perhaps the last truly great stop-motion animated sequence we’d see in film ever again once CGI took over the industry a few years later. Despite its lapses into absurdity – with Robos 1 and 2 plummeting off the roof of the OCP tower hundreds of feet to ground without so much as a bit of scuffed paint – the final sequence is so shockingly great you only wish it had been in service of a better movie.
You can get a sense of the movie Robocop 2 was on paper. Making a drug dealer the central villain and detailing how these addictions lead to moral and urban decay in our cities is bold for a film made in 1990. There are the symbols of the crack epidemic throughout Robocop 2 – the opening scenes in particular make this clear when Robo discovers one of Cain’s Nuke factories and finds it staffed by immigrant woman working under gunpoint. But as is always the case in movies (see also Explorers), there are rewrites, there are scenes filmed and cut or never filmed at all. Nancy Allen’s Officer Lewis is given nothing to do except tussle with a twelve-year old and lose. OCP’s “Old Man” (Dan O’Herlihy), a stern presence in the original film goes full on-camp in the second, bellowing “BEHAVE YOURSELVES” as the two cyborgs play “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robocops”. Even the Media Breaks and commercials scattered throughout lack that razor-sharp satirical edge the ones in the first film provided. Robocop 2 plays out like an 80s movie (which it is, being filmed in 1989) but released into a decade where the Big Issues of the day had yet to coalesce.
Robocop 2 doesn’t miss the point of what made Robocop a great film but rather it misinterprets what made it great in the first place. The movie plays out as a more cartoonish, more exaggerated version of a story that was already cartoonish and exaggerated by design, and this takes into consideration an actual animated Robocop TV series airing around the same time. To put it more succinctly: in Robocop the makers are telling you a great joke; in Robocop 2 they tell you they’re telling you a great joke, which pretty much guarantees you’re not going to laugh.
In the movie business it is often said that while success has many authors failure has only one. The original Robocop was a success, and Orion Pictures somehow convinced themselves that success was their doing, not Neumeier’s, not Miner’s, and not Verhoeven’s. Thanks to the groundbreaking original they had a template to follow they were so certain would guarantee success. But then those successful authors became a case of too many cooks, which is something that happens with an alarming frequency in the movie business. It takes a steady hand at the helm –the producer, or the director – to separate the bad ideas from the decent ones. But sometimes the mountain of bullshit becomes too much to summit you have no choice but to get used to the smell.[5]
I left Robocop fully satisfied by everything I’d seen. But I was left wanting after watching Robocop 2. I wanted less of the action and the gore. I wanted more scenes like the one in the beginning when Murphy must convince his still grieving wife Ellen that he is not her husband. That OCP constructed him with Alex Murphy’s face to honor the dead officer’s ’s sacrifice. In that scene the seed is planted for a story in which Murphy must reject his humanity to protect the ones he still loves. But we never see Ellen after that or son Jimmy at all. Instead we get a hundred plus minutes of violence and ham-handed commentary and leaden satire and an admittedly cool final battle ending with Murphy quipping to Lewis “We’re only human”. It’s such a betrayal of the first film and those character moments in the second that I find the most egregious. We didn’t watch and enjoy and love the original film because of the violence (though I’m sure some did). We loved it because of Alex Murphy; his journey, his reclaiming of his name and his self. Robocop 2 commits the worst sequel sin of wiping clean all that came before. Weller’s Robocop seems to reset back to the mono-syllabic monotone he was in the first film, before discovering he was once a father and husband and good cop named Alex Murphy. That heartbreaking moment in Robocop, where a self-aware Murphy tells of his family “I can feel them but I can’t remember them”, has no corresponding moment here. The promise of Robocop’s final shot of Murphy asserting his identity and smiling is never followed through here; surely the reason a sequel should exist.
A successful sequel should give us a story continuation but also characters who develop beyond whom and what they were in the first film. But too often they remain in stasis; preserving all the quirks and catch-phrases from the original film while losing the context in which those moments were borne. To wit: John McClane’s “Yippie-kai-yay motherfucker” to Hans Gruber’s sneering comment about Roy Rogers in Die Hard works; him saying the same to himself as he ignites the fuel trail that obliterates the bad guys airplane in Die Hard 2 doesn’t. In the first instance it’s a character beat of defiance; in the second its him saying it because it’s a line he said in Die Hard.
Being disappointed by a movie you so desperately wanted to like, let alone one you were so looking forward to seeing is a special type of pain. We’ve all been disappointed by movies before. But a curious thing happened to me at that screening, and that thing became something I’ve done many times in the years since whenever a movie I’m watching clearly is not working for me – I started rewriting the movie in my head. I put myself in the role of the writer and made different choices. And I did that with Robocop 2. I made Murphy’s wife and son bigger players in the story. I had his stalking them become a weakness that drug dealer Cain (Tom Noonan) and his backers at OCP exploit to their advantage. I had Cain’s addictive drug Nuke revealed to be engineered in OCP labs and distributed by Cain throughout Old Detroit to give OCP the leverage to unseat the ineffectual mayor and proceed with their plans to build Delta City (in a direct connect to reports of the CIA allowing the crack epidemic to spread through inner-city America to decimate those communities). And I had Cain – learning of Robocop’s connection to the Murphy family – kidnap Ellen and Jimmy, sending Robo on a Dirty Harry-esque rampage to get them back. Robocop of course saves the day but in the process of rescue, Cain kills Ellen. Jimmy is orphaned a second time, and destined for an OCP-run orphanage. But the day he’s to be sent away he gets a visitor. It’s Robocop. He kneels before Jimmy, removes his helmet, and reveals his father’s face. “Let’s go home, son,” Robo tells him. Cut to black. The End.
I didn’t say the version I imagined was a good movie, but it was the movie running in my head on the drive home. I had my fun with it but in the end just filed it away. I was a sixteen year-old from a small town with a likely unachievable dream of one day making movies of my own. And even if I did achieve that goal there was also likely no way in hell was I ever going to get a crack at a Robocop story, right?
Robocop faded from importance to me after Robocop 2, Robocop 3, and Robocop: The Series dove deeper into kid-friendly ham-handed satire. Cartoons like Alpha Commando and the Marvel Comics series didn’t help much either. At least I still had that near perfect 1987 original film though; the one that broke the mold that none of the sequels, spinoffs, and alternate takes were ever able to recapture. Robocop 1987 was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment, full stop. It ends, and so did my general interest with that character.
I would never in my wildest dreams imagine that just twelve years after Robocop stormed onto the big screen I would be standing on a movie set watching not one but two actors in Robo-Suits spouting dialogue I had written. And while the story of Prime Directives is one I intend to tell in due time, that time will have to wait, joys, heartbreak and all.*
In the end Robocop 2 taught me a valuable lesson about the movies but also in my growing interest in them. That I wasn’t just some mindless repository for light and noise splashed across a screen that would lap it all up like a dog thirsting for water on a hot day. That I was capable of watching a movie, being disappointed by it, and dissecting the reasons why I was disappointed. That just as you can learn more from a negative experience than a positive one, there was as much to learn from a film that didn’t work as there was from a film that did.
A few year later Robocop 3 stumbled into theaters where it died a quick death and a Canadian-made TV series followed in 1994 to little acclaim. But the bloom had definitely come off the rose for audiences and particularly for me. In my mind the Robocop story was a one-and-done deal. What I could never imagine was that Robocop would come back into my life later that decade and forever change that life in the process.
That story … will have to wait for Celluloid heroes: The Book. I promise it will be worth it.
[1] True story: the biggest laugh Ghostbusters 2 likely ever got was during the showing I attended that summer when some joker in the back row loudly sneezed then exclaimed in horror “ugh I’ve been slimed!” That line got much louder, longer, sustained laughter than anything on the screen.
[2] You see shades of Omni Consumer Products in Amazon, Facebook, and scores of Silicon Valley companies.
[3] Other disappointments on the Robocop 2 scale? Predator 2 and Ghostbusters 2, all of which I saw at the Cataraqui. Maybe that place was cursed or something, I don’t know.
[4] A howler of a bit comes when striking police officers carry a wounded Robocop to safety, stepping over their discarded picket signs, is the apex level of social commentary we get here.
[5] This as per a story sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison once related about some advice the equally great Charles Beaumont gave him when he first landed in Hollywood; that achieving success in the movie business was like summiting an enormous mountain of cow shit to pluck a single perfect rose from its summit; by the time you reached that summit you’ve lost your sense of smell. Those in the production trenches clearly dealt with this stink first hand, notably so in a scene when Murphy’s original three Prime Directives are ballooned into a mind-numbing 300+. Number 262: “Avoid Orion Meetings”.
* That story is told in the Celluloid Heroes the book, which is still a work in progress. But if you promise to buy a copy let me know so I can print and convince publishers/agents okay?
