RoboCop (1987)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1987
	Director: Paul Verhoeven (Hollow Man, Starship Troopers, Total Recall)
	Actors: Peter Weller (Screamers, The Naked Lunch, Sons of Anarchy TV-series, Star Trek Into Darkness), Nancy Allen (Blow Out, Dressed to Kill), Dan O'Herlihy, Ronny Cox (Deliverance), Ray Wise (X-Men: First Class, Rosewood Lane), Paul McCrane (The Blob, E.R. TV-series)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action
	Conditions of visioning: 18.01.2016, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: In a future Detroit, the police force has been pivatised to the OCP company which objective is to deploy robotic cops on the streets. Agent Murphy (Weller) is transferred to a dangerous precinct.
Review: It is when reviewing the 2014 remake Robocop by José Padilha that I realized that the original from Paul Verhoeven was not yet on JoRafCinema, meaning I hadn't seen in in more than three years. This was unacceptable and I quickly acquired the recently released Blu-ray edition which making was supervised by the director himself. I can first say that this edition is beautiful: I had never seen such details in the images and in the colors when watching this movie before. I noticed in particular the detailed shades of brown and rust in the abandoned factory that we see several time throughout the movie, a very well-chosen set. The close-up shots on Robocop allow us to much better appreciate the acting of Peter Weller and the quality of the armored suit prop. I was amazed by the make-up worn by Weller when he removes the helmet (that took 6 hours to put on every day) making his head half-human and half robotic. Even 30 years after and looking with Blu-ray resolution doesn't make this effect look old or cheap. The sound is quite good as well although I found the action scenes too loud compared to the rest (dialogs) so that I had to adjust the volume in order to avoid waking up the neighbours. The movie in itself is as I remembered it: deliciously twisted and satirical, generously violent and bloody, and in the end totally B. It is one of the movies that shaped in the 80's and 90's my taste in cinema for the years to come. The fact that the bad guys are not scared of anything (getting caught, dying, killing their comrades) makes them very scary and this culminates after 15 minutes of movie when they corner the poor agent Murphy. For me that scene is so horrible (a feeling reinforced by the screams of Murphy and the sadistic laughs of the bad guys) that it couldn't be shown in a movie nowadays. Also the approach of starting a movie with the total destruction of the hero is pretty daring. I was probably too young when I first saw it... I was criticizing the way RoboCop quickly takes the path of solving his own crime in the recent remake, but I now realized that the same thing was already in the original, maybe in a way that I found better incorporated with the rest of the movie. Another element that participate in giving such a great atmosphere to the movie is the music by Basil Poledouris, which is for me the second best soundtrack he ever wrote, between the ones of Conan the Barbarian for John Milius and Starship Troopers for the same Verhoeven. And of course the satyre is onmipresent in the way the OCP company is treating people against profit, the way newspeople announce tragic events, their interruption by commercials or the stupid TV shows people are watching. I love it all.
Rating: 9 /10