Face-Off: Total Recall vs. RoboCop

Not too much depth to the plot in RoboCop, it’s a classic revenge tale albeit with a hero that has more resources to get the job done than most, but luckily for this film I dig the hell out of revenge flicks. A dedicated cop gets terrorized in the worst way possible and is preserved thanks to a giant corporations plans for the future. A story like this and its execution is the stuff great action movies are made of. Like Total Recall there are enough twists and turns to keep the proceedings interesting as we go along. I’d buy that for a dollar!

We’re pretty much served with everything we got in Recall for RoboCop. Almost straight away we get a chase scene complete with gunfights and flying bodies that all builds up to the massacre of Murphy, which is I must say all the brutality of Total Recall wrapped up into one. Short but sweet is the fight between Murphy and ED, but damn did ED go out like a chump in both exchanges. Of course we get explosions galore thanks to the military weaponry our baddies are provided with, have to say that gun was all kinds of badass. Bottom line it was a pure joy to watch RoboCop fuck shit up.

Rob Bottin worked on RoboCop before moving on to collaborate with Verhoeven again in Recall, so one can only imagine the brilliant work they pulled off here. From the design of RoboCop’s suit, to the wonderful stop motion animation for the ED-209, all the way to the make-up affects for Murphy’s destruction and one of our baddies confrontation with a tower of toxic waste. These are things that should have stuck in my mind as a kid when I watched it, but alas I needed a rewatch to fully appreciate it. The suit design while Weller is no longer wearing the mask is brilliance. Everything the effects team did for this film they carried over to Recall and got way more ambitious, and damn did it show.

I’m actually going to give the edge to RoboCop in the acting department, and I’ll tell you why. Peter Weller had a challenging role ahead of him by having to portray a machine that had his humanity stripped away from him. That said, he was able to add emotion to his role by mere gestures from his mouth. That’s talent. Other standouts are Miguel Ferrer and Kurtwood Smith and his gang of baddies. Everyone seemed to bring their A game for their roles here with Kurtwood in particular having a blast playing a crime boss. Only negative I have to report is one of the villains unbelievably annoying laugh.

RoboCop earned $8 million in its opening weekend making it the 16th highest earning film of 1987. The film has an approval rating of 88%, the general opinion calling out how gory the violence is while at the same time praising it as a “smart sci-fi flick that uses ultraviolence to disguise its satire of American culture.” It was nominated for Academy Awards in Best Editing and Best Sound, and won for Best Sound Effects Editing. British Director Ken Russell has called RoboCop the best science fiction film at the time since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Would you agree?

RoboCop is a revenge flick of the highest quality. We got a great hero, brutal violence, and over the top villains galore. It spawned several sequels, and a looming remake. As I said in regards to the Total Recall remake, I don’t see a RoboCop remake capturing the magic of a movie like this simply because we do things differently these days. I don’t think the complete carnage of Murphy will be as brutal, I don’t think the villains will be as pleasantly cartoonish. There is the cheesiness of an 80’s action flick, but it has this intensity that we don’t see any more and for that, like other old school action films of its time it holds a special place in my heart.