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RoboCop (1987) is one of the stranger cultural objects of the 20th century, in that Paul Verhoeven made it as a savage self-critical parody of 80s action films and it became a beloved 80s action film, which he apparently found hilarious — so hilarious that he ran the same experiment twice more: Total Recall (1990), a film about corporate colonialism and implanted memory that audiences received as a terrific Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie, and Starship Troopers (1997), a film about fascist propaganda that audiences received as a fun bug-shooting spectacle. The three form an informal trilogy — not by plot or characters, but by shared preoccupation: futures run by corporations and governments so powerful they don't need to hide their ugliness, only repackage it, and the humans who live inside those systems and mistake the packaging for the thing. Verhoeven, as far as anyone can tell, has never stopped laughing. If you want to argue that he is one of the most interesting directors of American genre film, you'd have a strong case: here is a Dutch filmmaker who moved to Hollywood and proceeded to critique American culture by giving Americans exactly what they wanted, at full blast, with a knowing smirk they mostly didn't catch.
But the satirical reading, while correct, is not actually the most interesting thing about RoboCop. The most interesting thing is that RoboCop is a movie about wizards.
Wizards have magic, don't they — and technology in this film functions exactly like magic, in that Verhoeven never explains it, you never learn how OCP builds a cyborg police officer or how the neural interface works or what any of it costs, and you are expected to accept it as given because that is precisely how magic works. The wizard raises his staff and you don't audit the metaphysics; the effect is real, the mechanics are opaque, and the point is the consequence. The 80s had a particular gift for this: future technology in that decade's films arrived pre-polished, already chrome, already corporate-branded, belonging to the world before you got there. In RoboCop, this technological magic sits entirely in the hands of one entity — the Omni Consumer Products Corporation, which is in the process of purchasing the city of Detroit, which is the kind of sentence that probably should have set off more alarm bells at the time.
Which brings us to the second kind of magic in this film, and the more interesting one, which is that OCP doesn't take over Detroit with force — it takes over Detroit with rules. The corporation has contracts and clauses and board resolutions and reorganization agreements, and when it acquires the city's police department, it does so through legal machinery so dense and self-referential that it becomes functionally indistinguishable from an arcane spell — the kind that fills three scrolls in small script and leaves you transformed before you've finished reading. The law is the highest-order magic in this film; it moves slower than a pulse-round from an ED-209, but it governs more absolutely, and unlike ED-209, it actually works.
Dick Jones understands this, which is what makes him the film's primary villain and, in the precise metaphorical sense, a master wizard — though his magic is not the physical kind, since he's not out in the streets and doesn't pull a trigger himself, preferring to subcontract his violence to Clarence Boddicker, the crime boss whose operation Jones enables and protects in exchange for services rendered. Jones operates in boardrooms. His weapons are directives, including the one he hides inside RoboCop.
The four directives programmed into Alex Murphy — the slain cop whose body and neural residue become OCP's flagship law-enforcement product — are presented as perfectly reasonable: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law, the sort of instructions that sound like they came from a civics textbook, which is the point, which is to make Murphy sound like a policeman rather than a product. The fourth directive is classified and does not appear in any user-facing documentation, and what it says is this: RoboCop cannot arrest or harm a senior officer of OCP.
Jones has created, inside the most powerful law enforcement entity in Detroit, a legal immunity for himself — which is, when you think about it, a fairly elegant piece of work for a man who also greenlit ED-209, a robot that murdered a junior executive in a boardroom presentation and was somehow still considered a viable product. Murphy knows, by the end of the second act, that Jones ordered his murder and is running a criminal empire and is the obstacle standing between Detroit and anything resembling justice, and Murphy has full knowledge, full capability, and exactly zero recourse, because the moment he attempts to act, Directive 4 activates and he seizes up and cannot proceed.
This is the actual dramatic crisis of RoboCop, and it's more interesting than any of the action sequences, because Murphy isn't constrained by weakness or firepower or anything physical — he's constrained by a rule, a legal text written in advance by a man who understood that rules are the highest magic and that the law is precisely what makes the seemingly invulnerable, nearly-immortal enforcement machine stand helpless in a hallway, knowing everything and able to do nothing.
In the climax, Jones takes the Old Man — OCP's founder and CEO — hostage in the boardroom, RoboCop enters, and the situation is precisely engineered: Murphy has the knowledge, has the capability, and is frozen by the binding, which Jones has presumably been quite pleased with himself about for some time.
And then the Old Man speaks — not to negotiate, not to appeal, not to explain, but to invoke a counterspell that requires exactly two words.
Dick. You're fired.
In that instant, Jones is no longer a senior officer of OCP, has no position or title or legal standing within the organization that wrote the Directive, and so the clause dissolves, the binding lifts, Murphy's targeting system completes its acquisition, and Jones goes through the window — which is a very long way down from OCP headquarters, as it turns out. The master wizard prevails, not through superior firepower but because someone with authority over the rules rewrote them, performing a single clean legal act that neither ED-209's cannons nor Boddicker's entire gang had managed across the preceding ninety minutes. He fires the man. The man goes out the window. Justice is served.
Murphy saves the day. But what saves Murphy is HR.
Verhoeven plays the whole resolution as absurdist comedy — the Old Man is delighted, visibly tickled that this worked, and you can't entirely blame him — and that's the point, because the movie has spent its entire runtime demonstrating that technological magic, institutional magic, and criminal magic all operate at roughly the same level of moral authority and are all fundamentally in service of whoever controls them, so what resolves it is not heroism or violence but a bureaucratic utterance by an old man in a suit who controls the relevant paperwork.
There is something underneath all of this worth sitting with, though. Beneath the chrome and the satire and the wizard-systems is a genuine tragedy about memory and identity and loss, and when I first saw this film — I was a preteen, and the scene where Boddicker's gang shoots Murphy's hand off and laughs while he bleeds out was one of the most disturbing things I'd encountered — what hit me wasn't the action but the second act, where Murphy, now armor-plated and legally owned, starts having flashes he can't explain: a kitchen, a child's face, a woman's laugh, things he doesn't know what to do with except understand that they were his and that they're gone. Nancy Allen, as his former partner Anne Lewis, plays every scene with such precise human warmth that her interactions with the reconstructed Murphy become quietly devastating — two people trying to locate one person who isn't quite there anymore, in a film nominally about a robot shooting people in parking garages.
Verhoeven shoots all of it with the same flat, punchy visual grammar he brings to the action, so the emotion arrives alongside the mayhem, neither underlined nor apologized for, and it's in the gap between those two registers — the bombastic and the intimate — that the film actually lives.
RoboCop is a movie about wizards, and the technology-magic and the law-magic and the institutional-magic are the forces that shape Murphy's world, take his life, reconstruct him, and imprison him in his own chassis — but what frees him, at the end, isn't magic at all. It's a decision by one human being to hold another accountable, delivered in the form of a termination notice.
The spells were impressive. The firings more so.
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