RoboCop (1987)

The year is 1987. Detroit is collapsing, the police department has been sold to a corporation, and the corporation has decided that a dead officer makes for a cheaper product than a living one. Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop presents this arrangement without outrage, which is what makes it sting. Omni Consumer Products owns the law, bills the city for it, and treats a murdered man as inventory. The satire aims squarely at the privatization of public services and the cheerful savagery of late-century American business. It is a sustained joke told with a straight face, punctuated by gunfire and advertisements for nonsense products.

The corporate critique carries most of the film's social weight, and it lands through comedy instead of sermonizing. The media breaks are the sharpest instrument in the box, a running gag about a news culture that has already surrendered. Elsewhere the film is content to be an action picture. Race is background texture; two Black authority figures appear, are competent, and are never asked to explain themselves. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no environmental lament, no meditation on body image, no engagement with neurodivergence, no rewriting of the historical record. The body here is a machine to be rebuilt or a sack to be shredded. That is the whole of its interest in flesh.

Nancy Allen's Anne Lewis is the closest thing to a progressive gesture on the personnel front. Verhoeven cut her hair short so the character would not be sexualized, and she is written as a capable partner who saves the hero twice. The film is not organized around her, though, and it never argues a case about gender. What remains is a lean, mean piece of pulp with an unusually bitter view of capital, made years before the current cultural vocabulary existed to describe it. It earns its marks where it earns them because it meant every cruel word about the boardroom, and nothing at all about the rest.