461. RoboCop (1987)

Starring: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Dan O’Herlihy

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Running Time: 102 mins

RoboCop is an American film about a future Detroit, where one police officer is brought back from being fatally wounded to become a cyborg, with prime directives to police the city, despite a small recollection of the horrors of his past life.

This film is just so cool! It may have one of the cheesiest and most American concepts ever in a film, but it had a fascinating story, brilliant action and characters, as well as really cool visual effects, especially on RoboCop.

I’ve got to start with the RoboCop himself. Obviously, his armour and his weapons were unbelievably cool, but the character was all the more fascinating. When you first meet him, he does seem very alien and emotionless, yet as he begins to remember his past life, he becomes a lot more human, making him a lot easier to sympathise with.

The supporting cast were also quite impressive. There was no actor and no character that was particularly irritating, as you could see each an everyone’s clear motives, separating the good from the bad, and making the film a lot more exciting and more fun to support certain characters.

Moving away from the action and the fun, this film really did have quite an unexpectedly dark tone to it. You’d expect this to be a sort of Star Trek atmosphere, where the technology is for the betterment of humankind, not a seemingly dark, dystopic premonition of the future like Blade Runner.

But that’s exactly what you get, with various messages within the film talking about the dangers of the use of technology in society, the dangers of the development of big business, and themes such as revenge and the moral aspects of policing.

As well as those particularly dark ideas, that really do make the film quite intriguing to watch, it’s the cinematography and dialogue that really step up that atmosphere. It’s almost as if nothing in this film happens in the day, making every thing more dark, and there’s a lot more adult language that make this film often seem all the more serious and dark than you’d think.

Overall, I’ll give this an 8.2, because as well as being really cool and action-packed, I was intrigued by its darker and more serious themes that change the atmosphere of this film from cheesy to fascinating.