RoboCop (1987) Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. Starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Miguel Ferrer, and Kurtwood Smith.

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Let me start with my favorite story about the making of RoboCop.

In the middle of the 1980s, film producer Jon Davison, then working at Orion Studios, picked up a screenplay by two young screenwriters. Davison is the man who produced the films Airplane! (1980) and Top Secret! (1984), those gleefully over-the-top parodies that people of a certain generation (i.e., me and my siblings) still reference incessantly. Davison liked the satirical nature of this script that was titled RoboCop: The Future of Law Enforcement. At first, he and the studio intended Jonathan Kaplan to direct it. When the director he had in mind left to work on a different movie, Davison had to find another.

That proved to be rather difficult. The studio approached David Cronenberg (who, as far as I can tell, was offered every sci fi movie produced in the ’80s) and Alex Cox (director of Repo Man [1984]), but they both turned it down, and nobody else the studio considered was able to sign on. They started to think the movie would never get made.

Finally, one of the people at Orion, Barbara Boyle, suggested they send the script to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, with whom the studio had recently worked with on his first English-language film. The grim, gory historical Flesh and Blood (1985) had been a resolute failure, the kind of box-office bomb that makes a movie vanish from theaters almost as soon as it arrives. Screenwriter Michael Miner would later say, “[Edward Neumeier] and I were two of only a handful of people in the theater when we went to see it.” They, and everybody else, were more impressed by Verhoeven’s 1977 war film Soldier of Orange. The studio sent Neumeier and Miner’s screenplay to Verhoeven to see if he was interested.

Verhoeven read maybe one page of the script and threw it away. “I thought it was a piece of shit,” he would later say.

It was his wife, Martine Tours, who read through the script and persuaded him to reconsider. He listened to her, but he’s always been very frank about the fact that he didn’t get it at first. He didn’t understand the humor. He didn’t understand the satire. The title was too cheesy. The story was too American.

I love this bit of backstory for a couple of reasons. One small reason is that it’s hilarious to imagine Verhoeven chucking the screenplay away in disgust, not knowing that RoboCop would one day become his career-defining magnum opus.

The larger reason is about what happened next, which is that Verhoeven actually read the screenplay to figure out what he was missing. He looked for the character hooks his wife had seen. He asked Neumeier and Miner to explain the politics, the satire, the humor. He didn’t understand why they wanted the movie to be darkly funny instead of serious, so Neumeier gave him a pile of comic books, including Judge Dredd; Verhoeven dutifully read through them to understand out what tone the screenwriters were going for.

In a 2017 interview, Miner said, “Ed and I were the luckiest screenwriters in the decade of the ’80s.”

He’s got a point. It’s more or less taken as fact in the film industry that the screenwriter stops mattering once a director signs on to a project, and the film that gets made will be a reflection of the director’s vision. It’s vanishingly rare to hear about a director putting so much effort into crafting a film that is exactly what the screenwriters want it to be.

I also feel like if we surveyed people, just in general, and asked them to name movies that are screenwriter-driven rather than director-driven, most would probably come up with serious, dialogue-heavy dramas. Most would probably not name an ultraviolent ’80s sci fi satire that features a man’s skin gruesomely melting off after he crashes into a giant tank helpfully labeled “TOXIC WASTE.”

So let’s go back to the beginning: RoboCop was born because Neumeier and Miner loved robots and really fucking hated Ronald Reagan.

In the early ’80s Neumeier was a film school graduate working as a story analyst at Columbia Pictures, reading scripts in a trailer on the lot Columbia shared with Warner Brothers. He was captivated by what was going on outside his window. “…Next door was this giant street they built, suddenly, which is a lovely thing to behold in and of itself,” he said in a 2014 interview. “It was for a big science-fiction movie called Blade Runner, and I never had seen anything like it.”

Neumeier marched over to the Blade Runner set to do some work on the film during the night shift, and it was Blade Runner’s replicants that gave him the idea for a robot policeman. The corporate side of the story came from his experience of working at MCA and watching studio execs interact with legendary media mogul Lew Wasserman; Wasserman was the blueprint for “The Old Man” (Daniel O’Herlihy), the chief executive of Omni Consumer Products in RoboCop. Neumeier wanted to skewer the macho, worshipful culture of corporate America in the ’80s. He later said, “Everybody was walking around in the ’80s talking about ‘corporate raiders’ and ‘killers’ and how business was for tough guys. I just thought that was absurd.”

Around the same time, Neumeier made the acquaintance of Miner, who was working as a cinematographer and directing music videos for Bay Area metal bands. They began talking about their projects and discovered that they both loved robot stories as much as they both hated Ronald Reagan. In the 2014 oral history published in Esquire, Miner makes the film’s political and economic intent about as clear as can be: “Because we were in the midst of the Reagan era, I always characterize RoboCop as comic relief for a cynical time. Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys ransacked the world, enabled by Reagan and the CIA.”

Both of them were absolutely determined to keep the movie set in Detroit, because Detroit was the city that best exemplified the politics of the story. Neumeier specifically cites Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam’s 1986 book The Reckoning, which details the decline of the American auto industry, as one of his inspirations while writing. The characterization of Detroit as a crime-ridden hellscape is deliberately mocking the so-called “law and order” politics of the era. As Miner explained it, “That is a cop trope, right? ‘Crime was out of control, blah, blah, blah.’ It’s a very Republican idea.” (The film might be set in Detroit, but it was mostly filmed in Dallas, with a few scenes serving as notable exceptions. Such are the whims of the movie business.)

With that’s ’80s context in mind, RoboCop takes us to a science fictional near future. According to Neumeier, Verhoeven wanted the future to look more like Blade Runner, but producer Jon Davison basically said, ha, no, we can’t afford that. So it’s an unspecified future in which “Old Detroit” is overrun with crime and drugs, and the city’s police department has been privatized and is now run by a mega-corporation called Omni Consumer Products. As the company’s Senior Vice President Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) observes at one of the most iconic board meetings ever put to film, “You see that we’ve gambled in markets traditionally regarded as non-profit. Hospitals. Prisons. Space exploration.”

Jones delivers this line just before introducing his newest innovation: the ED-209, a police robot that he wants to deploy to clean up Old Detroit. Of course, nobody in that boardroom actually cares about crime. They want to empty the city so they can embark on a massive (and massively profitable) real estate development project.

The ED-209 was designed by Phil Tippett, the man behind the AT-AT Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and built by Craig Hayes (credited as Craig Davies). Due to budget limitations, Tippett went completely old school in animating the robot’s motion; he used Ray Harryhausen’s Dynamation technique and filmed it using the older widescreen VistaVision film format. That’s why ED-209 has that halting, janky movement that makes it look so unsettling when it’s first introduced.

Jones instructs doomed junior executive Kinney (Kevin Page) to take a gun and threaten ED-209. We know the demonstration is going to go badly, and it does, in an outrageously over-the-top way. The scene is pure, bloody, pitch-black comedy, with the culminating moment being somebody shouting for a paramedic and the ambitious Bob Morton (played by the wonderful Miguel Ferrer) seizing the moment to pitch his own pet project to the company head.

Morton’s project is RoboCop: an experimental cyborg police officer. First, Morton needs a dead human cop, however—so he has helpfully transferred some officers from less dangerous parts of the city into the worst neighborhood in hopes of getting a fresh donor body. One of those unlucky transfers is Officer Murphy (Peter Weller), an ordinary cop with a wife and kid who just wants to do his job. Murphy and his new partner, Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), are out on patrol when they get a call about an armed robbery. They chase a group of criminals led by Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) to an abandoned steel mill. The criminal gang captures Murphy and tortures him to death in a scene so gruesome the MPAA gave the first several cuts of the film an X rating.

(Those parts, and the climactic scene, were filmed in a defunct Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel mill in Monessen, Pennsylvania, which has since been demolished. I’ve never watched RoboCop with my dad, who worked for Wheeling Steel at a different mill when he was young, but if I ever do, I’m sure he’ll helpfully identify every part of the mill that he can.)

But Omni Consumer Products isn’t done with Murphy, so he’s brought back to life with his memory wiped and his body replaced by a machine. We see this resurrection from his point of view, with confusing glimpses of memories for which he has no context. There’s a grimly funny moment when the scientists and doctors say they can save his remaining arm, but Morton berates them for caring about preserving the human when they can replace every part with machines.

The RoboCop suit was built by special effects artist Rob Bottin. We’ve talked about his work before in this column; he’s the one who got his start working on the cantina clientele in Star Wars (1977), then went on to craft The Thing in The Thing (1982) and the mutant make-up in Total Recall (1990). That suit was apparently something of a problem for everybody. Verhoeven and Neumeier wanted something more “sensational,” Bottin had to try to make their impossible ideas work, and Weller was miserable the whole time he was wearing the contraption, because it took six and a half hours to put on the face and head prosthetic, and another hour and a half to put on the suit. By all accounts, including their own, Verhoeven and Weller came very close to strangling each other on set, but they also say they made up before it was over.

(Note: There is a lot of information out there about the making of RoboCop, because it was a film that attracted industry interest even while it was in production. The Cinefantastique article from December 1987 is a very detailed contemporary account. As a bonus, that same issue contains a piece wondering if the brand-new show Star Trek: The Next Generation could possibly be any good.)

When Omni Consumer Products debuts its cyborg cop, RoboCop is at first a success for the company, as he struts around the city stopping assaults and robberies. This sequence is punctuated by one of the film’s amazing interludes of evening news clips; news broadcaster Mario Machado and Entertainment Tonight host Leeza Gibbons play the anchors. The news is a litany of apocalyptic horrors, delivered in chipper evening news style, complete with a commercial that shows a family playing the fun new boardgame “Nukem,” in which they try to defeat each other in nuclear warfare.

But RoboCop’s successful patrols don’t last. One of Boddicker’s henchmen (played by Paul McCrane) and Officer Lewis both recognize Murphy, and their recognition triggers confusing memories that send him looking for who he used to be. That leads him to the old Murphy home, now unoccupied and up for sale. He remembers a little about his wife and son as he’s walking around the detritus of their life together, but it’s a distant recognition, the kind of disconnected memories that frustrate him and provide no catharsis.

That’s the scene that convinced Verhoeven to make the movie, even when he was skeptical about the rest of it. It’s the scene he paid attention to when his wife told him he was focusing too much on the outward trappings of the film and not enough on the soul.

I can see why that would draw him in, but I think what’s really interesting about that scene is that it does not lead to Murphy regaining his memories or reuniting with his family or reconciling his past life with his current existence. It doesn’t fix anything. There’s no catharsis. When he talks to Lewis about it later, he says that he can feel the loss of his family, but he can’t actually remember them.

The rest of the movie is a flurry of action: RoboCop discovers that Boddicker is working for Jones, because of course he is; Jones has Boddicker blow up Morton as part of their corporate dick-measuring contest. RoboCop apprehends Boddicker, but he can’t do the same with Jones because he is programmed to keep his hands off the company executives. (That is a very on-the-nose metaphor for law enforcement working to protect wealthy criminals at the expense of everybody else, but it’s one that has only become more relevant over time.)

Jones sends ED-209 and a bunch of cops to kill RoboCop, but he escapes with the help of Officer Lewis. Boddicker and his henchmen track Murphy and Lewis to the abandoned steel mill and there is a big, messy fight. None of the criminals survive that encounter.

And, yes, Rob Bottin also did the toxic waste/melting face special effects on actor Paul McCrane—do you even need to ask? If we all take nothing else away from this film club, let us all cherish our hard-earned ability to recognize Rob Bottin’s special effects when they explode all over the front of cars in a gory mess of fake blood and chicken soup.

From that point onward, it’s relatively straightforward to dispatch Jones. Murphy’s final act in the film is to reclaim his name. Does that make it a happy ending? Not exactly. The world hasn’t changed. The corporation is still in control. The city is still in chaos, violence is still the norm, and rich men are still profiting from it. The company still owns RoboCop. His family is still gone. His tragedy is not undone.

Much like Total Recall, it’s only a happy ending if you don’t think about it. Once you start thinking about it, all the fridge horror returns and you can’t escape how incredibly bleak it is.

Only onscreen, though. Off screen, for the people who made the movie, it was very much a happy ending, because the movie was a wild success. It made a ton of money at the American box office and even more money when it was released internationally on VHS. The character of RoboCop became an indelible part of American pop culture. There are sequels and remakes (I’ve never seen them) and video games (never played them) and comic book appearances (never read them). RoboCop has never gone away.

As for the screenwriters: Neumeier went on to make Starship Troopers (1997) with Verhoeven. Miner also did more screenwriting after RoboCop, but he is now a landscape photographer and writing teacher.

We can’t separate RoboCop from its politics, although people have certainly tried, many in ways that will make you admire their mental gymnastics. A fun and edifying thing to do is to search for what self-proclaimed RoboCop fans say about the movie on Reddit. You may encounter some of the wildest media interpretation known to humankind!

It’s not quite the same situation as They Live (1988), where there is a critical effort to repurpose the film for politics completely counter to the movie itself. It’s more that a great many people who still love RoboCop today saw it when they were quite young, and naturally didn’t pick up on the satire, and aren’t quite sure what to make of the film now.

It’s been thirty-nine years and we live in a world in which all the things RoboCop is commenting on are now depressingly normalized: The militarization of police and justification of extrajudicial police violence. The privatization of public services into for-profit industries. The idea that any public-serving part of society should ever be run by people who want to be rich. The fundamental sociopathy of corporate America. The histrionic fear regularly drummed up about crime-ridden urban centers. Rich old men ranting about sending armies into cities to clean them up. None of that ever went anywhere. We don’t need movies to show us government agents shooting people in the streets. It’s on the news right now.

I don’t have a pithy conclusion to this article. I read it over, trying to think of a way to end it, then went up to change the headline. It used to specify “1980s America.” But that’s letting us off the hook too easily.

RoboCop is a great movie. It’s smart and vicious and funny in the darkest, bleakest way. I love it. I’m glad I’ve rewatched it and researched its origins as an adult, with a lot more knowledge and perspective than I ever had as a kid.

But I also wish it hadn’t remained so relevant.

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What do you think of RoboCop and its place among the great sci fi political satires to come out of the ’80s? What about the sequels and the more recent remake? There is so more lore about this film… it could fill an entire book, and there is no way I could write about all of it, so I’m sure I’ve left out some interesting tidbits.[end-mark]

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You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

We’ve watched a number of movies about alien invasions, both successful and failed, but what happens when it’s not an invasion? What happens when it’s just an individual or a small group who finds themselves on Earth and now must figure out how to survive? That’s the theme of the films we’re watching in February.

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The post <i>RoboCop</i>: A Glorious, Scathing Satire of America appeared first on Reactor.

News item #1:

Trump on Omar: "She's always talking about 'the Constitution provides me w/ the following.' She comes from a country that's a disaster. It's not even a country. They're good at one thing – pirates. But they don't do that anymore bc they get same treatment from us as the drug dealers. Boom Boom Boom"

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) Jan 27, 2026 at 3:13 PM

News item #2:

 A man sprayed an unknown substance on Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar and was tackled to the ground Tuesday during a town hall she was hosting in Minneapolis, where tensions over federal immigration enforcement have come to a head after agents fatally shot an intensive care nurse and a mother of three this month.

The audience cheered as the man, who was wearing a black jacket and holding a syringe, was pinned down and his arms were tied behind his back. In video of the incident, someone in the crowd can be heard saying, “Oh my god, he sprayed something on her.”

Somehow, I don’t think Trump is going to respond to this by toning down the rhetoric. Really impressive the way Omar stepped up to that asshole, though.

The post The Theory and the Praxis appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Pretti was a licensed, law-abiding gun owner, registered nurse, and worked at a veteran's hospital.

A person holding a passport and suitcase has a hand on their head like they have a bad headache.

On Saturday, January 24, an ICE agent murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Five agents tackled and beat him, then an agent shot him multiple times. Video footage from multiple angles confirms that the agent shot Pretti after he had been disarmed. Immediately following the murder, the Whittier neighborhood rose up and battled ICE, Minnesota police, and Minnesota State Troopers for over four hours, eventually forcing them to withdraw.

This murder occurred one day after a historic general strike in which more than 100,000 workers in the Twin Cities walked out against the ICE occupation. Many people in the streets expressed the opinion that the federal agents murdered Alex as an act of revenge for the strike.

Once again, we note the role that local and state police play in enabling ICE to continue murdering with impunity. Democrat politicians have expressed disapproval of ICE tactics, but they and the police who supposedly answer to them have yet to do anything concrete to stop federal agents from terrorizing, abducting, and murdering.

The following is an eyewitness account from an anarchist in Minneapolis.

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I woke up at 9:15 this morning to my phone buzzing over and over. The first text I saw read, “URGENT FROM WHIT/UPT IN FRONT OF GLAM DOLL DONUTS: Someone has been shot by ICE.” I groggily squirted some caffeine syrup into my water bottle as I processed this information. I threw on five layers of clothes, a pair of goggles, and a mask, called in sick to my job, and rushed to the scene.

When I got there, there was already yellow crime scene tape up around a three-block stretch of 26th Street. Masked ICE and Border Patrol officers guarded the perimeter, armed with shotguns and pepper spray cans. An ambulance was still there. A crowd circled around the crime scene tape, but did not cross it. A friend recognized me in the crowd and patted me on the shoulder. Someone told me the victim was dead. One person was weeping. Most people were cursing at the feds. An old woman was shouting “You are going to hell!” in the face of a Border Patrol stormtrooper. He was threatening her with a can of pepper spray.

Behind us, on 1st Avenue, three people started rolling a dumpster into the street. An ICE agent fired a tear gas grenade at them. My friend and I started running south on 1st Avenue to get away from the gas. We turned right, then right again onto Nicollet Avenue, bringing us to Nicollet and 26th, where ICE had murdered the man hardly half an hour before. There was a much bigger crowd here facing off against a skirmish line of feds. We recognized another friend of ours and ran up to them.

Just then, we heard the loud crack of flash-bang grenades being fired maybe two or three blocks northwest of us. “We’ll take my car,” our friend yelled. He was parked right there on Nicollet. We piled into his car and he flipped a U-turn and sped away from the ICE agents. We made a few turns and ended up at 25th and Blaisdell.

There was a line of MPD Riot Squad cops at the far end, closer to Nicollet. I recognized them by their yellow vests. Between us and the pigs, closer to Blaisdell, a group of people were building a barricade out of dumpsters, trash cans, cinderblocks, and wooden pallets. We heard the ubiquitous call-and-response chants of “FUCK ICE, ICE OUT!” People drummed on the trash cans along to the beat. Someone was sprinkling what appeared to be home-made caltrops in front of the barricade.

As we approached the barricade, people in the crowd started rolling the dumpsters forward toward the police line. Somebody lit one of them on fire. One man was shouting at us, futilely trying to peace-police the crowd, but no one wanted to hear it. A few people promptly escorted him away. Flames engulfed the burning dumpster. People rolled that one forward too.

The police started shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. Their aim was not particularly good. This was the first time this year that I’ve seen them use rubber bullets rather than pepper balls or gas. The crowd fell back, and the cops charged forward and overtook our barricade. Three of them tackled and arrested one person near me, slamming her to the pavement. I yelled and turned back for a second, but instantly choked on the tear gas and was forced to fall back towards Blaisdell. Some people were chucking glass bottles and chunks of ice at the cops as they retreated.

The crowd pulled more trash cans from the alleys and quickly began building another barricade further back. I had lost track of the person I had driven there with, but soon I found another person I knew. Some began shouting for people to fall back west on 26th and keep building barricades. This ad hoc strategy caught on. People ran down the street leaving trash cans and tires behind them, creating a series of small barricades as the cops advanced.

A woman was watching from her porch. Someone ran up and addressed her: “Ma’am, we’re out here defending the neighborhood against ICE. We need barricade materials. Is there anything in your yard you wouldn’t mind parting with?” She nodded urgently and showed them to her backyard, offering a flower bed, an old couch, and a lawn chair. Three people helped to carry these out and add them to the barricades.

While this game of cat-and-mouse progressed, Signal messages arrived from others who were holding down a different barricade three blocks away, on Nicollet on the south side of the intersection. Our crowd was facing off against MPD, but theirs was facing off against ICE. My friend and I decided to join them. We cut through a series of alleys until we came out on 27th Street.

We ran left onto the stretch of Nicollet full of restaurants that locals know as “Eat Street.” There was a much bigger crowd there standing behind a barricade made mostly of wooden pallets. A skirmish line of ICE and CBP officers stood on the opposite side. We could see the fear in their eyes. It felt good.

No sooner did we approach the barricade than ICE opened fire with tear gas. I’m not a stranger to tear gas, but they fired more than I’ve ever seen. Noxious white clouds enveloped us. My lungs felt like they were burning. Somebody picked up a canister and threw it back. We stampeded south on Nicollet to get out. When I turned to look behind me through the gas clouds, I saw ICE SUVs and a Bearcat armored car leaving the scene, headed east toward the highway.

We ran down to 1st street, where I’d started out, to try to catch the agents as they retreated. We turned and ran north back up to 26th. People were peppering their cars with rocks and ice chunks as they drove off toward the 35W on-ramp. They fired more tear gas and green smoke out of the vehicles as they fled onto the highway.

After people chased off the ICE agents, we returned to 26th and Nicollet from the east. A huge number of state troopers were lined up on one end of 26th, facing the protesters on the other side. They had an LRAD on top of a Bearcat. One of the cops was reading a dispersal warning over a loudspeaker.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” one person shouted back.

“TRAITORS!” screamed someone else.

The state troopers launched a barrage of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at us. Someone threw a powerful firecracker back at them. It exploded at their feet.

The crowd hurried back and turned left onto another street. Everyone was exhausted from a long morning of activity; many were starting to move more slowly. I saw the state trooper vehicles speeding away through their own cloud of tear gas, just as the ICE agents had done. It took me a minute to realize that they were gone.

I ducked out of the ongoing protest. It was high time to buy a real gas mask. I went to a hardware store and picked up a big pack of hand-warmers to give out to the crowd. It wasn’t until my adrenalin eased up that I realized I hadn’t eaten yet. I was famished.

I returned to the site of the murder about 45 minutes later. A massive crowd of well over 1000 people had gathered, filling up a whole city block. It reminded me unmistakably of George Floyd Square. The block that was once Eat Street had transformed into Alex Pretti Square.

It appeared that all the little barricades that the people of Whittier had erected had been relocated here, blocking off Nicollet at both ends. People sat on top of dumpsters, drumming on the lids. The crowd looked more racially diverse than I’d ever seen that neighborhood before. A Mexican flag was waving near the middle of the crowd.

A young woman produced a PA system in the middle of the crowd. Everybody circled around it as people took turns making speeches.

A young man took the mic. He couldn’t have been more than 20.

“Y’ALL. NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US. WE MADE HISTORY YESTERDAY. WE WENT ON GENERAL STRIKE. WE SHUT DOWN THIS WHOLE FUCKING CITY. THAT’S THE BEST WEAPON THE PEOPLE HAVE, WE’RE THE ONES WHO MAKE THE WORLD RUN AND WE’RE THE ONES WHO CAN MAKE IT STOP. BUT ONE DAY’S NOT ENOUGH. WE GOTTA KEEP IT GOING INTO MONDAY.”

The crowd broke out into thunderous applause, cheering and drumming rhythmically on the dumpster lids.

The young man started a chant: “NO MORE MINNESOTA NICE! MONDAY MINNESOTA STRIKE!”

It echoed across the square.

The ICE invasion of the Twin Cities has long since passed the point of no return. It is unthinkable that society could return to “normal” after what we have seen and felt. The powers that be know very well that they have to play for keeps now. So do we.

Today, at the Battle of Whittier, even through the tear gas, we could taste a softer, gentler future to come. These federal murderers know it, too. We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.