the thinking man's action film
So I guess it turns out that even among my friends I'm the only one who sees Paul Verhoeven's 1987 RoboCop as nothing short of classic. Everybody enjoyed it, thoroughly, but I see it as one of the best of its era.
The script is tight -- each scene moves the story along, contributes to the overall themes, and develops the characters. And not a scene is wasted, especially in the first act where there's a lot to cover. We spend the whole first act of this film with a protagonist who, in a sense, doesn't matter to us. We know he's meat. You've got to make us like a guy and know a guy enough that when he dies and is reborn, we not only root for his reanimated, cybernetically enhanced corpse, but we actually root for that corpse to reunite with that first guy, the hot young stud with the curly blonde hair. We have to want RoboCop to retrieve his identity and his memory and his sense of self, even though as moviegoers we're really just watching all this Officer Alex Murphy stuff because we're excited for the Frankenstein's Monster he's going to become -- and the writers know it.
In the 80s and early 90s there was a sort of hot subgenre, the Venn diagram crossover of gory action with dystopian sci-fi, a category that's since been slightly marginalized as "fun but silly," I think. But there are those that hit hard on the action and soft on the commentary (Predator, Demolition Man, Sixth Day, I'd even throw in I, Robot and The Island) and those that hit hard on the commentary but light on the action (Terminal Man, Westworld, going back to Logan's Run or Planet of the Apes). I don't think it's a coincidence that the latter films tend to come out of the late 70s and early 80s and the ones who hit too hard on the action side come later, starting in the late 80s and pretty much swallowing whole the sci-fi/action genre by the 00s. But there was a period in the middle there where an unusual balance of thoughtfulness and hard-hitting action lived side by side, in such films as Running Man, the first two Terminator movies, Alien, and Verhoeven's trilogy: RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers.
I think the Verhoeven Trilogy is the pinnacle of this, honestly, because they are so self-conscious of the gap they are bridging and so willing to have fun playing in that strange open space between low and high brow sci-fi expectations. On a scene-by-scene basis, the films seem to ask, Is this serious? Is this fun? Is this exciting? Is this provocative? Should you laugh? Should you cringe? It's silly, right? But don't you think we know that?
They know you're going to laugh at the violence, the acting, the datedness, the effects. Don't think so? In RoboCop, not long after we are meant to "marvel" at the stopmotiontastic performance of the ED-209 we cut to a horrible, claymationesque dinosaur in a tacky television commercial, with pointedly amateur cutaways of people reacting to the less-than-impressive monster: a blatant exaggeration of the ED-209 sequence. Likewise in Starship Troopers, we continually intercut what feels like heavyhanded fascistic scenes of military violence and war-machine-worship with really baldfaced political propaganda videos; clearly the filmmakers know what they appear to be endorsing. Other filmmakers who use this tongue-in-cheek "we're in on the joke" defense are the team of Parker and Stone, who open Team America with a shitty marionette show, and who bring Terence and Philip into the world of South Park as a way of mocking their own basement aesthetic and cheap animation techniques.
And like Parker and Stone, Verhoeven knows his audience. I think he knows that we not only can reconcile unredeemable violence and bloodthirsty action with thoughtful commentary and mindbending existential plots, but we like it, and we want to do so. There is an audience for the thinking man's action film. I think Verhoeven saw something at work in the films leading up to his trilogy, the crossover between science fiction and horror or science fiction and action; I think he saw that you could make a good film if you strike the right balance between thoughtful and violent, rather than pandering to one or the other too heavily.
I have made the argument before -- for the strange crossovers of action and comedy (everything from Romancing the Stone to Ghostbusters to Weekend at Bernie's) -- that the 80s were an unusual time in the history of American cinema, perhaps in art in general, where the decadence and youngblood-mentality of the 70s had given way to a different kind of decadence in the "me" generation of the 80s, and the result is, we just embraced absurdity with conviction. You didn't have to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek to make a movie like TeenWolf, you didn't have to apologize for scripts like Twins: you just made the movie, and you made the action exciting and the humor fun. The same mentality seemed to be at work where sci-fi and action crossbred. The results? Not just totally awesome (because they were that, definitely), but transcendent. Movies that excite and scare and thrill, and make points and have messages and say things about the world?
Yes, please.
To be fair, there are plenty of examples today where this all comes together and works, but never with quite the absurdity and energy that we had in that heyday of the late 80s and early 90s.
Michael Bays and Tony Scotts of the world, please take note: it can be done. (And The Island didn't do it.)