So Robocop is a pretty decent movie. Let’s break it down here:
80’s Action Movie/Paul Verhoeven standbys:
- Gritty urban dystopia filled with cocaine and privatized services
- More cocaine
- Titties
- A gun that creates explosions
- Recontextualizing of corporate-takeover lingo in an action setting
There are some clever touches in Robocop though. Partially revealing the character in the first-person sequences through the video monitor, interjection of news segments to establish the universe (they probably could have been more outright satirical, though “Nukem” is pretty brilliant). I kind of appreciate the 80’s movie mentality where you can create an ultraviolent action flick without any sense of irony or self-awareness while at the same time putting in ham-fisted social commentary. Robocop is never really telling us to laugh at how stupid the concept is nor does it break the fourth wall and manipulate the audience at all. There’s something delightfully amateurish about it all. Modern action films tend to be run through an algorithm crafted by (pardon the phrasing) an army of robotic focus testers. It seems today every hit, every explosion, every line feels perfectly framed and timed to make people gasp and laugh and overstimualate easily-excitable bloggers.
I mean, in a greater context movies like Robocop are the reason we can have movies like that today, but early on here there’s still a rough-around-the-edges quality to it. It’s as if the conceptual aspect of each scene was more important than the execution itself. “Yeah, this giant robot is going to shoot a guy a bunch of times and he’s going to fall back onto a drink tray”, instead of “Yeah he’s going to fire in time with the beat of the soundtrack we have licensed through Juno Reactor on top of the tray full of SMIRNOFF (TM) drinks while the frame is divided between a shot of his face and a continuous 360-degree take of the entire room.” There’s something mechanical about action movie creation, but a lot of 80’s and early 90’s stuff (I’m thinking Aliens) feels different by comparison. Most post-Matrix action films feel like kung-fu movies, they’re continually getting crazier and crazier and more complex in a smooth gradient, where the earlier ones are more like big mechanical setpieces that are clumsily transitioned to and from. There’s a sense with every action scene in Robocop that the movie could end right when its over. There’s a big explosion, a death, some sort of climax that brings a sense of finality to each scene. It’s kind of exhausting to watch, but also more interesting.
And the punch-lines tend to be a little less ironic too. Gotta love that.
Switching gears, finally starting to play the giant stack o’ games that I have lying around. Starting with Half-Life 2 Episode 2 right now. Episode 1 wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t long enough to provide the satisfying buildup and variety of scene changes that HL2 had, but there were satisfying action sequences and some really cool environments to play around in. Episode 2 seems to be shaping up in the same way, but the super-obvious physics puzzles seem to be a little more well-integrated into the environment. I mean, it’s jarring to find that every elevator in this place is broken but at least it makes more sense to use a weight-counterweight system in a mineshaft than in the middle of a modern city under an Orwellian alien overlord. The action sequences also feel tighter, the antlion scene underground kicks the pants out of the underground dark-room zombie fight (though I would like to play that sequence again with Episode 2’s flashlight). Both of the episodes I’ve noticed felt like a greatest-hits compilation of Half-Life 1 moments. Episode 1 had a lot of indoor Black Mesa-esque shaft-crawling segments and Episode 2 has a lot of open-air (or cavernous) Xen-like moments. I guess I can forgive Valve for being predictable and transparent when the environments feel so well-done and the action sequences so satisfying. I think the increased inclusion of gore this time around actually gives the fights a little weight, you’re not just shooting at targets until they magically fall down. They sort of have the blood-balloon thing going on, but its better than the previous games where I felt compelled to count how many bullets could take down any given enemy. Valve has also done a pretty damn fine job of framing their real-time cutscenes, either when forcing a camera perspective or by encouraging the player to stop and admire the scenery (some well-placed barrels here, a line of dialogue encouraging the player to look around, etc.). I guess that’s why I call the game slightly transparent, I can tell that the designers want me to stop and look, I can tell that I’m being manipulated by the environment and the other NPCs. To steal a thought from Tim Rogers, I don’t think it really ruins the artistic integrity of the game itself though, the narrative and the story itself have room for this creeping feeling of manipulation and straight-forwardness. In a backwards (and apologetic) way it makes sense that I feel like I’m on a ridiculously well-planned and conflict-filled roller coaster, I bet Gordon does too.
That’ll be all for tonight.
