ROBOCOP 30th Anniversary — Commentary by Stacia Kissick Jones

RoboCop, a dark political and cultural satire and director Paul Verhoeven’s first American film, was released in the middle of a summer no one knew was a harbinger of things to come. Filled with arid, empty urban landscapes covered in dust and rust and decay, the disintegrating Detroit of the film, thirty years on, less resembles a grim wasteland of obsolescence than the direct result of a drastic change in the weather. No one was talking about global warming at the time — that would come a year later when a second hot, record-setting summer finally grabbed America’s attention — but RoboCop, its scenes filmed in the sizzling Texas sun and in the blast furnace of an abandoned factory in Pittsburgh, sure as hell had heat on its mind. Continue reading…