Robocop has an R rating, a bold marked white R stranded in a square of also-white as if to cut off the rest of reality around it. A light bending tattoo stamp projected onto a stretch of canvas and the lights go down low. Turn your cellphone off and be ready to be taken on a thrill ride, starring Peter Weller. He plays a character who dies in the first dozen or so minutes of the movie, and not just one that dies terribly. Officer Murphy (Peter Weller) dies the moment his hand is carved by bullets into a trickling stump of bone marrow and human flavored beef. He dies a minute later when the audience sees his leg ripped from the knee by a shotgun slug. It makes a ten year old go wide eyed with a type of blood lust nobody talks about. Robocop is a movie that pays off in patience, of slapstick gags, of seeing Murphy (Peter Weller) pushed through a corporate police machine and coming out the other end with his humanity intact.

Peter Weller (Robocop) calls Robocop a tragedy in interviews, from his perspective. There are countless hours of horror stories about flying in mime experts days before everyone was prepared to walk off set, production disagreements, fighting a suit that seemed too large for life to ever inhabit it on the screen. Weller spent days re-learning how to walk and move to give the character a sense of purpose on screen, to install a fiberglass and rubber suit with the life of a man struggling out of it.

You can use words like “Prison” to describe Alex Murphy (Peter Weller, Robocop)’s state throughout the movie. He is, at turn, hounded by police officers he’s meant to replace in a crumbling dystopian Detroit circa 1980, circa New York in the 1970’s. Well, let’s circle around: By 2019, Downtown detroit was rigged with a wire and muscle nervous systems of green-lit cameras that record faces, license plates of vehicles, suspicious behavior and that all negative imprint of Crime that is somehow nowhere but always lurking just around the corner.

Those aren’t the only cameras feeding data into the RTCC (Real Time Crime Center): As of fall 2019, DPD had installed automated license plate readers at various traffic intersections. This technology involves cameras that photograph license plates, tag with GPS coordinates and time and date, and uploads the information to a searchable database. This allows cops to search the travel patterns of vehicles and even get alerts on a vehicle’s location in real-time. In August 2019, the city approved a plan to install an additional 500 video cameras at intersections as part of a “Neighborhood Real-Time Intelligence Program.” According to local TV station WXYZ, there are also “secret, hidden cameras” in various areas where illegal dumping is common.

In 2019, the city approved a $4 million expansion of the RTCC program, half of which went to the creation of two 900-square-foot “mini” RTCCs within the 8th and 9th precinct buildings on the west and east sides of the city. – (https://www.metrotimes.com/news/a-primer-on-detroits-real-time-crime-center-25065692)

Peter Weller, (Robocop), though, isn’t referencing the state the movie was made in or the conditions, he’s made the appeal in at least one interview that though there are a dozen different ways to read the movie, he sees it as a tragedy. We come unglued from the screen with childhood to teenage eyes, I hear my sibling start introducing Robocop 2. This is the one written by Frank Miller, he says. I don’t know what that means, so I nod my head affirmatively. You know, Batman? anyway, Robocop 2 has more Robocop (Peter Weller) than even the first one, steeping aside all of that introduction we do to introduce us to a robot-cop that shoots not a single man in the dick and balls.

Robocop sans Peter Weller existed in the minutae timestream of internet self-references and movie realities plucked from their source and mined for comedy and surrealism as “Hey Remember When Robocop Shot That Guy In The Dick?” it is, as a bulletpointswriter might point out, shocking and gruesome and there to support the narrative: I don’t feel bad for the head of a multi-national conglomerate when he gets riddled with bullets and turned into something that could be fit into a single black garbage bag, and not even one of the ones meant for yard work and leaf raking. It does stay “at the forefront of my memory” but only because every time I see the scene as an adult it only gets funnier. A quick pan cut as soon as The ED-209 is introduced over the board room, a lingering camera. Dread is established that will pay off, punctuated with violence, but the horror comes when the rest of the board room, still in shock, joins in writing off the killing as a necessary evil that comes with pushing a good product to market.

Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Starship Troopers) threw the script to Robocop, starring Peter Weller, in the wastebin as soon as he finished reading it the first time. His wife convinced him to take a second look at it. It’s a movie that was greenlit, allegedly, because the board at the time considered Robocop something easier to merchandise. Little plastic Robocop toys, shooting your G.I. Joe’s in the dick in an alleyway. I’d buy that for a dollar.

Whatever producer that was deserves a raise. Robocop is so ubiquitous to a certain type of pop-culture fandom that if I wanted today, I know at least five different types of suburban males who’d look upon me as a close friend who knows them if a 109.99 dollar NECA Robocop: Springloaded Pistol action figure ended up under a birthday tree for them sometime in the near future. We often forget, in the slapstick of the horrifying moment where Robocop passes a bullet between a womans legs after she’s nearly sexually assaulted on celluloid that she runs towards him to cradle between his arms, static in a position of firing. He belts out, almost mechanically, with a digitally-filtered Peter Weller (Robocop) beaming, visor staring off camera, “Madam you have suffered an emotional shock. I will notify a rape crisis center.”

Pages of youtube comments descend from Robocop: Rogue City trailer shouting, chanting in unison. It’s been a long time coming…but Robocop is BACK! Exactly like you remember him, without all of those sequels getting in the way. Fire the Auto-9 in fully or semi-automatic mode. Wander a stunningly recreated Police Station exactly like it was in the movie. Talk with actors who are, non specifically similar to the original cast but let’s say we’re trying to really focus on the story here and not any individual performance, but Peter Weller is along for the ride.

There is a sense from these comment sections and user reviews, of a kind of drift towards Robocop as a type of cop folk-hero, a lone ranger, echoed by the black visor that covers his eyes. Now when playing with Robocop it’s a want to be drenched in him, all of him. We take the seat of Robocop: Rogue City behind and out of the body of Agent Murphy (Peter Weller) with scenes from the movies echoed but not repeated. A sort of Adolescence of Utena, for the original movie. His feet clunk like they do in the movie. His visor clicks on in slow-mo and clearly delineates targets in a little green box. The Auto-9 roars to life, really the only weapon you ever need to touch in the game. We end with a spectacular set piece that dovetails into the existence of Robocop 3,

I remember the original movie more from syndication and it was in the CRT TV lines of that memory that this all started clicking for me, the way the whole game covets the character as only merchandise can do, with even the ending of the game being about an old man coveting the implacable nature of the bot-cop, turning himself into the metaphor for the concept of sequels that Robocop (Alex Murphy) fought at the end of Robocop 2, the robot known as Robocop2.

We’ll chase the bloodshed with competing ability trees: always making Robocop faster so he’s not this slow thing that never made much sense in the first place. The opening hours are shooting gallery affairs that are just missing a giant steel plate to put our actual foot on to duck behind a wall or cover. The ending hours have thoroughly turned our Murpyh’s into killing machines that dash around and cut down body bag after body bag.

Violence disappears in those last scenes: what Robocop: Rogue City is comfortable with is not the up close gore and violence of Paul Verhoeven’s original movie. We only hear the bastard OCP officer’s head collapse in steel fingers in the end, not see it, and the finale is spared even broken glass and battering Alex Murphy’s less than half-a-man corpse strung up by electronics. It’s okay to shoot a man, but too graphic to watch him die. We need violence that can reach no upper limit, not carried by rage, but carried by something else entirely. At 60 frames per second, in god given high definition, is there much difference between a computer monitor spinning off of the plastic base it’s fixed to when struck by our gunfire and a head popping? One has a life bar?

Really, it’s the fucking moralizing. Those canned Peter Weller (Robocop) voice clips land as goofy asides when we make the good-boy points go up. There’s a moral alignment system too, and it makes fighting to mop up side content where all of the jokes and references are. Battle through 80’s arcades and sets from the movies like little plastic dioramas. Desolate and empty movie sets with familiar not-familiar Cop Story pastiches filter in through our ear. There’s no satire because we’re trying to satire reality cast out of fiction, copying themes from the original movie like homework. There’s so much Robocop to go around, these days.

I stare at the Detroit Robocop statue and wonder about the needing for meaning getting injected into everything. Into histories real and imagined, into digital blood. Wanting there to be a feeling to all of the violence, like a story could be told. Redemptive or moralizing, something worth feeling about. This is a toy, it’s easy to repeat: the executive was right. It will be easy to merchandise forever, snapping a new PCI board onto the Auto-9 in our heads, private playtime. Back to the good old days. Someone get that man a raise.