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This chapter explores the legacy of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop in terms of the original critical reception, the film's relationship with its two sequels, and the marketing of the film. Released in the summer season of 1987, RoboCop was an unexpected commercial success, leading to the creation of the RoboCop universe, extending into television, video games, animation, and numerous sequels. The chapter then considers Verhoeven's work in the Hollywood science-fiction genre. The success of RoboCop led to an interest in science-fiction cinema that would lead Verhoeven to direct three more science-fiction films: Total Recall (1990), Starship Troopers (1997), and Hollow Man (2000). None of the films are pure science fiction but hybrids, fusing conventions from a broad range of genres including war movie, horror, and the political thriller.

This chapter challenges critics' readings of films as ‘sexist’, looking at two illustrative examples: Paul Verhoeven and Spike Lee. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) was widely regarded as misogynistic and ‘lesbophobic’. Basic Instinct is a neo-noir film that scandalously refuses to conform to the patriarchal rule of ‘compensating moral values’. Moreover, its visual pleasures are deliberately constructed against the grain of male voyeuristic pleasures and offer women (especially lesbian women) a rare opportunity to dissect and ridicule male sexism, homophobia, and voyeuristic power. Verhoeven's Elle (2016) is a much more subtle and complex critique of how women's self-image is ‘mediated’ by patriarchal culture, and the film makes explicit or oblique references to tabloid journalism, the gaming industry, and religion in the construction of a total culture that presents women as ‘others’ not only to men but also to themselves. Meanwhile, Spike Lee has been a frequent target for the ‘sexist’ label. The chapter argues that this is unfair, given Lee's relatively frequent attempts to make films about female sexual empowerment (or the causes of female sexual disempowerment). The three examples of She's Gotta Have It (1986), She Hate Me (2004), and BlacKkKlansman (2018) suggest that Lee has in various ways attempted to represent females as empowered sexual agents, and to address social double standards erected by men to possess women through the possession of their bodies.

This chapter assesses the portrayal of the cyborg in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). RoboCop was part of the cycle of 1980 films in which the cyborg was consolidated as a genuinely ambivalent iconographic motif of science-fiction cinema. In many ways, it is the complicated experience of emotion and memory that defines the ubiquity of the cyborg in science-fiction cinema. The chapter then considers the ‘transmigration’ theory of Robotics professor Hans Moravec, who helped pioneer the development of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). It also discusses religious, philosophical, and mythological dimensions, chiefly the potential of reading the film as an allegory of Christ. Whereas the Christ parable is nothing innovative to the way Hollywood heroism can be read, what makes RoboCop's Christian allegory markedly distinctive is that it takes places in the context of the science-fiction-cyborg-film sub-genre.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). If one were to compile a canon of great science-fiction films, the inclusion of RoboCop would be problematic simply because of the puerile title. Given the way films are inevitably marketed, made palatable for audiences naturally means film titles are transformed to suit commercial inclinations, often conflicting with the content of a film. In terms of high-concept cinema, the title RoboCop is a moribund simplification of the film's existential core. Yet it is such outward simplicity that fosters a contradiction often lurking in Hollywood-genre films like RoboCop. RoboCop's reputation was an early source of ridicule, such was the fate of many violent films of the 1980s when sanitised by the puritanism of the BBC or ITV. Fortuitously, the critical standing of RoboCop has grown over the years, in no small part aided by the intervention of Criterion, a specialist home video label which was first to re-release the film on Laserdisc and then later on DVD in an unrated directors cut. While the Criterion edition of RoboCop has long been out of print, the film's inclusion in the Criterion library accentuates its merit as a seminal science-fiction film; a key American work of the 1980s, overturning familiar genre trappings while its erudite philosophical address transforms the iconic Frankenstein narrative into an altogether more radical, theological work.

This chapter details the key credits and synopsis of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). RoboCop takes place in a dystopian future, where Detroit is a city ridden with crime and on the verge of collapse. A mega corporation, Omni Consumer Products (OCP), has taken control of the Detroit police force and plans to implement a new program to bring crime under control. After police officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is massacred while on duty, he is chosen by OCP to be the first volunteer for the RoboCop program. Murphy is transformed into a man-machine, a cyborg super-cop. But OCP's attempt to erase the memory of Murphy proves to be unsuccessful. In turn, RoboCop undergoes an existential crisis, leading to a search to reclaim his true identity and exact revenge upon the heinous perpetrators of his violent death.

This chapter investigates the representation of the feminine subject in science fiction. It is shown that feminine subjects have traditionally been joined within the science fiction film. The 1990s saw the development of a different kind of female figure in science fiction cinema. The chapter states that female figures which emerged in science fiction/action films appeared to take on a functioning role more normally assigned to the male hero. Comparative analyses of three films in which a female hero appears are given: Hardware, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Nemesis 2: Nebula. Both Hardware and Nemesis 2 exploit the Terminator films, but each in its way also subverts the narrative trajectory of their blockbuster counterparts. Starship Troopers effectively takes both the female hero and the femme fatale. An interview with Director Paul Verhoeven regarding the female heroes is also offered.

This chapter reports the depiction of the masculine subject in mainstream American science fiction films from 1980–1990. The popular rebirth in the science fiction film in America results to the genre's market dominance. Star Wars and Close Encounters offer a picture of disintegrating family structures and absentee fathers. The Back to the Future series continues the themes of family and fatherhood. The cyborg films, The Terminator and Robocop, in 1980s are explored. It is believed that it is wrong to see either of these films as unproblematically upholding the dominant ideology of the time. It appears that, with the influx of the American film product onto the global marketplace in the 1980s, some national cinemas responded by producing national films. The interview with Paul Verhoeven clarifies the ways in which American culture came to be ‘written’ into the film.

This chapter discusses Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) as a Western. Though the film's hybridity has been mentioned especially in regards to science fiction's interrelatedness with horror, and in the intertextual nods to Shane (1953), it has not been explored at length to sufficiently argue for iconographic slippages that account for the salience of the Western. The chapter's purpose is to widen the possibilities of looking intimately at the way iconographic details can create genre dissonance, what is known as ‘vraisemblance’. Reframing genre readings means retracing the intersections with the horror and science fiction. This includes accommodating for developments such as the science-fiction Western, a sub-genre that has veered from innovation to derision yet continues to elicit new rejoinders. The chapter then offers a consideration of Western themes, notably the savage, the massacre, and revenge, which intersects with the horror genre.