RoboCop: Prime Directives (2001)

RoboCop: Prime Directives (2001)

4 episodes, approx 90 mins each.

A miniseries made up of four feature-length TV movies: 01. Dark Justice; 02. Meltdown; 03. Resurrection; 04. Crash and Burn. It's important to watch them in the correct order because there's continuity. It takes place ten years after the original Paul Verhoven film, which is referenced briefly. Had they been allowed to use it more, they surely would've.

Like the short lived TV Series (1995) it ignores the original film sequels, but goes even further by ignoring the TV Series as well. It's odd that it would do that, because it feels like a middle ground between the two. It's less violent than the original film but much more so than the kid-friendly series. So much so that I lost count of the number of dead cops that piled up in the streets.

RoboCop: The TV Series (1994)

RoboCop: The TV Series (1994)

Feature-length pilot and 21 episodes, approx 44 minutes each.

Wisely ignoring the existence of RoboCop 2 and 3 (like many people tend to do), the cheapo TV series is set two years after the events of the first film.

It feels like something I'd have sat down to watch on a Saturday evening as a kid after The A-Team had ended and before the crap variety show with Jimmy bloody Tarbuck came on. If you stumble upon the series while channel-hopping you may give it little more than five minutes before hopping some place else. That's because it takes a couple of episodes before the show begins to justify its existence.

There's a lot of attempted humour; not quite slapstick and certainly not sophisticated, it sits somewhere between the two and ends up mostly face-palm bad.

The aspect that stayed me from pressing the stop button is the relationships. When it finds the human element that's buried within the machine parts it becomes mildly entertaining and raises itself out of the shit-bin for a time. It's still bad, but it has measurable heart beneath the clumsy scripts and the awful villains.

RoboCop: Film Trilogy (1987-93)

RoboCop (1987)

Dir. Paul Verhoeven

I don't know how it was in the rest of the movie-watching world, but in my small corner of it the RoboCop poster was an almost permanent fixture in VHS rental stores in the early 1990s, and consequently I'd an image burned into my brain of how I thought the film's protagonist would be onscreen long before I saw the actual film.

As it turned out, despite the B-Movie-esque title and violent and gimmicky exterior it exceeded my youthful imagination, mostly because lurking beneath the imagery is a semi-sophisticated drama staged by Dir. Paul Verhoeven and brought to onscreen life by a perfectly cast Peter Weller in the title role.

I use the term 'semi-sophisticated' because parts of it haven't aged well, particularly the OTT comic book villains, but the scathing script and emotional heart of the work more often than not make up for any failings elsewhere.