Doing Action Justice: Watch How Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop Gives Excessive Action the Treatment It Deserves (Video) – MovieMaker Magazine

If Paul Verhoeven has taught moviemakers anything during his time spentdirecting blockbusters, its that action and violence can be as meaningful as they are lean and mean.

In RoboCop Exploring an Action Masterpiece, video essayist Rossatron explains: RoboCopis heavy on action, but it always feels there for a specific reason. What that reason is varies throughout the film, ranging from social commentary, to satire, to punctuation between beats in the narrative progression of Alex Murphys (Peter Weller) journey from slain police officer to the titular resurrected RoboCop. But one things for sure: As the video says, This isnt a mindless one-man army film, but a film about a weaponone that is discovering where it came from and what it is, made in a decade so obsessed with the glamorization of the military and so affected by Cold War thinking. [Its] a film about the militarization of a police force as the foundation of a new utopia, and the ghost in the shell and dangerous glitches of the new technology that is needed to make that feel so prescient and important.

Rossatron points to a major contrast between VerhoevensRoboCopand the 2014 remake of the original film: What Verhoeven brings to the action is clarity. Everything is well covered and the editing is in support of what is happening on screen. In the remake,RoboCoppretty much just shoots anywhere, and we see robots getting shot. We dont establish where they are, instead only seeing what has been shot after Robo has fired. We always follow the gun, the firing and then the aftermath. However, in the originalRoboCop, we almost always get one shot of a criminalaimingfirst, before seeing RoboCop fire. That one extra shot each time adds so much: We get a sense of geography and direction, and of course, tension.

Good old, shaky-cam-free action films like RoboCop,Rossatron argues, also heighten audiences sense of space in each bullet-ridden sequence. Thank God for the 180 degree line, he adds. Everything happens on one plane. It can be so helpful in a gunfight to keep the audiences understanding of what is happening clear. If a bad guy shoots to the right,RoboCopshoots to the left. If that plane changes, we cut to a wider shot, or an exaggerated movement to show the change in direction. Simple.

These basic formal techniques, coupled with the directors tongue-in-cheek perspective on American cultures celebration of consumerism, corporatism and carnal violence imbues what mighttypically be construed as silly, high-concept fare with meaty subtext and even philosophical wisdom. Watch the video, then ask yourself: How can you make your action features concept and execution actuallymeansomething?MM

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Doing Action Justice: Watch How Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop Gives Excessive Action the Treatment It Deserves (Video) - MovieMaker Magazine