RoboCop Punched Me in the Mouth and I Thanked It

Earlier this year, I finally crossed RoboCop off my watchlist. Not for lack of opportunity — it’s been staring at me for years as I’ve leisurely been working my way through Paul Verhoeven’s filmography — but because I’m the kind of viewer who waits for the right moment.

As it turns out, that moment was me coughing up half a lung on my couch — recovering from pneumonia — drugged out on decongestants, tea, edibles, and buried beneath mountain of blankets while my roommate was out watching The Wild Bunch at the VIFF Centre. That was the night I met Officer Alex Murphy — or what was left of him — and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

What followed wasn’t the ‘80s action romp I’d been led to expect. RoboCop is not a beer-and-bullets movie — at least not if you're paying attention. It’s not just gritty, it’s grotesque. Not just violent, but surgically brutal. It’s the kind of movie that drenches its satire in blood, grinds it through the corporate machine, and feeds it back to you with a smile. Despite the toy lines, the sequels, and the very comic-booky name, this isn’t some campy cyborg hero flick you show your kid once they’ve outgrown Predator or The Terminator. It’s cold, jagged, and angry — a film that stares directly into the bleakest corners of American culture and doesn’t blink.

And that’s exactly what makes it so brilliant.

Verhoeven doesn’t do satire that whispers. He makes satire that rips the roof off, breaks the fourth wall, and invites you to laugh while everything burns. RoboCop punched me in the mouth and I thanked it and asked for another.

The fact that RoboCop became a pop culture icon is almost a cosmic joke — a satire so sharp it wrapped around the horseshoe and got mistaken for the very thing it’s criticizing. Just like Starship Troopers would do a decade later, RoboCop was embraced for all the wrong reasons. People saw the chrome armour, the ridiculous gun, and the explosions and thought, "hell yeah, that’s badass," completely missing the fact that Verhoeven was gleefully tearing into police militarization, corporate greed, and the media’s role in softening public perception of violence.

This is the same director who shows us a man's hand being blown off in slow motion before cutting immediately to a chirpy news broadcast selling heart transplants like used cars. He’s not subtle — but when the parody’s this good, Poe’s Law kicks in. Make your fascist fantasy compelling enough, and the fascists won’t even notice they’re the punchline.

But RoboCop didn’t just hit — it truly landed with me. Because it arrived in a moment when I needed something raw. Something with teeth. That’s a pattern I’ve started to notice — some of the films that mean the most to me weren’t ones I planned to watch. They were the ones that found me when I was ready.

When I first watched Skinamarink, it wasn’t in a cinema or on a streaming service. It was a shady link sent through a DM, leaked from a festival before the film even had distribution. I was deep into research on liminal horror for a short I was writing, and reading Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film for fun. Watching a flickering bootleg of an experimental Canadian horror film, at home in the dark, already in a headspace of isolation and liminality — it didn’t just scare me, it possessed me. The context became part of the experience.

Same story with Scott Barley’s Sleep Has Her House. I pre-ordered the limited edition reprint on day one, and left it untouched on my shelf for months. Then one day, in the middle of an editing spiral while working on the assembly cut of my short film, I just felt compelled to watch it. No real reason. Merely instinct. By the end, I was completely floored — not because I’d prepared for it, but because it hit me in the right mental space, and hit hard.

And Showgirls? That one caught me completely off guard. I watched it blind, knowing almost nothing beyond the title. I wasn’t expecting the movie that unfolded — and I definitely wasn’t expecting it to become the start of a full-blown obsession. But that’s exactly what happened. I came out the other side not just fascinated, but determined to understand how a film this hated could also be this smart and so ahead of its time. I bought the books. The documentaries. The box sets. I wanted to know how a director could be so misunderstood, and yet so exacting in his commentary.

That’s the key to Verhoeven: contradiction. Every one of his films is a paradox in motion. They look indulgent, sleazy, violent, absurd — but that’s the bait. The critique is in the excess. His worlds are over-the-top because the real world is too, just slightly more polished.

Take Total Recall. At face value, it’s a sci-fi action blockbuster about a guy who might be dreaming — a Martian shootout with quippy one-liners and mutant rebels. But lurking underneath is a question about escapism, memory, and whether fantasy is more comforting than truth. It’s a film that sells the thrill of living out a macho power fantasy — and then quietly undermines it with ambiguity. Was any of it real? Did it matter? It wants you to wrestle with that even as it shovels explosions into your face.

Basic Instinct, meanwhile, takes erotic thriller conventions and twists them into a game of perception. It gives us a seductive mystery with all the tabloid-ready trimmings, but it’s not just about who killed who. It’s about how we consume danger, how we eroticize violence, and how easily spectacle can blind us to manipulation. Catherine Tramell isn’t just a femme fatale — she’s a mirror. Watching her seduce the police, the audience, and the narrative itself is watching ourselves get played.

Then there’s Starship Troopers — a film that gets more relevant with every year. At a glance, it’s a patriotic sci-fi bug-hunt with marble-cut jawlines and interplanetary explosions. But spend more than a minute with it, and it becomes clear: this is a fascist recruitment video directed by a man who grew up under Nazi occupation. The cast delivers every line with artificial sincerity, the uniforms echo Nazi-chic, and the structure mirrors military propaganda films to an unsettling degree, but it’s all deliberate. Verhoeven builds a seductive authoritarian fantasy — and then waits to see who notices.

And Showgirls? That’s the real masterpiece in disguise. Written off as camp trash that swept the Razzies, it’s actually a razor-sharp takedown of the American dream — specifically how women are commodified in the pursuit of fame, beauty, and power. Las Vegas becomes a glitter-drenched hellmouth, where identity and dignity are chipped away with every fake smile and high-kick. It’s exploitation as critique of exploitation. Nobody in that film escapes untouched. It’s all razzle-dazzle until you realize it’s a meat grinder.

But RoboCop — that’s the Rosetta Stone. The foundation of everything Verhoeven would go on to explore in his later Hollywood productions is laid right there in Detroit’s decaying skyline. It’s the synthesis of genre and critique. A Frankenstein monster of corporate overreach, media desensitization, and dehumanized labor, all wrapped in a body that used to be a man. Murphy isn’t a hero in the traditional sense — he’s a product. A corporate commodity. A dead man resurrected as intellectual property. His humanity isn’t just stripped from him — it’s rebranded, reprogrammed, and sold back to the public with a marketing jingle and a shiny chrome finish.

The news segments throughout RoboCop aren’t just funny — they’re vital. They serve as the connective tissue for the film’s entire world, showing how catastrophic violence is sanitized into punchlines, how mass death is repackaged as quirky filler between commercial breaks. It’s not hard to draw the line between those parodic segments and modern media cycles that treat tragedy like a ratings spike. Verhoeven predicted not just where media was headed — he saw how numb we were already becoming.

What makes RoboCop feel so essential is how unflinching it is. It doesn’t offer comfort. It doesn’t pull punches. It presents a world where human life is secondary to quarterly earnings, where law enforcement is privatized and lethal, where trauma is productized, and where the illusion of choice masks a closed system. Sound familiar?

And yet, despite all this — it’s fun. That’s the trick! Verhoeven knows you won’t swallow the medicine unless he coats it in spectacle and pretends the spoon is a choo-choo train. So he gives you blood squibs, mech-suits, and cool-guy one-liners, even as the actual horror seeps in through the soles of your shoes and soaks your socks.

Watching RoboCop in 2025, after years of rising authoritarianism, amidst a budding billionaire-led tech dystopia, and the constant churn of grief-masked-as-news, it feels less like retro satire and more like prophecy. I mean, just look at what’s happening in Los Angeles RIGHT NOW. We’ve caught up to its nightmare — and in many ways, surpassed it.

But for me, RoboCop didn’t just land because of its politics. It landed because I was ready. Sick, strung out, emotionally raw — I needed something confrontational. Something loud, ugly, and honest. And that’s what Verhoeven delivers every time. His films don’t just hold a mirror up to society. They shatter it, and dare you to pick up the pieces.

There’s a particular kind of magic to watching the right film at the right moment. It’s not about crossing titles off a list — systematically working through every single Best Picture winner since 1929, or some “100 Movies To See Before You Die” list written by nobody-fucking-cares-who. It’s about letting a film hit you where it matters, when it matters. And when that happens — when a film finds you at just the right time — it doesn’t just entertain. It imprints. It rewires you. It lingers.

RoboCop didn’t just join my favorites list. It kicked the door down, fired off a magazine, and demanded a seat at the table. And now that it’s there, I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

The only question is: which Verhoeven is next? Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.