Here’s the deal in a nutshell – Robocop: Rogue City is, much like the film that inspires it, a work made by a brilliant creative team whose ambition frequently collides with the resources available to them. The result is an overall experience that’s infinitely better than it has any right to be: janky, and a little rough around the edges, but nonetheless smart, compelling, and cool as hell.
The beloved 1987 action film Robocop was conceived as a satire of Reagan’s America: imagining the damage that his government shrinkage obsessed administration might do to the country if the ruinous neoliberal doctrine of Reaganomics were allowed to proceed unchallenged for the next few decades. The world it portrays is, as a result, incredibly bleak. Corporations rule over a wasteland of rotting buildings and tent cities in which a police force diminished by endemic mistrust and chronic underfunding is slowly but surely being privatised, militarised, and mechanised. Also, the adverts are fucking mental.
Calling it “prescient” is, quite literally, the understatement of the century: this nightmare vision of America’s future, necessarily directed by a European intellectual, holds up more or less intact in Rogue City as a nightmare reflection of America’s present. Perhaps it takes the outside perspective of a continental European to properly skewer Reagan’s legacy (or Thatcher’s, if they ever fancy making a first person shooter based on Boys from the Blackstuff).