Hollywood doesn’t make movies like Paul Verhoeven used to anymore. As bombastic, exploitative and hyper-violent as they can sometimes be, his films are goofy, sensationalized and fearless in a pointedly satirical way. Just compare their remakes to their originals: 2012’s “Total Recall” doesn’t hold a candle to Verhoeven’s original 1990 sci-fi oddity, and the same can said for 1986’s “Robocop” and its forgettable 2014 remake. “Robocop” is a lighting-in-the-bottle success, a campy ‘80s low-budget sci-fi movie with a silly name and an even sillier premise that serves as a perfect byproduct of the Reagan era. That can be seen in “Flesh + Steel: The Making of RoboCop,” the 37-minute documentary exploring the making of one of Verhoeven’s most iconic films.
The short film, initially released as an extra in the film’s 2002 DVD release, features interviews from various behind-the-scenes personalities, including producer Jon Davison, production designer William Sandell, the late composer Basil Poledouris, cinematographer Jost Vacano, screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, Visual FX Supervisor Phil Tippett, ED 209 creator Craig Hayes and Verhoeven himself, as well as “RoboCop expert” Paul Sammon. The doc delves into the writing process, the difficulty in finding a director willing to take the material seriously, finding the humanitarian approach to this type of genre material, Peter Weller’s bird-like moving patterns of the titular character and more. “RoboCop” fans should love it.
It proves just how meticulous, brave and thoughtful a director has to be in order to make a movie like “RoboCop” work, at least beyond schlock conventions. “It might be my best American movie,” Verhoeven notes at one point, and that might very well be true.