Robocop Was Right! - How a movie from 1987 predicted the current mood.

Oy the news. Every day President Cheeto Puff finds a new way to shock and horrify. There's been the natural disasters, conflict, and a strange foreboding in the air. There has been a long, cruel heat wave that descended over Los Angeles like an itchy wool sweater. It’s got me feeling down. Watching the news has given me the “can’t look away” feeling in the same sense as people describe when they see a car crash, surreal and disturbing. I couldn’t help but feel like I’ve seen news stories like these somewhere before. 

Then I remembered! 1987’s Robocop.
If you have not seen Robocop, I highly recommend you do. It sounds like an easy enough premise; cyborg cop shoots bad guys, how hard can it be? 

It’s a fairly complicated story about a future where corporations are way too powerful, the  1% is repressing the people, crime and corruption are at an all-time high. (Sound familiar?) To maintain “law and order” during a police strike, a corporation creates a cyborg to “help” the police in rundown rusted over Detroit.

So that's the plot, but really makes this movie interesting, are these “media breaks” that happen randomly throughout the film. These are in the form of TV shows, commercials, and the news. Its a gritty, realistic nightmare of what people in 1987 thought the zeitgeist of the not too distant future could be, conveyed through the news and commercials.

Some are funny, but I remember seeing this as a kid, and being more afraid that the future would be like that, than the violence and gore of the film itself. (remember the dude who fell in toxic waste…and got out all knarly?) Watching these now, with all that's going on in the world gave me a chill. Sure some details are different but the mood, the stories, the sheer volume of disasters and the selfish indifference of nearly every character all very familiar, unfortunately. So did Robocop in 1987 foresee the mood of today? I’d buy that for a dollar!