RoboCop does what Mickey 17 couldn't

Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) and his ED-209 policing robot in RoboCop (1987)

As the credits rolled on Bong Joon-Ho’s long-awaited Mickey 17, I walked out of the theater feeling… underwhelmed. Throughout most of its first half, the film presents an array of memorable moments and thematic threads that had me downright hooked. Questions of dehumanization, bodily autonomy, and death depicted through Robert Pattinson’s dim yet charismatic Mickey Barnes, who spends much of this section being killed and regenerated into someone that his coworkers don't even consider human.

But for the life (and death) of it, Mickey 17 has too much on its mind to tell a satisfying story, and like 17 having dinner with Ruffalo’s Kenneth Marshall, decides to bloat itself to an upsetting degree. By the end of the movie, both versions of Mickey have been cast aside in an endless sea of Creepers, and the story has largely sidestepped its character-driven themes for broader and more scattered statements about society at large. The film still showcases many of the director's signature traits: wickedly dark humor, class conflict, and (mostly) seamless tonal shifts -- Pattinson is also addicting -- but I couldn’t help feeling there was a certain potential left behind.

That night, during my ritualistic doom-scroll into the depths of Instagram Reels, I saw a clip from the 1987 film RoboCop, directed by Paul Verhoeven. It was the scene where Dick Jones, senior president of the malevolent Omni Consumer Products, demonstrates his self-policing robot to the other executives, only for the machine to glitch out and tear some poor guy apart after it fails to recognize he’s not a legitimate threat (ironically, that guy is one of the threats). The shock of this scene, combined with my knowledge of Joel Kinnaman screaming “There’s nothing left!” in the 2014 reboot, piqued my interest. Here was a film dedicated (or so I hoped) to the very concepts that Mickey 17 didn't fully deliver on. Not to mention it was one of those essential ‘80s action flicks that I could cross off my Letterboxd watchlist.

And I wasn't disappointed. Hidden under a barrage of bullets, gore, and flying limbs, RoboCop tells the story of a man who reclaims his identity after being robbed of everything he ever knew and morphed into the titular cyborg. Instead of letting the novel premise and overarching societal themes take control, the film remains committed to Murphy, as a person, rediscovering the fragments of who he once was -- and as it concludes, still is. Despite featuring satirical news reports, over-the-top action, and comically despicable villains, RoboCop somehow never loses sight of its emotional core.

That isn't to say the film is perfect. The use of stop motion, albeit brief, aged like milk, and the one-dimensionality of all the street-level thugs is frustrating. Some moral complexity here, I imagine, would be a bit too much for the mechanics of the story to handle. Regardless, it makes up for this in how it presents the all-powerful OCP, which has successfully privatized control of the Detroit police force. They aren't some outwardly demonic, Illuminati-esque presence, but simply a room full of suits looking to maximize profits. Seeing the gamesmanship between Dick Jones and Bob Morton (until it leads to gruesome murder, of course) is fascinating because if they were simply pushing a different product, it would be considered nothing more than cut-and-dry capitalism.

The most striking comparison between RoboCop and Mickey 17 comes in Murphy and Mickey’s central dilemmas. Although their personalities couldn't be further apart, they both exist within the bounds of a greedy corporation who has taken ownership of their body and, by extension, their humanity. In the same way the scientists who transform Murphy into RoboCop treat him more like a zoo attraction than a cognitive being, those who oversee Mickey's reprintings hardly bat an eye whenever he plops out of the machine like a fish (I assume these “handling” errors are what leads to the personality changes between different versions of the character).

But where Mickey 17 mostly ends up ignoring its titular character as it gets swept up in the trappings of its own world, RoboCop gives Murphy a complete and affecting character arc in which he rediscovers his humanity piece by piece. For an IP that has seemingly been rebooted into the ground, it's astounding how firmly the original RoboCop stands on its own two cybernetic feet.