My Cinematic Alphabet - 'R' stands for Raiders and Robocop


Raiders of the Lost Ark


This is how I like my Indiana Jones: young, non-wrinkled and free of flying fridges. Indiana was the quintessential serialised rugged action hero plucked from a non-existent radio series and given eternal life by Lucas. God bless 'im for the wonder years of cinema, before he regurgitated them into the plunder years of cinema. My god, Indy 4 winked at itself so much that I could feel a breeze. You have to consider it a spoof rather than a sequel and then strike it from the records. I think most of us have already. I do hear the lego game version is great. Lego 'anything' is cute. Heck even a lego Steve Buscemi with a Predator's mandible mouth would be cute.

'Raiders' was there first with the greatest epic dusty action adventure of the modern age, and it had the score, the man, the hat and the whip we boys all wanted to own. I would've ruled the schoolyard with a whip like that. Indy was great when he was hunting religious relics and we were there in awe when the Ark was finally opened. Then we rewound the VHSs again and wewatched it many more times watching Nazi's faces melt off. Good times.

Robocop

Never before has the story of Jesus been told so eloquently, and with so many high tech machine guns. If Jesus died and rose again sometime in the future, how could he not want to do it Robocop style? Oh yeah, the whole 'peace' thing. Whatever. The late 80s was an amazing time for action movies with Die Hard, First Blood and Lethal Weapon, and they didn't hold back on the swearing, drug use, and memorable one-liners.

Robocop had it all! Sweet stop-start animation, and a costume design that never dated. NEVER. It's just gorgeous to look at and have as an action figure that I'm not allowed to display. All the robot designs were timeless. I loved Robocop 2 also, and I think it was an awesome thing with some real nasty stuff RoboMurphy had to deal with, despite Frank Miller not being able to do exactly what he wanted with it.

Thirty years later it seems Hollywood is trying hard to recapture the feel of those movies, but it just seems they're over. A reboot to Robocop has been mulled over for a while now, but Robo's resurrection was already done to perfection, and then overdone by the time the crappy Robocop 3 was released, plus subsequent TV series. No actor nowadays is going to sign up for a movie where half of his face is going to be covered up for the most part. Robocop has no Bruce Wayne alias that allows him to go out at night to sip cocktails. He's a brooking hulk of a figure that misses his wife and kid. 

He's only human. Onya Murph.

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