In an interview Verhoeven gave about his experiences in World War II as a child, he recalled the formative moment of seeing the body of a downed British airman extracted from flaming wreckage in the Netherlands: “When you’re 6 or 7, you think: Oh, that’s strange. The human body is just meat. It comes apart in pieces, and you can put it in little boxes. The emotional truth behind death, you don’t get that as a child, so I think my memories are very cold.” He added, “That might be the reason why I’m always interested in the damage done to the human body.’”

Damage to bodies is ever-present in Verhoeven’s film. RoboCop tends to be remembered as being a campy, ‘80s catchphrase mill, but it actually has a lot to say about how much violence costs. Each character who is killed, no matter how minor to the storyline, spews buckets of gore. And why not? Brutality is brutality, regardless of who it’s against. Every time a random drug-lab enforcer meets his end in repulsive, bloody fashion, it makes the audience think about just how horrible violence is.

The starkest example of this comes when RoboCop shoots an attempted rapist in the genitals. The agony of the wounded pushes the viewer to consider the bad-guy-gets-a-bullet logic of so many action films. The very woman RoboCop rescues looks on in numb wonder, not quite sure if she should side with her attackers or the corporate machine that’s conveniently come to her rescue.

Most of that subversion is gone in the RoboCop remake. Instead of his iconic machine pistol, RoboCop has a Taser. The bulk of the enemies put down are other robots, whose demise raises no pesky moral questions. The dreaded ED-209 is turned into a cartoonish bucking bronco. The humans on the receiving end of RoboCop’s justice are mostly killed in a sanitized, dry fashion. During a mid-movie action sequence obviously meant to invoke first-person shooter videogames—the camera inhabits Robocop’s point of view, complete with heat vision—the flesh-and-blood people dispatched seem like nothing more than CGI baddies.

In 2012, another Paul Verhoeven film, Total Recall, was remade. In terms of pure body count, both the original and its predecessor are somewhat equal. As with the Robocop though, what differentiates the new Total Recalls, besides just being a worse movie, is the cleanliness of the killing: largely bloodless, and largely against robots. Both the Robocop and Total Recall remakes shed the originals’ hard-R ratings for PG-13—an understandable business decision, perhaps, but one with moral and artistic ramifications.

Research has shown that depicted violence does not necessarily lead to real-world violence. But depicted violence can say a lot about the appetites and attitudes of audiences. The Verhoven approach—bloody, unsettling, and confrontational—seems more and more like a relic. What people want now is violence that is clean and quick, provoking no questions.

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