Set in 2029 in a destitute, near post-apocalyptic Detroit, after cop Alex Murphy is brutally murdered in the line of duty, he is reborn as RoboCop, an unstoppable, crime-fighting cyborg. Threatened with an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Verhoeven was forced to reedit his sci-fi satire multiple times to remove the more outrageous carnage. His original vision, presented in this series, was intended to be near-comical in its displays of violence, but the MPAA’s required edits muffled the surreal quality of the film. As Verhoeven noted in 2014, “It was very unusual that people would tell me how to shoot my movie. But the distributor said they wanted an R, not an X, and I understood that. So we went back to edit it. And each of those eight times we had to cut off a little more violence here, violence there. It was give and take, but I'm not sure if it was working with the MPAA, or working against them. They were very adamant.”
Film Center Member Presale: Monday, August 14 - 10:00AM online / 5:30PM box office
General Public: Thursday, August 17 - 10:00AM online / 5:30PM box office