With the announcement of his RoboCop TV series for Prime Video, James Wan effectively told fans, “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” Okay, maybe that’s overstating it a little, but there’s no question that even the biggest RoboCop devotee has reason to be skeptical about another take on the classic 1987 movie, even from a filmmaker as well liked as Wan. After all, none of the sequels or remakes, or video games have really been able to capture the spirit of the original.Yet a recent observation by star Dan Stevens has us cautiously optimistic that Wan and company know what they’re doing as they try to follow the character’s prime directives. “It’s very funny. It’s satirical,” Stevens told The Hollywood Reporter about the series. But the real interesting part came when he talked about what the original film means to him. “It left an imprint, and I probably saw it too young. It was, perhaps, my first exposure to extreme violence.” With that observation, Stevens clearly understands the importance of the first movie and the character.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner and directed by Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop presents itself as a straightforward supercop story, not unlike other Hollywood hits of the era, such as Lethal Weapon or Beverly Hills Cop. Peter Weller plays Alex Murphy as a good cop and a family man transferred from his quiet precinct to the hellscape of Detroit where he’s almost immediately gunned down by Clarence J. Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his gang. The mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) uses Murphy’s brain and face to create RoboCop, a weapon against crime.However, as Murphy regains his memories and investigates his murder, he discovers a plan among the executives at OCP to use rampant crime to destroy Detroit and replace it with their own metropolis Delta City. The whole thing ends with RoboCop killing the bad guy, complete with a one-liner, just like an ’80s action movie should.As generic as that sounds, RoboCop is a Verhoeven movie, which means that it’s filled with plenty of social satire and excess that undercuts the action tropes. Verhoeven intercuts the action with television commercials and news reports that reveal chaos under a glossy corporate sheen. Even the movie’s final line, in which RoboCop identifies himself as “Murphy,” plays less like a happy ending (he’s recovered his humanity!) and more like the police department putting a sympathetic face on their war machine.Nowhere is that satirical undercutting of action tropes more clear than in the violence that Dan Stevens notes. In one of the movie’s best scenes, the malfunctioning ED-209 obliterates some corporate schmuck in a boardroom. The shots of him getting blasted seem to go on forever (despite being cut down to appease MPAA censors), passing from something exciting to something horrifying, to something darkly funny, especially when after the shooting finally stops, another executive shouts, “Somebody wanna call a goddamn paramedic?”The violence changes RoboCop from just a standard action movie to something terrifying and bizarre. That’s especially true if like Stevens and a lot of RoboCop fans (including this writer) you saw the movie way, way too young. RoboCop feels like an action figure come to life, so of course he’s going to appeal to young kids. But where something like G.I. Joe taught kids to love the American military and C.O.P.S. taught them that the police were cool enforcers of justice, RoboCop teaches them that police, corporations, and criminals are all part of the same milieu.To be sure, every RoboCop entry since the original has tried to retain that quality. RoboCop 2 and the recent video game have their own comedic commercials, and the 2014 remake featured Samuel L. Jackson as a Fox News-style commentator. The TV show and the comics made villains out of men in business suits who disregarded human life while trying to save a buck.But none of them have matched the original RoboCop‘s ability to make the critique work alongside the action, to make the violence so excessive that we turn away in disgust or chagrin more than we cheer. But if Dan Stevens can keep Wan focused on traumatizing today’s kids the same way the original movie traumatized him, then the Amazon RoboCop series might match some of the power of the Verhoeven movie.The RoboCop TV series is now in pre-production.The post Dan Stevens Understands What Made RoboCop Work So Well appeared first on Den of Geek.