Robocop can easily be viewed as a simple linear story, in delivering its message to the audience, but still allowing viewers to debate the extent corporations have control over a society. When left to its own devices, corporations are inherently thinking about profits, and corruption and internal conflict are certain.

With a movie such as Robocop, a linear story allows more fun while watching the movie. Today, directors and writers either try too hard or not enough, and it shows in the quality of their movies. Paul Verhoeven manages to keep the momentum at its maximum, but not overdoing scenes so they get old and the viewer is bored by the first half-hour of the movie.

Robocop is certainly a classic, and it's somewhat of an indication of how true the themes of the movie have stayed with fans and those who appreciate it. There is one aspect of Robocop which was not addressed at the end. Delta City. Delta City was supposed to be a completely new Detroit, employing a few million workers, a new mostly crime-free city, allowing citizens to go about their daily business activities without feeling threatened and without being harmed. While we know OCP was financing this new city construction, we were left at the end of the movie with OCP still in charge of the construction, and ED 209's possibly still being used for the cleaning up of certain neighborhoods riddled with organized crime. This leaves an uncertain future for the city of Detroit.

Robocop also implies that in order to deal with violent and nearly insane criminals, you have to do deal with them accordingly, outside the typical restrictions of law enforcement. While on the one hand we applaud such strict enforcement and dynamic response, we also have the ED 209 example, which implies machines cannot deal with humans unless they have some sort of human trait. This trait is empathy.

When we combine the elements of man and machine, Robocop offers a glimpse of the future of how society could deal with itself. But in order to do this successfully, it must have human traits. It cannot be cold like a machine and have internal corruption within a corporation.

Robocop's inability to pursue anyone within OCP because of Directive 4, is a caution to those who would pass control over to a large corporate entity, and is another caveat to the idea of letting any large entity being its own creator and enforcer. In some sense this makes the situation worse than the Big Brother conspiracies, because government is accountable to its citizens and there are many public hearings which can happen as a result of investigations. With a corporation, no such internal investigations would ever occur, due to the nature and history of corporations investigating themselves in the first place.

Setting aside the underlying messages, Robocop is just a fun movie to watch when you want to see some raw blood and guts, and some funny one-liners. It's probably not a movie you'd invite your girlfriend over to see, but it's a great "guy" movie, and will never be outdated in my DVD collection.

The Audio

• There are three main audio formats available. The original 4.0 Dolby Surround track, and a new Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtrack. Well, they all sound about the same. No kidding. I was rather surprised. After investigating further, I found the original soundtrack and Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack are the exact same size (340MB). The DTS 5.1 soundtrack is 573MB, which explains why it sounds more natural and isn't front-heavy on the vocals and mids.

  In fact, the DTS 5.1 on this film is rather tame compared to other DTS soundtracks I've listened to in the past. The soundtrack is still free of a lot of ambient noises, which is rather good for a film 20-years old. I certainly give a thumbs-up to the soundtracks in general, but I do question the justification for offering the three soundtracks if there isn't much difference.