The Best Way To Watch RoboCop Completely Ruins The Movie

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 19 seconds ago

For this ‘80s kid, RoboCop (1987) is one of the best films ever made. As a young movie nerd, I watched the movie for its spectacle, including conniving bad guys, kooky sci-fi, and some of the best action scenes in Hollywood history. Growing older, though, I realized the real strength of the movie was its trenchant satire and social commentary. Director Paul Verhoeven held an unflinching mirror up to America, and he willingly interrupts his sci-fi opus with fake ads meant to highlight the inevitable dangers of where society was headed.

Now, RoboCop is streaming for free on Tubi, and this is arguably the best way to watch this ‘80s epic. You see, Tubi is a free streaming platform with ads embedded into every film, which is fine: a few ads are a small price to pay for this streamer’s sprawling platform of titles. However, the ads on Tubi have arguably gotten weirder than ever, including AI slop being used to sell everything from pay-to-win apps to gambling services. Now, in a truly meta moment, you can stream Verhoeven’s vision of future America and compare how strange our modern advertisements have become to the hilarious fake ads he created nearly four decades ago.  

Cops And Robots

The premise of RoboCop is that in a dystopian Detroit, law enforcement is now handled by a creepy megacorporation. They want to be tough on crime, so they take a recently slain police officer and revive him inside a cybernetic body. Now, as RoboCop, this mechanical lawman is the bane of criminals throughout the city. However, there is still a glimmer of humanity beneath his dark visor, and that spark of who he was may help the city’s top cop save the day. Assuming, of course, it doesn’t get him killed before that can happen.

The cast of RoboCop includes some very fun surprises, including Ray Wise (best known for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) and Ronny Cox (best known for Total Recall). The movie also stars Kurtwood Smith (best known for That ‘70s Show) as one of the most memorable villains to ever grace an action movie. But the real star of the show is Peter Weller (otherwise best known for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension), who is amazing as both hero cop Alex Murphy and RoboCop, a technological powerhouse who may very well be the future of law enforcement.

As an ‘80s kid myself, I had a simpler view of RoboCop. When I was younger, I loved the fact that the title character looked like an action figure, and that he fought bad guys as two-dimensional as the ones in my beloved Saturday morning cartoons. It helped, of course, that the very concept of this hero felt like something out of the fevered imagination of a sugar-addled child. After all, what’s cooler than a cop in the eyes of a kid? A robot cop, naturally!

Ironically, as I grew older, I appreciated how RoboCop functioned as a hilariously on-the-nose criticism of America’s police force. The individual cops are mostly decent people trying to make their city a better place, but they are caught up in a corporatized system that prioritizes profits over people. That system will do more than chew you up and kill you: it will then transform you into a robot zombie whose only function is to reduce human jobs and increase shareholder values. Regardless of your personal politics, that message is more resonant today than it ever was back in the waning twilight of Reagan’s America.

Tomorrow’s Future Shock, Today

Like many great franchises, no future films or shows were able to capture the magic of the first RoboCop film. Without Paul Verhoeven’s deft touch, later installments focused only on the surface-level coolness of having a nearly unkillable cop fighting everything from high-tech gangbangers to rival robots.

But it’s the satire that makes this first film an enduring classic, and the satire manages to be as hilarious as it is incisive. The most blatant satire comes from the bevy of fake ads that remind you that this is a world in which sex, violence, drugs, and even robotic cops are all just ways that a soulless corporation will try to sell you something.

Watching the film on Tubi now truly does make RoboCop that much more surreal, as your film about a corporate dystopia obsessed with money is periodically broken up by AI ads created by companies that didn’t want to pay real actors. In retrospect, Verhoeven gave us the most potent kind of satire: the one that accurately portrayed our own bleak future with unflinching accuracy and undeniable style.

RoboCop himself poses existential nightmare questions for audiences: like, how can anybody rage against the machine when the system makes us part of its gears? Today’s corpse is tomorrow’s cop, proving that even death cannot free you from the endless reach of our corporate overlords.

If you want to experience this eerily prescient movie in the best possible way, you don’t have to spend so much as a dollar. All you have to do is stream RoboCop for free on Tubi. Afterward, you might just spend the rest of your life quoting it. Because of that, make sure everyone in the room is cool before you start trying out your best impersonation of Kurtwood Smith’s hilariously iconic line: “b*tches leave!”