I like a lot of different types of films, but my favorite are the subtextually rich, nuance-light action/science fiction films of the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, made by directors like Cameron, Carpenter, Cronenberg, McTiernan, Scott, and Verhoeven. Perhaps the most prescient of all of these is RoboCop (1984). The film’s feel is set by over-the-top comic sex and violence and silly diagetic TV clips. In less deft hands, it could easily have become the sort of campy farce best described (or perhaps, denigrated) as a “cult classic”. (This usually means a film is just bad.) But Verhoeven wields sex and violence like a master wields a paintbrush. (I take this to be a sort of self-critique of his childhood aesthetic appreciation of the violence he saw as a boy growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland, not far from the V-2 launch sites.) The film is thematically rich, so much so that one can easily forgive Verhoeven’s apparent decision to leave out (in what is probably the most “dated” element of the film) any overt criticism of policing as an institution. It is ruthlessly critical of what we’d now call neoliberalism, of corporatism, and has much to say about the nature of the self. The theme that strikes me as most prescient is how the film hinges on the very modern realization that, to a striking degree, what we call “AI” is fundamentally just “other people”, alienated and dehumanized by contractual labor relations. Verhoeven could somehow see this coming decades before anything that could reasonably be called AI.