RoboCop 2 (1990) on Netflix
Detroit cannot pay its debts to Omni Consumer Products, and the conglomerate wants the city to default. RoboCop patrols with Anne Lewis as the drug Nuke spreads under crime boss Cain.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.9/10101,025 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes28%
Trailer
Plot summary
The conglomerate Omni Consumer Products holds Detroit's debts, and the city cannot pay them. Its chairman wants Detroit to default so that OCP can take over public property for the Delta City development. To turn the public toward that plan, the company holds back money from the police, and crime grows. Nuke, a new drug, is sold across the city by Cain and his teenage lieutenant Hob. RoboCop works with his partner Anne Lewis, and memories of his former life as Alex Murphy keep returning to him. OCP builds other cyborgs from the brains of dead police officers, and each one destroys itself once switched on. The psychologist Juliette Faxx blames the subjects and looks for candidates of her own.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about RoboCop 2 (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, who wrote the first RoboCop, lost the sequel: the five-month Writers Guild strike that began on 7 March 1988 left them in breach of contract and they were fired, with Orion already put off by the grittiness of their draft.
- Orion threw out Frank Miller's script as unfilmable, even though the first film's producer Jon Davison admired its grit and politics, and brought in Walon Green, who had written The Wild Bunch, to rewrite it. Miller later turned his treatment into his own RoboCop comics in the 2000s.
- Davison's first director, River's Edge filmmaker Tim Hunter, walked out eleven weeks before shooting, saying Miller's more humorous script was tonally unfocused against the dark film he wanted. Irvin Kershner, who had directed The Empire Strikes Back, took over because he shared Miller's view.
- Orion doubted it needed Peter Weller at all, reasoning that audiences would not notice who was inside the helmet, as with Universal's Mummy. Weller was also unsure, weighing months of training to act in the suit against an offer to be paid for ten weeks of filming in the Caribbean.
- The villain Cain was written as an ordinary suited drug dealer until Tom Noonan turned him into a former hippie, drawing on his own time as one in the 1960s.
- Cain's computer-animated face was built by laser-scanning Tom Noonan's head and animating the model in real time with software called Perform; only the moment the face pushes through a wall of computer text used keyframe animation and early compositing.
- Phil Tippett's team married the digital face to a physical puppet the hard way: each frame took about a second to render on a monitor, was photographed by an automatic 35mm camera, transferred to laserdisc, then played back frame by frame on a CRT screen mounted on the stop-motion model of Cain's robot body.
- A bigger budget let Rob Bottin's crew paint and polish the new RoboCop suit to the show-car finish he could not manage on the first film, and fit it with quick-release fasteners so it would not rot from being worn too long, as the original had.
