Crime and economic despair have ravaged the city that has contracted the conglomerate Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to essentially run the police department. When officer Alex Murphy is brutally murdered by a vicious gang, an ambitious OCP executive transforms the fallen officer into RoboCop with his company’s state-of-the-art technology. Though given a second chance in life, Murphy—now RoboCop—has no recollection of his past life and seems to have lost his capacity to process human emotions. All there is left to do is to fight crime and kick ass.

Though set in Detroit, Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi satire was shot in Dallas, with the I. M. Pei-designed Dallas City Hall serving as the exterior of OCP headquarters. The filmmakers used matte paintings to make the inverted pyramid look taller than the actual building.

An excerpt of Dallas City Hall: An Architect's View (1978) will be shown prior to the screening with introductory remarks by M+ Curatorial Assistant, Design & Architecture, Iris Ng. The archival film features a time-lapse of the building’s construction.

Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938, Netherlands) witnessed the horrors of World War II as a child in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, later informingd the graphically explicit satires that he later made in his career. He first found popular success in his native country with the romance film Turkish Delight (1973). After moving to Hollywood, he directed one hit after another, including Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992). The controversial Showgirls (1995) was panned by critics and bombed at the box office but has since developed a cult following. Starship Troopers (1997) is also a cult favourite, while his recent films, Elle (2016) and Benedetta (2021), have made him a festival darling.