by Brendan Foley
You can like Stuart Gordon’s films or you can hate them, but you have to love Stuart Gordon. A true American original, Gordon has been marching to the beat of his own drum for decades, going all the way back to the time he and his wife’s Peter Pan adaptation got them arrested for obscenity in 1968 (yes, this is a real thing that really happened).
Also, if you dislike Re-Animator you are probably a bad person, objectively speaking.
Robot Jox represents Gordon attempting to take his usual skillset and interests and apply them to the world of science fiction family filmmaking (one of his subsequent attempts? Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Yes, really). A few decades ahead of its time, Robot Jox is a big, broad live action cartoon, a lovable blend of wacky and bizarre that holds up quite nicely as a new Blu-ray release from Shout! Factory.
Robot Jox is set in a future where nuclear war rendered giant swaths of the earth uninhabitable wastelands. While these areas are stuck Mad Max-ing it up, the remains of civilization have re-formed with corporations as rulers. All war has been outlawed, replaced with gladiatorial combat between two robot joxs… robot joxes… robot… look they get big giant mecha suits and they have dudes in Tron-y suits to pilot them and they get called Robot Jox.
Our hero is Achilles (Gary Graham) a hotshot Robot Jox close to finishing his contract up after his tenth fight. When tragedy strikes, Achilles is completely shaken and pulls away from the Robot Joxing lifestyle. Will he be able to recover his mojo? Will new, genetically-engineered super pilot Athena (Anne-Marie Johnson) take up the gauntlet? And who will win the final battle with insane “Confederation” pilot Alexander (Paul Koslo) and claim ownership over Alaska?
Yes, this is a movie where giant robots pummel each other over who will own Alaska.
The cheapness of Robot Jox is unavoidable. The walls of the sets practically wobble whenever a door is closed, and the streets are always empty and crowds distractingly small (although I suppose you could make the case that the cities are empty because most of the population got fried in Judgement Day, or whatever these folks call it). Gordon attempts to do some interesting stuff with the world-building (like having everyone wearing gas masks during outdoor scenes, suggesting that even years after the bombs have silenced the air is still toxic) but none of the actors are good enough to make this seem natural or lived-in. This sort of exaggerated cartoon world is still difficult to pull off today, with hundreds of millions of dollars and cutting edge computer effects, so it’s not exactly a surprise that Gordon would struggle.
Screenwriter Joe Haldeman would complain that the movie’s problems were the result of an impasse between him and Gordon. Haldeman claimed that he wanted to write nuanced, adult characters while Gordon insisted on using stereotypes (or archetypes, if you want to be kind) and emphasizing the children’s film aspects.
OK, I can see how that would be frustrating, sure. But Haldeman is selling himself, Gordon, and the film short with that thinking. If anything, the film’s simplistic characters and pop cartoon look only make it all the sneakier with its more thoughtful material.
Part of it is the Robocop thing. The “Everything in this world is fucked, but everyone is so used to it being fucked that no one cares” approach. Many (most?) post-apocalyptic or dystopic films end up ruining themselves because they have to include a part where a secret underground leader delivers a speech about how bad the world is. Like Running Man. Running Man has this great nightmare future where all politics and power are controlled by TV stations jockeying for viewers, but then they have to go and have Yaphet Kotto and some other non-Yaphet Kotto chumps explain in exacting detail how this is a bad thing, which just makes the whole thing feel way less interesting.
Gordon’s a smarter cat than that, though, and he keeps the darkness just below the surface, choosing individual moments to really screw with the formula of this sort of movie. Like, OK, you know how in any movie with the hotshot renegade ace who is down on his luck and now feels threatened by the younger set, there’s going to be a scene where the new, eager pilot/driver/pitcher/cop/etc. asks our broken-down hero about a critical mistake they made in the past?
Well, here, the ‘mistake’ that Achilles made was trying to rescue a bunch of people from being horribly crushed to death during a Robot Jox match. And when he failed, a bunch of people were, indeed, horribly crushed to death. And the young pilots can’t understand why he would break off a fight to try and save spectators. After all, they signed waivers. Who cares what happens to them?
And then there’s the dehumanization that is going on. ‘Achilles’ is actually named Jim, but he signed away his name and past when he agreed to be a Robot Jox. He’s essentially an owned human being, his every movement and action planned and scheduled by corporate overlords who only care about the bottom line. And the next step is genetically engineered pilots, who don’t even have real names and lives to get back to, should they actually survive. Which they almost certainly won’t.
All this comes to a head in the ending, when the central conflict of who gets Alaska is settled but Achilles and Alexander keep right on fighting. They’ve had every other piece of their self stripped away, leaving only the compulsion to keep fighting. The final battle means nothing, gains nobody anything, but it’s all either man has to live for.
Gordon’s kid film is eerily prescient for the way in which it predicted the way humans would take a backseat to humanity’s problems. It’s not difficult to draw a line between Achilles’ horror at the collateral damage his Robot Joxing caused and the breakdowns and guilt we’re seeing in modern drone pilots. Did Gordon intend this? Well, unless he has psychic powers that he hasn’t let anyone on to, no he didn’t. But I think it’s indicative that the film is more thoughtful and has more depth than even the guy who wrote it will give it credit for that these observations about the impact of technology on human conflict do ring true, even if they are surrounded by a whole lot of wacky.
Robot Jox never quite takes off, but there’s enough going on and enough fun to be had that I absolutely recommend checking it out. You’re not a bad person if you dislike it, the way you are if you dislike Re-Animator, but people who would dismiss Stuart Gordon because he opted for the silly are missing out on some great stuff.
Robot Jox hit Blu-ray on July 7th, 2015 from Shout! Factory