One Uproarious Robot Movie Wasted A Major Sci-Fi Talent
Let’s talk about this vintage robot battle that could have been so much more.
What do you get when you combine one of the best science fiction novelists of all time with a 1990s low-budget action flick? If your guess is one of the worst science fiction movies of all time, you wouldn’t be far off. And yet, in order for something to be the worst of any category, it has to be notorious or bad in some spectacular way. On November 21, 1990, when Robot Jox hit theaters, it was met with bad reviews, but it was also quickly forgotten, which revokes its “worst thing ever” status immediately. And 35 years later, the crime of Robot Jox isn’t that it’s forgettable or egregiously poorly made. Those things are true, but what’s really interesting is that it was very clear, almost very good.
Robot Jox takes place in a near future in which nuclear conflicts have led to war being made illegal. Instead, two major global powers remain, and in order to settle conflicts over resources and territory, they’re required to have two massive human-controlled robots duke it out. Yes, the combatants are inside of massive Voltron-esque battle mechs, decades before Pacific Rim, but with none of the charm. Instead, the goofy robot battles are made far less enjoyable by the bleak, Cold War-obsessed themes. The two global powers left are clearly just stand-ins for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which feels pretty dated even for 1990, when the Berlin Wall had just fallen the previous year. (In fairness, Robot Jox was supposed to have come out in 1989, but had a delayed release.)
Still, the Cold War themes give the movie a cartoonish quality, in which the bad Russian robot jockey Alexander (Paul Koslo) just insults people and cheats constantly, meanwhile the “good guy” hero robot jockey, Achilles (genre legend Gary Graham), seems to be the only person who cares about innocent bystanders.
In a truly absurd twist in the first act, Achilles nearly wins his robot bout against Alexander, but accidentally knocks a massive mech opponent onto a bunch of spectators sitting in the bleachers. Why are there bleachers on an empty battlefield in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? This concept is hand-waved away because the rest of the movie needs to happen, and yet, the grisly crushing of 300 people in the bleachers fuels much of the movie’s attempt at pathos.
But for all the bad ideas in Robot Jox (a former robot jockey champion named “Tex” who wears a cowboy hat might take the cake), there are plenty of good ideas buried inside this tortured screenplay.
The film was commissioned to be written by Hugo-Award Award-winning author Joe Haldeman, a true master of the SF literature field, and both then and now, probably best known for his novel The Forever War. Haldeman collaborated on Robot Jox with Stuart Gordon after the pair had tried to bring Forever War to the screen years earlier. Reportedly, and in many interviews since then, Haldeman made it clear that he and Gordon did not see eye-to-eye as to the tone and nature of the film, specifically the notion that Gordon wanted the various characters to be as hyperbolic and archetypal as possible, while Haldeman wanted more subtlety.
“I would try to change the science into something reasonable; Stuart would change it back to Saturday morning cartoon stuff,” Haldeman said in a post on his own website in 2004. This description seems somewhat generous, as a poppy Saturday morning cartoon version of Robot Jox would have been preferable to the mishmash we actually got. Generally speaking, Saturday morning cartoons don’t feature women and children being trampled to death by falling robots. Instead, it's the compromise of Robot Jox that makes it a failure, not that Gordon got his way entirely, or that Haldeman got his; it's an unholy mixture, which truly has to be seen to be believed.
But is it the ultimate killing machine?
Still, Haldeman’s smart science fiction world-building skills manage to shine through in many areas: Most of the jockeys are illiterate, because in this future, knowledge and reading are basically only for the very elite. Various diseases are widespread, which means we see civilians wearing various face coverings, a slightly prescient visage of the world to come. Throughout all of it, Haldeman’s writing suggests that the real subject of the movie is a question of empathy; when one hides behind a massive robot suit, it's easy to lose one’s sense of humanity.
And it’s in this theme that you can feel a warm soul inside of Robot Jox, a humanist sci-fi message, trapped, like a person stuck inside of a mechanized robot suit that's melting all around them.
