Editorials
Before ‘Pacific Rim’ There Was Stuart Gordon’s ‘Robot Jox’!
This past weekend, the sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 flick, Pacific Rim, made its way to theaters. Despite finally dethroning Black Panther from the top spot, Pacific Rim: Uprising brought in around $28 million domestic. Granted, it’s already proving itself to be a juggernaut over in China where it was quite literally “engineered” to succeed. That was a Universal exec’s word, not mine.
But long before del Toro brought the crumbling world of Jaegers and Kaiju (not the rubber suited variety) to screens, a little movie from Empire Pictures had already brought the image of awe-inspiring, human controlled battle mechs to theaters. Since that fim’s release, however, it’s mostly loafed around without much in the way of box office or fanfare to make its name known. This specific deep cut of bot-sploitation comes from none other than Master of Horror Stuart Gordon.
In 1987, Stuart Gordon found himself marveling at the rampant success of Transformers. They were one of the most popular toy lines ever, and the concept of giant battle bots struck him as the perfect backdrop for a whizbang, effects laden action picture. Thanks to a failed partnership with award winning sci-fi author Joe Haldeman, Gordon knew who he wanted to bring in to help mold his concept into an full fledged screenplay. The two had met when trying to adapt Haldeman’s “The Forever War” into a mini-series. Funding for that project fell through, but the two were able to repurpose some of it into a stage production. After surviving such a tumultuous trip through development hell together, surely there next production together would be a cake walk? Hmm…
Gordon, who had a wonderful working relationship with Charles Band and Empire Pictures (Re-Animator, From Beyond), felt he could rely on Band to pick up the bill for his Transformers cartoon come to life. Not so fast. Empire was known for pushing out low budget cheapies, and Robojox (as it was originally known) was far from the confined location, quicky horror flick the studio was known for. Gordon’s vision would require extensive effects work at a price tag Band wasn’t comfortable with. It took a series of test shoots featuring stop-motion robot action to convince Empire to come on board. Of course, as thrifty as the company was, that test footage ultimately became the opening scene of the film itself. With a budget locked in around $6 million, Robojox was set to be the most expensive film Empire had ever, or would ever, produce.
With an official greenlight, Gordon and Haldeman began fighting; I mean, writing the screenplay. The story they concocted revolved around a group of elite jockeys, trained to operate giant scale mechs in one on one competitions, tournaments created to settle the disputes of opposing countries. The main point of contention between the two writers was the film’s overall tone. Gordon wanted a satirical, fun take on the material that would still manage to appeal to kids of all ages while Haldeman felt it should be more intelligent, relying upon real science instead of Hollywood hokum. In retrospect, Haldeman has summed up the situation like this, “I would try to change the science into something reasonable; Stuart would change it back to Saturday morning cartoon stuff. I tried to make believable, reasonable characters, and Stuart would insist on throwing in clichés and caricatures. It was especially annoying because it was a story about soldiers, and I was the only person around who’d ever been one.”
Gordon ultimately turned to an uncredited third party to rewrite Haldeman’s draft. When given the chance, the sci-fi author who was looking for his big break in Hollywood set fire to the bridge by writing a scathing critique of the current screenplay. He felt that it piled on all the elements he’d been fighting with Gordon to excise. A couple weeks into the film’s principal photography in Rome, Haldeman got a call. The producers agreed with much of his criticism of their current shooting script and requested he be flown out to Italy in order to help sculpt the film more towards his original concept.
The final film is certainly all over the place. There are moments of real drama interspersed with absurd action sequences (the Jox can apparently fly in space?), and scenes of horrific human casualties. All of this is set to the backdrop of Cold War paranoia. One minute it’s a super cheesy B-movie, the next is ripe with espionage or discussing a widespread infertility epidemic! Still, despite the “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario, the production went fairly well with all parties wrapping on amicable terms. Before Haldeman left to come back home, he claims Gordon summed up their differences perfectly: “Joe, our problem is that you’re writing a movie for adults that children can enjoy, but I’m directing a movie for children that adults can enjoy!”
The large scale production proved to be too much for Empire pictures, however. The company folded in on itself, filing for bankruptcy. It took two more years for another studio, Epic Pictures, to swoop in and rescue the film. They funded the rest of the money needed to complete the picture (rumored to have ballooned to $10 million). The name was changed from Robojox to Robot Jox due to the threat of legal action from Orion who felt the title was far too close to their own RoboCop. Epic released the film to a quiet audience. It only went on to gross a little over $1 million at the domestic box office. Over the years, the film has garnered quite the cult following and managed to spin off with two Full Moon films (Crash and Burn, Robot Wars) released in some countries as Robot Jox 2 & 3; though outside of giant robots, there isn’t much to link them to Gordon’s original film.
For those who love some Saturday matinee, low-fi/sci-fi realness, Robot Jox is a blast, with impressive effects, a scene stealing maniacal villain (complete with chainsaw dick…you’ll see), and a lighting fast pace. With its focus on giant mech action, it makes a perfect double bill with Pacific Rim. In fact, Gordon has stated that had he the chance to make a Jox sequel, it would have featured the bots going up against evil aliens.
This awesome mashup from Nerd of All Trades imagines a world where the two are one in the same, cut together to form “Robot Jox of the Pacific”…
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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