RoboCop (2014)



"Familiar cop, in a refurbished theme"

RoboCop (2014) is a different take on the eponymous cyborg cop's origins, directed by José Padilha of The Elite Squad fame. Joel Kinnaman stars as Alex Murphy, a Detroit Police Officer who is mutilated by a car bomb and resurrected as an unstoppable cyborg police officer by OmniCorp. Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton play supporting roles.

Alex Murphy has a tendency to act outside of the book because he trusts and acts on his hunches. His justification in this case is that since he and his partner were investigating dirty cops, calling for backup would alert the guys they were after. Unfortunately, their attempt to nail the bad guys goes wrong and Murphy's partner Lewis ends up in the hospital.

The crime lord the dirty cops work for wants Murphy out of the picture as well, but with his hands clean, since cop killers get the enmity of the entire police force. The dirty cops do the dirty work for him, and tag his car with a bomb. It goes off, burning Murphy badly and damaging his eyes and ears from the concussion. Enter Omni Corp, who has been looking for a way to get their crime-stopping robots on the streets of an American city. The American people don't feel comfortable with a soulless robot who can't feel, so putting a human face on a robot seems to be the way to go.


 * All There in the Manual:
 * According to supplementary materials, RoboCop's cyborg body is made from graphene as opposed to titanium laminated with Kevlar. It's also stated that the ED-209s and EM-208s are also made from graphene.
 * According to the toy-line, the silver body is called "RoboCop 1.0" and the black body is "RoboCop 3.0". The proposed version that could transform between a combat and safety mode is likely the missing 2.0. Doubles as a Mythology Gag as the RoboCop 2 from the first movies didn't last long either.
 * Ascended Extra: Murphy's family now plays a central part in the plot, whereas they originally were limited to mere flashbacks and cameos in the original.
 * Big Brother Is Watching: Downplayed, but it's still there. There are CCTV cameras all over Detroit, and Murphy can wirelessly access the entire network at will. He also has the backlog for the cameras, allowing him to pin crimes on people months or years after the fact. He can trace cell phones whenever he wants. Finally, all of this is correlated in real time with the police database. When he's first linked up, Murphy racks up nearly 200 pending arrests on the spot. What keeps it from being a completely straight example is that only Murphy is capable of doing this. The police have neither the time nor manpower to correlate all this data, while Murphy has a computer linked to his brain that can.
 * Big Freaking Gun: It's stated that nothing smaller than a .50 cal Beowulf round will harm RoboCop.