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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: When Alex Murphy is interrogating Andre Daniels and John Lake, Daniels seemed to make the inadvisable decision to pull a gun on Alex "Robocop" Murphy to try and beat him at a de-facto Quick Draw standoff and ends up being killed for it. However, Jack Lewis mentioned to him (and presumably John Lake too) that he could be locked up with the same people that he helped put away and Daniels may have realized that he could have faced a Cruel and Unusual Death if he went to prison. In short, was Daniels being too over confident or was he silently asking Murphy to grant him Suicide by Cop by drawing his pistol, with his anxiety levels indicating how conflicted he is with the choice he has to make. Daniels did ready his pistol before Robocop even entered the room, but was this originally because he actually did think they could beat Murphy to the draw and only drew because Lewis frightened him with the possibility of being locked up with the upset people he helped put away?
  • Anvilicious:
    • "Drone warfare is bad."
    • "Lawmakers should not be above the rules they create."
  • Awesome Music: The wicked digital remix of the original's iconic leitmotif.
  • Broken Base: The reboot has received mixed reviews overall, with the positive praising it for re-imagining RoboCop in today's era, while the negative bash it for not being like the original film.
  • Complete Monster (includes The Human Factor comic by Boom! Studios): Raymond Sellars, CEO of OmniCorp, produces drones which reduce countries to Police States. Sellars has a dead soldier refashioned into a cyborg to ingrain his products in the army, and when the man's guilt leads him to commit suicide, Sellars deletes all records of his existence. Repeating the process with hero Alex Murphy, Sellars uses him to sway the public into repealing an act preventing his machines from operating on American soil and tries to kill Murphy after doing so.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Despite not having that much of an active role in the main narrative, Samuel L. Jackson's character gets a lot of praise for stealing the show.
    • Dennett Norton also gets points for playing a memorable supporting character to Alex Murphy, and accepting the error of his ways in succumbing to peer pressure from Raymond Sellars. He also saves Alex from being murdered by Ray and enables Alex to go after him for attempted murder.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • RoboCyclops, since the slimmer armor and glowing visor resemble Cyclops' signature ruby visor and his current All-New X-Men outfit.
    • RebootCop, RoboCrap, and RobertCop are other nicknames gaining some popularity.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film 's North American box office gross ultimately amounted to slightly under $60 million, well short of its $100 million production cost (presumably due to competition from The LEGO Movie among others), but has grossed over $120 million abroad, most of which has been from China. The director's native Brazil comes afterwards.
  • He Really Can Act: When Joel Kinnaman was cast as Alex Murphy, the response from most fans was "Joel who?" and "Why?" Then we got to see the scene where Murphy sees what he's become, and everyone realized "Oh. That's why."
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In the Japanese dub, Tesshō Genda voices Pat Novak. The hilarity came with the fact Novak claims in his show why America is so robophobic, a very odd choice of words from someone who voiced one.
    • The mayor of Detroit in the film is named Durant and is played by Douglas Urbanski. The current mayor of Detroit, who took office after the film was shot, is named Duggan and looks somewhat like Urbanski.
    • Michael Keaton played Batman who had Wayne Enterprises as a force for good in that film. This time, he plays Raymond Sellars — one of the top executives of OmniCorp — who hopes to establish good PR by introducing the heroic RoboCop who also fights crime. However, Sellars is a Corrupt Corporate Executive and a major antagonist rather then a hero.
  • Life Imitates Art: The mayor of Detroit in the film is named Durant and is played by Douglas Urbanski. The current mayor of Detroit, who took office after the film was shot, is named Duggan and looks somewhat like Urbanski.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Sellars crosses it unambiguously by lying to Clara about her husband, then outright threatening to murder her and her son just to mock Murphy for being unable to stop him from doing so.
  • Narm:
    • Murphy grabs a worker in the factory where he wakes up and awkwardly yells at him "What am I" before pushing him away making it look like he doesn't actually care about the answer.
    • RoboCop dramatically turning the lights on after shooting everyone in Vallon's stronghold complete with musical stinger.
    • The machines removing Murphy's robotic components starts out as Tear Jerker Nightmare Fuel but the sheer extensiveness of it, with the right hand seemingly randomly being one of the few human pieces left, gets silly.
    • A lot of Novak's lines. "Why is America so robophobic."
  • Narm Charm: The sheer extent of Murphy's disassembly might be a little extreme (particularly the slightly cartoonish touches like the seemingly random inclusion of one hand, or the question of how the hell he can still talk like this). Doesn't stop it from being completely gut-wrenching and horrifying.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The sheer state of Murphy's condition after he's converted into RoboCop - there's nothing left, and nothing he can do about it either. Arguably, it's one of the few places where they actually improved on the original movie - the eerie cleanliness of it all is, in a way, far more disturbing than the cartoonishly over-the-top gore of the original.
  • Signature Scene: "Show Me," when Murphy is disassembled and he sees the full extent of the Body Horror he went through before he became a cyborg and just how little of his original body remains. This is damn near universally seen as the highlight of the film.
  • So Okay, It's Average: Most who have gone into the film felt it to be okay, if certainly not as ambitious and memorable as the original. Taking the whole franchise into account many have noted that it's not necessarily bad, and far above the sequels, tv shows and cartoons, which set the bar low enough that the remake could simply step over it.
  • Strawman Has a Point: Pat Novak is a pontificating blowhard who wants Dr. Norton in prison for blowing the whistle on exactly what OmniCorp did and was prepared to do to Murphy. While the whistleblower angle is obvious nonsense for anyone who doesn't think corporations should be allowed to do whatever they please, Norton seems to escape any legal repercussions for his own part in OmniCorp's actions, even though he testifies in front of Congress that it was his research that made it all possible. It's possible that he negotiated for immunity in exchange for his testimony, or that Senator Dreyfus pulled strings on his behalf in return for the support of the Dreyfus Act.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While it may not hold up to the original, it's almost certainly better than other RoboCop franchise installments.
    • As for how it relates to the original, one could argue that it's a sterling example of how to do a remake correctly: not treading on or rehashing the story of the original film, but taking the same ideas in a new direction more in-line with modern culture and and problems with a dash of realism thrown in (Murphy actually uses restrained force against Thomas King and reads him his Miranda Rights, even though he's a wanted felon). RoboCop's design in particular was based on Rule of Cool in-universe in both films, the remake just updates it because what corporate executives perceive as cool and marketable has changed from 30 years ago.
    • Doug Walker also gave the film credit for reuniting Alex Murphy with his family and exploring what life may be like with a cyborg father, a plot point that got dropped abruptly in RoboCop 2. On this note, Murphy's family even factors into the finale and are there to help Alex find the strength to overrule his computer components and end the showdown with Raymond Sellars.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • In his review, Doug Walker felt that the movie missed the opportunity to satirize modern development such as social media by limiting itself to only parody a single Strawman News Media program with Pat Novak rather than showing more points of view reacting at the events happening around Murphy and OmniCorp and thus taking the movie on different directions with the world-building, instead of coming off as being less satirical to the modern era than the original film was towards the '80s.
    • As noted in a feature-length retrospective by Youtuber UnderTheMayo, the opening ten minutes speak to a much more interesting plot, revolving around OCP having a virtual lock on the global industrial complex. The state of the world is such that OCP has the ability to openly parade drones and ED-209 units through Tehran, Afghanistan, and get wrapped up in a pitched battle that involve numerous attackers throwing themselves at the droid units in order to sway public awareness about what's happening in their country. along with setting up the concept of "Red Assets" (VIPs that can't be attacked or harmed by an OCP droid). The conflict itself is dropped after the opening action sequence, with the plot (barring Alex's awakening in the overseas facility) moving back stateside for the remainder of the film, while the "Red Asset" concept only comes back into play briefly when Murphy confronts Maddox in the final few minutes (and Lewis shoots Maddox down almost immediately afterwards).

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