History Headscratchers / Robocop2014

*** It's also ''a realistic approximation of what he can expect to face'' - and, indeed, [[spoiler: ''does'' later in the movie, during the drug lab assault scene]]. A gang's not gonna have ''all'' their members equipped with .50cal anti-materiel weapons that can take him out; they're going to have primarily lighter pistols and other small arms, but they could well have ''a single boss'' - or several heavy weapons guys - with such powerful weapons. In which case the other gangsters, if well-organized, would indeed be trying to set him up for their boss/heavies to get a shot...

* How was Murphy able to [[spoiler:shoot Sellars]] when he was 'redtagged' and moments earlier was unable to [[spoiler: shoot Mattox]]?

** That's assuming it actually ''is'' a living hand, and not some robotic armature clad in Murphy's plastinated skin.

** His mouth and esaphogus are intact but lead nowhere. Where does the saliva and mucas he produces and swallows go?
** Having real lungs, nose/mouth, and (one real) eye is a safety hazard. He's susceptible to tear gas, pepper spray, and even airborne diseases. Even if they could filter out the pathogens during blood maintenance, do you really want to risk the initial stress on his already limited system? And it's kind of ridiculous to allow your otherwise superhuman cyborg to be able to get too choked with smoke to save someone from a burning building, or to be incapacitated by a goon with a gas grenade.

** They may also be skirting the boundaries of whatever the criteria for "legally dead" happen to be, in various jurisdictions where Omnicorp hopes to market Robocops. If one or more of those markets has "capable of breathing" on its list of qualities that formally distinguish someone as a living, autonomous human being, then making sure he can still do that can ensure Omnicorp's products won't be banned under laws that restrict the sale of human body parts.

* The entire motivation behind developing this incarnation of Robocop was that the existing autonomous robots lacked human conscience and therefore couldn't make moral decisions on civilians' safety and such. While that's a very valid reason, why couldn't they just solve this issue with the same general principle we use with Predator drones today and make those high-tech combat robots remotely controlled (at least partially) by an operator sitting behind a console? They would still be physically the same robots with the exact same equipment, but the decision to open fire would actually belong to a human being who thinks like a human and makes human-like desicions (that's also the exact reason why today's flying drones aren't fully autonomous), which was the whole point after all. One could probably argue that a guy sitting comfortably in a room wouldn't have the same motivation to make the right decisions as someone who is physically out there in a danger zone, but this could probably be solved by making the operator fully liable, legally and financially, for all the harm potentially done to civilians (it works for everything else where human safety is concerned), or seeing how this world has a pretty liberal approach to civil rights, they could probably even hook the operator to some sort of electrodes that would mildly shock them for harming civilians, or something like that. Either way, it would be much easier, more practical and more reasonable than permanently fusing a human being into a robotic body they don't even have a full autonomy over and forcing them to live a life of a combat machine 24/7.

*** It's also ''a realistic approximation of what he can expect to face''. A gang's not gonna have ''all'' their members equipped with .50cal anti-materiel weapons that can take him out, but they could well have ''a single boss'' with such a powerful weapon. In which case the other gangsters, if well-organized, would indeed be trying to set him up for their boss to get a shot...

** The droids are maneuvering him towards Maddox because only his gun is powerful enough to take Murphy out. So yeah, the test was pretty biased. On the other hand it is also a pretty good benchmark, if Maddox (who ''is'' just a guy in a suit) can take out their top-of-the-line cyborg then what's the point of him tactically in the first place?

[[folder: No new tech for the good ol' cops]]

** Lack of manpower/corruption. Don't forget, the Chief of Police [[spoiler: is also a CorruptCop.]]
** They also don't have access to the processing power needed to sort and cross-reference all that data. The police would have whatever government funding could get for them, and whatever that is is probably long since obsolete. Robocop has the bleeding edge technology from [=OmniCorp=]. It's almost literally the difference between your couple years old desktop versus a supercomputer.

** Well, consider that in this continuity, Omni is a lot cleaner than OCP was. Dick Jones' goals were A) turn Detroit into an even worse hellhole by any means necessary (which included having a psychotic gang leader on his payroll) so the company could buy the city cheap, screwing everybody in the process, and B) selling to the government a highly defective military product. Sellars only became a card-carrying villain towards the end of the movie, and his initial goals were to simply sell a good, efficient product to the government. He doesn't even have any contact with the equivalent to Clarence Boddiker in the reboot. Seeing that [=OmniCorp=] finances an expensive research on advanced prosthetics, odds are they are villains with good publicity, so if a Senator suddenly put in question their motives and suggested stuff like that without any base, it would be damaging to his argument.
** Also it's kind of the point. As pointed out on the main page unbiased robots controlled by highly biased creators is an allegory for lawmakers exempting themselves from the rules they create.

** If you think about it, it's effectively another leash they have on Murphy. The old Robo was more or less autonomous and could wander off to do his own thing for extended lenghts of time, but this Robo has to return every night for his blood cleanup and nutrient dose, or he will die.

* Rather than have the computer take over "and he won't know the difference" why not ''tell Murphy'' about this aspect and that they can reverse it if it doesn't work out? He's already aware he's half machine anyway. Heck, he's not at all surprised when they upload the whole police database into his brain - he knows there's computers in there and some back-and-forth.

** depends on how they PHRASE it. of COURSE he'd freak at being told he's being mind controlled, but selling it as a reflex booster package or something similar... (which isnt THAT far from the truth)
** [[FridgeBrilliance That's probably exactly what they told him.]] After all, Murphy isn't a moron, he'd realize pretty quickly that he was reacting faster, and differently, after the "upgrade" than before. If he asked about it, they probably told him something about a different software interface and faster data collating or somesuch to wave away his concerns.

** It's not just that they have guns. It's that people are concerned that robots can't really examine what force is reasonable in a given situation, and may use excessive force because their programming operates on strict logic, rather than emotional judgement. And let's face it, a military robot doesn't need a gun to kill someone, if that's what its programming dictates it do in a given situation. The whole point behind Robocop was that there would be a human element to the decision-making process (which didn't make it out of the first prototype stage, but that's part of the point), alleviating people's fears about mechanized officers, and paving the way for actual robotic police officers in American cities.

* Why do Maddox and the CEO make such a huge deal about Murphy's performance being slightly lower than the robot in the same situation? Those robots are illegal to deploy within the States, so from a market perspective this comparison is a moot point. Omnicorp is not trying to sell Robocop based on the performance, but the human element. As Robocop is intended to help sell the idea of robotic law enforcement and bring about the legalization of autonomous drones and robots within the States, leaving Robocop's performance as is could even be a good marketing ploy: "See how much good Robocop has done? Well, we can do even better with pure robots!"
** They want to prove how much ''better'' their robots would be to human police. If Robocop performs only slightly better than a human cop, the government might not be as into the idea of buying into such impressive tech for a marginally small difference. Proving how much ''radically better'' Robocop is would push the swap that much better.

** Sellars himself says "I don't know how to sell 'okay.'" He wants a specific level of performance for his product, whether that's what would actually be best in that situation or not, and refuses to move forward until what he perceives as a problem is solved. It's part of the point of the movie, what the big corporations think the people want as opposed to what they actually want. Later, when reviewing focus-group tested designs for Robocop's release, Sellars himself says "Nine time out of ten, people don't know what they want until you give it to them." While he may have a point, it's also very revealing of modern corporate strategy: This is what we'll do, and the people will like it, and if they don't too bad because we're the only game in town."
** When Dr. Norton shows Sellars the compiled performance data, the robot scored a 98.4% efficency in the simulations, whereas Murphy only had 23.5, so the difference wasn't just slight.

** Also it's kind of the point. As pointed out on the main page unbiased robots controlled but highly biased creators is an allegory for lawmakers exempting themselves from the rules they create.

** Wehn Dr. Norton shows Sellars the compiled performance data, the robot scored a 98.4% efficency in the simulations, whereas Murphy only had 23.5, so the difference wasn't just slight.

* Why do Maddox and the CEO make such a huge deal about Murphy's performance being slightly lower than the robot in the same situation? Those robots are illegal to deploy within the States, so from a market perspective this comparison is a moot point. Omnicorp is not trying to sell Robocop based on the performance, but the human element.