Line #14 Headscratchers/RoboCop2


1	* Hob's death is presented as a [[WhatASenselessWasteOfHumanLife tragedy]], but every other hardened homicidal criminal gunned down is presented as scum getting what they deserve. Am I the only one bugged by this?
2	** Hob gets sympathy points purely because he's still a kid. Plus, he's never been shown to be explicitly violent. He's more of an unscrupulous businessman than a bloodthirsty thug.
3	*** He is violent - he's shot guns repeatedly, and tried to garrot Lewis. On the other hand, we get a brief moment of FreudianExcuse, as he tries to look away during the torture scene but Cain forces him to look.
4	** You're not the only one bothered by it, no. I personally thought it was a little heavy-handed. Then again, the second film isn't exactly known for its subtlety.
5	*** Again, it's because he's ''still a child''. Yes, he's a child that's fallen in with a bad crowd and done bad things. The point is supposed to be that as a child, he still has a life ahead of him where he could make choices and move away from that life. The OP should remember a key word they used... "hardened". Every other criminal that gets gunned down is a full adult who's shown to largely revel in violence, while Hob is still mildly horrified by it... yeah, he tries to garrot Lewis, but that's hardly stabbing her or shooting her in the head. There's also the fact that the film specifically shows Robocop as mourning him ''because the kid reminds him of his son''.
6	** I agree. I don't care how old that little brat was, he deserved a death ten times as violent as everyone else's! (Which for this franchise is really saying something, amirite?)
7	** I didn't take it so much as it being tragic for his own character's sake, but because Murphy, who's there to hold his hand as he dies, was reminded earlier of his own son when he looked at Hob. He probably doesn't see too many kids in the line of duty (the occasional evil little league aside), so the association was probably still there when he found Hob bleeding to death. It's not that we're supposed to see Hob as "just a kid," it's that Murphy clearly does.
8	*** I agree that Hob brought his death on himself. Hob was the one who made the decision to leave Cain for dead, which likely factored into Robo-Cain killing Hob, the brief scene showing him ''shooting two police officers'' (heavily implying he killed one) and there was the glee he took in damaging Robocop and trying to garrote Officer Lewis (even taunting her about it: "You're looking a little out of breath bitch). Child or not, he deserved what he got.
9	*** Don't think of it as Robocop mourning that Hob-the-psycho-kid-drug-dealer is dead. Think of it as Robocop mourning that Hob-the-kid ever became Hob-the-psycho-drug-dealer in the first place.
10	** Hob had a bunch of drug dealers teaching him to not value the lives of others, dunno what your excuses are.
11	** We're meant to see Hob as a victim as well as a criminal, the scene where Cain forced him to watch them torture the dirty cop was meant to show Hob was heavily influenced/coerced by his companions and still had some humanity left. He hated Cain and left him for dead, but even without Cain around Hob is still evil at this point. I dont think we're supposed to feel bad about him dying so much as sorry for the corruption of his innocence. This is also a scene where he's forced to acknowledge [=RoboCop=]'s humanity, while previously he was shown to be reveling in dismembering him and even sadistically tried to feed him his own lubricant, so it may be slight moment of redemption for the character. That being said, I think the scene is more about Murphy than it is the kid.
12	It was less about Hob being a kid, and more about Hob reminding Robocop of his son. That's where emotional oomph of this scene lays. Remember, after Hob shot Robo earlier in the movie, he has a flashback of playing baseball with his son. Hob represented what Murphy had lost.
13	* Hob may be just a kid, but why did Robocop's programming deny a target lock when he saw him with a gun during the drug bust. He may be a kid, but he was an armed kid in commission of a crime. This wasn't Murphy choosing not to fire; this was the programming not allowing a kid to be targeted. If anything, allowing the armed kid to get away from the crime could be considered a violation of all three Prime Directives since it allowed a criminal to get away and put the public at risk. One could argue that OCP didn't want their priced creation in the news for killing a kid, but in the crapsack, dystopian world Robocop 2 exists where the Rainforest is radioactive and carjackers get electrocuted as a theft deterrent, Robo offing a kid wouldn't be noticed at all.
14	** Whatever the ethics of killing an armed criminal kid, the ''optics'' of Robocop doing so are what OCP would be concerned with. They don't want their political or corporate enemies somehow getting footage of him doing that and raising a huge stink.
15	** It was less about Hobb being a kid, and more about Hob reminding Robocop of his son.
16	* Beyond sequel escalation, why create a brand new Robocop model rather than reusing the successful prototype design? Unit 001 (Alex Murphy) was a brilliant success.
17	** They TRIED, the whole problem with the original Robocop model is that almost no one else can deal with the transformation. Murphy is an exception because his devotion to the law and his faith (this movie reveals that Murphy was a devout Catholic, and suicide is a mortal sin in Catholicism) makes the horror of his new existence bearable. Everyone else just commits suicide in despair. A prototype you cant recreate is next to useless
18	** The original project leader was also dead, with it possible Dick Jones messed with the research so they had to make a new Robocop from scratch. Also OCP wanted a new and better model, Robocop 2.0.
19	** The failed prototypes also mostly seem to be lighter and more mobile... the original's fairly slow and pretty heavy, they probably wanted something that would have similar speed and mobility to a normal human but still be as tireless and hard to kill. RoboCain went the other way, larger and more massive, specifically because Foxx went after a subject who would revel in power.
20	** Where did the Elvis guy disappear after the first act? His fate was never explained after the warehouse scene.
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22	* Loading multi-ton mecha-Cain up with an arsenal, taking him to a press conference and then waving a drug canister under his nose. WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong? Wait, Robo's turned up, lets wave his gun-safety controls under his nose.
23	** The Old Man doesn't know that Cain is a Nuke addict; it's unlikely he even knows who Doctor Faxx even used to make Robocop 2, and even if she couldn't keep that information from him, she wouldn't have told him that their hold (or more precisely, her perceived hold) was based on feeding his habit. She's too self-confident in her own good; while she's waving the remote around she's shouting at everyone "He's harmless, he's not even armed!" She clearly didn't make the logical leap that if he was already misbehaving, he would probably go a lot farther.
24	*** Indeed, when the Old Man's working with Johnson and his lawyer to plan out the damage control, Johnson suggests throwing Faxx under the bus, saying she violated their trust. The Old Man's hesitant, given his attraction to Faxx, until Johnson points out that she picked the brain, meaning the whole thing is rightly her fault. The Old Man compliments Johnson for his good thinking.
25	** Also, in what can only be a case of learning from previous mistakes, at least didn't arm the weapons systems this time.
26	* How did Cain know the code sequence that would arm his weapons?
27	** There was no code - Cain just pushes a single big, red, button then crushes the remote.
28	* Why would they show the flawed prototype [=RoboCop=] 2s?
29	** With Robocop essentially being a successful, if controversial product with the guy who spearheaded the project dead, they'd need to make more. Just as Dick Jones unveiled the ED209 to the board, the Old Man would undoubtedly want a progress report - it is his company and his money, after all. As such, they're kind-of obligated to show him how things are going.
30	** Those probably weren't full unveilings to the board like the ED-209 demonstration, more likely just little things for the lab staff like when the original Robocop came fully online in the first movie.
31	* When he raids the warehouse to kill all his former comrades, RoboCain uses his [[GatlingGood onboard machine guns]] to first shoot out the lights for his advantage. But then he lights up his onboard floodlights to hunt everyone down. While this makes him look more terrifying and monstrous, presumably he has the same ability to see using infrared that [=RoboCop=] does, and if he used that instead he'd have even more advantage as it would be harder to know exactly where he is inside the warehouse.
32	** This is Cain we're talking about -- a sadistic madman. Not a tactical genius. He probably did it specifically because it would terrify his victims.
33	** Have you ever been in a dark room when someone shines a flashlight in your face? It simultaneously blinds you and lets them see you.
34	* What the hell happened with the Old Man between the original and this movie, why is he behaving so differently? I mean, Dick Jones even reffers of that guy as a "sweet old man" who means well.
35	** Dick Jones actually mentioned he hated the Old Man, even referring to him as "Iron Butt". And given how unphased he was by the demonstration that led to an employee's extremely violent death in the first movie, he's always been like this. Delta City being delayed likely made him more agitated and more willing to cut corners morally.
36	* The previous "candidates" to be Robocop 2 all went crazy and killed themselves or had to be put down. Yet they think a batshit-insane cult leader would be a good choice? What sense does this make? Was the "reasoning" something like "he's already crazy, so becoming Robocop 2 won't make him any crazier?"
37	** Essentially, yeah. First of all, we see two and neither had to be put down, they both kill themselves. The problem with previous models was their minds being unable to handle getting turned into (largely) unfeeling cyborgs and presumably losing all they hold dear in their lives. Faxx figured a sociopathic megalomaniac who doesn't really care about anyone else and gets most of his pleasures from kiling people and the drug he's addicted to, would okay with killing people for them for said drug and the power and immortality that comes with it. Given this horribly backfires and that the overall theme of the franchise isn't that corporations are made out of inteligent and responsible people, the idea being bad isn't something to scratch one's head over.
38	* Ok, so how exactly is that Magnavolt system supposed to differentiate between a car thief and the car's owner?

Context Headscratchers / RoboCop2