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"Holy Christ, there's nothing left!"
- It's not as initially graphic as Alex's shotgun torture in RoboCop (1987) but his first "death" here is still very abrupt with the bomb going off and knocking him out cold. Alex's condition is shown on a screen to Mrs. Murphy for the audience to see too with him severely disfigured from the car bomb, severe burns and loss of limbs all over. Mrs. Murphy is told that time is not on her side, and that becoming an experimental cyborg is his best hope for survival.
- Alex Murphy waking up as Robocop has him paralyzed electronically. The notion that you can not move unless somebody sees fit to unlock your components can be frightening by itself. Then, Dennett Norton shows Murphy the "gravity of his situation". Murphy's dis-assembling is the film's highlight in Nightmare Fuel. It gets to the point where even Murphy himself is too visibly shocked to see what'd happened to his body after the Car Bomb that critically wounded him. And they don't cut away, showing what was left of his body in every detail.
- If you think about it, Murphy's situation in the remake is even bleaker and more desperate than in the original. The old Robo at least was highly autonomous and could survive on his own for a time, and once his true self resurfaced he remained Murphy. In the remake, Murphy is completely dependent on the tech in Omnicorp's labs, as he needs every day to have his blood cleansed and imbued with all the chemicals and nutrients needed for his organic parts to survive. And the fact that they can toy with his mind so easily and... wirelessly is frightening. Hell, even in the times Robocop is kicking ass, it is not actually Murphy doing the ass-kicking, but the combat software taking over and lying to his brain.
- The situation for Murphy's wife and son is horrifying too. While Murphy can at least take comfort that his loved ones are still the same people they always were they have to cope with the sight of his face staring out of a giant metal robot thing, and the fact that his emotions appear to be under control of others.
- While it didn't happen in the film itself the implication that Murphy's mechanical parts would act with the rest of him dead is kinda shivering.
- The ED-209s, hulking armored walkers the size of a semi truck and packing high caliber automatic weapons, are programmed to consider a knife-wielding teen-aged boy a threat that warrants machine-gunning him to death. Even if one assumes that the boy was suicidal and like the other suicide bombers was intending on getting himself killed live on international television, it's still a bit of overkill. It's a chilling showcase that these ED-209s aren't the self-destructive idiots of the original trilogy.
- By extension, the drone occupation of Iran. On the one hand, it is an impressive achievement, and even trivializes terrorist tactics to the point of glorifying the use of drones. On the other hand, it's an armed occupation where civilians can be gunned down for trivial circumstances, such the boy with the knife, and people could just assume any accidental deaths are typical extremists. And the rest of the world is okay with this.
- The most subtle and yet most horrific is this: When they evaluate Murphy's performance, they don't judge him by his restraint, or his adherence to procedure, or anything that a cop is supposed to utilize in the field. Instead, they just evaluate his ability to kill people quickly. A cop isn't supposed to just gun down a building full of people, he's supposed to try and get people to surrender, especially in a hostage crisis. The idea that all they evaluate him on is his ability to kill paints a nightmarish picture of what would happen if they did become the police. You want to know how you get cyberpunk dystopias? This is how.
- An even more disturbing aspect is the fact that, when they evaluate his thought procedures, they show how many steps there are in the process between seeing the target and shooting. For a human being, there's about five or six steps, or maybe a better word would be safeguards, that prevent an ordinary human being from gunning a person down in a combat situation until they're certain that person is a legitimate target. For a robot, there's two: See, and shoot. Unless the individual in question is a Red Asset, anyone with a weapon is fair game when the robot is in combat mode. Now, imagine if, for a moment, in a similar situation to the one in Iran, the subject were to encounter a child with a knife, or anything of a similar nature. Suddenly, those missing steps are really freakin' important, as they are the only things stopping a person from shooting a child to death. Had Murphy encountered something similar to that situation in Iran before he'd gained the ability to override his systems, he'd have the death of a child on his conscience, and would have been powerless to do anything but watch as, with his body on full automatic (But the wiring inside making him believe that he's in control), he puts a bullet in the child's brain.
- Worse, he would have thought that he was the one who chose to do it, because they never did tell him that it was the software controlling him. People have been driven to suicide for less.
- This becomes even more horrific in light of recent incidents with people legally licensed to carry concealed firearms being shot by police officers who mistakenly assumed they were reaching for their guns. A perfectly law-abiding citizen with a carry permit suddenly becomes a "threat" in the eyes of the robot's programming. Unless OmniCorp has some serious software upgrades for their drones, using them as American police forces turns them into walking Second Amendment rights violations.
- Never mind legal carry; what would one of those drones do if it chased a suspect into an active restaurant kitchen, or any other location where knives are used for innocent purposes? Or a shooting range? Or the home of a pregnant woman who is in the middle of cutting up food for dinner? Or a family of four sitting at a dinner table, eating a steak dinner. Depending on what the robot is programmed to consider a deadly weapon, just holding a fork in its presence could be enough for it to decide to put a bullet in your head.
- An even more disturbing aspect is the fact that, when they evaluate his thought procedures, they show how many steps there are in the process between seeing the target and shooting. For a human being, there's about five or six steps, or maybe a better word would be safeguards, that prevent an ordinary human being from gunning a person down in a combat situation until they're certain that person is a legitimate target. For a robot, there's two: See, and shoot. Unless the individual in question is a Red Asset, anyone with a weapon is fair game when the robot is in combat mode. Now, imagine if, for a moment, in a similar situation to the one in Iran, the subject were to encounter a child with a knife, or anything of a similar nature. Suddenly, those missing steps are really freakin' important, as they are the only things stopping a person from shooting a child to death. Had Murphy encountered something similar to that situation in Iran before he'd gained the ability to override his systems, he'd have the death of a child on his conscience, and would have been powerless to do anything but watch as, with his body on full automatic (But the wiring inside making him believe that he's in control), he puts a bullet in the child's brain.
