Movie Review: RoboCop 2014

Warning: Spoilers!  Not spoilers as in too many plot details, but spoilers about how this is yet another Hollywood Liberal Tomato.

When this movie came out in theatres I didn't go to see it because I thought it would just be another completely lame attempt to cash in on a popular movie.  The original 1987 RoboCop was a fantastic movie- any re-make would necessarily be much less.

I watched the new RoboCop by myself first to make sure it wasn't inappropriate for my kids and was pleasantly surprised. This really is a completely different story than the '87 RoboCop. And as entertainment it's not bad.  It's much more serious than the original, but honestly it's better written.  The dialog is better.

Unfortunately, RoboCop 2014 suffers from the rot of the liberal mindset much much worse than the original.

The basic premise of RoboCop 2014 is that the evil Corporation (backed by FoxNews) wants to replace policemen with Terminator-like robots, but Senate Democrats won't allow it. This is laid out in an early scene between the evil CEO of The Corporation and the heroic senatorial homage to Harry Reid and Barney Frank:

Senator Dreyfuss: I don't care how sophisticated these machines are, Mr. Sellars. A machine does not know what it feels like to be human. It can't understand the value of human life. Why should it be allowed to take one? To legislate over life and death, we need people who understand right from wrong. What do your machines feel?
CEO Sellars: Well, they feel no anger. They feel no prejudice. They feel no fatigue, which makes them ideal for law enforcement. Putting these machines on the streets will save countless American lives.
Senator Dreyfuss: You're evading the question.
CEO Sellars: No, I'm not.
Senator Dreyfuss: Yes, you're evading the question. I asked what do these machines feel? If one of them killed a child, what would it feel?
CEO Sellars: Nothing.
Senator Dreyfuss: And that's the problem. That's why 72% of Americans won't stand for a robot pulling the trigger. 

This little scene exposes the #1 hallmark of liberals: They find feeling to be so much more important than thinking. What would a good human cop feel after killing a child?  Guilt, remorse, possibly even suicidal. So? How does that possibly make anything better? If the robot can tell the difference between a toy gun and a real gun in the hands of a child and is thus less likely to shoot the child to begin with, wouldn't that be a clear advantage?

But more generally, why would you even give a robot a gun? You could easily make it armored against the small arms it would encounter on the street, so it wouldn't need to shoot bad guys at all- it could just walk up to them and take their guns away and then handcuff them.

And, as long as we're doing some actual thinking there certainly wouldn't need to be a law against armed robots on the streets of America.  It would be virtually impossible to convince any corporate CEO to put a gun in the hand of their product for one simple reason: Product liability. Look at the billions Toyota has had to pay out just because they put a gas pedal in the "hands" of a machine.

Overall, the premise of RoboCop is "the need to put a man in the machine."  That's a really good idea- based on what we're seeing in the movie it would be easy for OCP to make Iron Man-style suits. And with that even the human police would need to shoot a heckuva lot less.

I liked the new RoboCop, it was interesting entertainment. But the overall statement that "technology is bad because it doesn't feel" was certainly irritating. Especially because it was a horse they kept beating long after it was dead.

Right at the very beginning of the film we see a guitarist with a pair of very Terminator-like (matter of fact, why isn't James Cameron suing them?) prosthetic arms attempt to play an acoustic guitar.  Everything goes well and he successfully plucks out a classical piece... until he becomes emotional.  And then the arms begin to glitch because oh, no! technology is incompatible with feeling.  "You're doing fine, just keep trying," the good doctor who invented the arms tells him.  "I have to feel to play," is the reply. And so, the whole endeavor is doomed to failure because emotion is incompatible with technology.

Man, that really sucks for all the keyboard players who play synthesizers.  And what about Devo?! Buncha unfeeling robots, I guess.

Much, much later the good doctor attempts to load a database into RoboCop.  Things go horribly awry, he can't handle that much data, and RoboCop turns into a limp basket case.
"I can fix this!" the doc proclaims.  "Just dial down his emotions!"
"Dopamine (technobabble for emotions) reduced to twenty percent!" His assistant replies.
"Not enough! More!"
"Dopamine level at ten percent!"
"MORE! Take it to two percent!"
And at two percent emotion RoboCop is rude to his own family but he can make arrests.  The machine is working.

Late in the movie RoboCop manages to fight off their emotional, er, dopamine inhibitor and starts to feel again.
"How is he doing that?!" The assistant shouts (this person was cast for their shouting ability).
"I don't know," the doctor replies incredulously, and the scene is lame enough for me to fleetingly wonder if the doc was actually going to say "perhaps he has a wocket in his pocket!"

Actually, the movie went somewhere even lamer than that.  Due to the miracle of all-powerful emotion RoboCop had feelings and the machine somehow worked anyway!  Yay!  *Retch*.