“Is Alex Murphy a cop dreaming that he is a robot, or is he a robot that only dreamed it was a cop? The question isn’t answered in either iteration of RoboCop — not in Paul Verhoeven’s gonzo original, and not in this remake by Brazilian director José Padilha.”

— "All Man, All Machine, All Cop: The Enhanced Personhood of ‘RoboCop’," Claire L. Evans, Grantland

Being inundated with science fiction of all types makes me unusually bristle at the idea brought up in this edition of Grantland's The Futurist. I'm not a fan at all of Diet Robocop but it has a scene as haunting to me now as when I saw disassembled and writhing cyborg in Robocop 2.

Nü-Alex Murphy demands to be shown how much of his new body is a suit and how much of him is physically left. Without hesitation, Diet Robocop's creator shows him:

“This scene has an existential color that is muted, and eventually bled out, by the rest of the movie. Without his mechanical body, RoboCop is little more than a brain in a jar. With it, he’s a neurological passenger perched on top of a big machine; as such, he can’t objectively know if the external world — the lab, his family, Detroit’s criminal element — is real. ”

— "All Man, All Machine, All Cop: The Enhanced Personhood of ‘RoboCop’," Evans, Grantland

A.D. Police Files, a 1990s cyberpunk anime about a police force that fought rogue robots and leveled the city doing so, had their own take on this in "The Man Who Bites His Tongue." An officer is critically injured and his last functioning organs--his tongue and brain--are put into a robot. A newly minted tank that can go one-on-one with other unstoppable machines that reminds himself of his humanity by biting his tongue.

Naturally, His evil creator has plans to scrap him after he performs poorly by acting more mechanical than human after the public reject the idea of a man inside a machine. This is the same public that deals with literal miles of property damage and explosions on a daily basis from machines so the future has a low tolerance for failure.

So, our cyborg overdoses on a drug that inhibits his emotions, goes into a delusion he's with his girlfriend while he actually slaughters his fellow officers. He recovers enough to beg his girlfriend to shoot him with (conveniently) an anti-tank rifle in the tongue so he can feel enough pain to die.

Both the mouth and gun are a reference to the original Robocop when one of the criminals suggests they "aim for the mouth" with their own anti-armor ordinance as they hunt an injured Robocop and Lewis in an abandoned factory. The joke being they think its face is human, but an earlier remark from an OCP official that the only organic components to Robocop are parts of Alex Murphy's brain and his face stretched across a metal skull.

Maybe because we've had 27 years to digest it in pop culture, but the overwhelming feeling of Robocop is it is not Alex Murphy. It learns to call itself Murphy, it learns to respond to Murphy and it learns to process emotions like revenge and anger but Robocop isn't Alex Murphy.

Throughout the original trilogy Robocop became morecomfortable performing how it assumes Alex Murphy would do. Why refer to Robocop as it when I refer to the character from A.D. Police Files as him? Robocop has never "felt" pain in any of the versions shown. The ongoing joke is Robocop may call itself Murphy, but it doesn't hesitate to strap on a jet pack and a machine gun in place of an arm. It also looks awesome to kids that want to play with action figures.

Diet Robocop makes a second leap with its ending where Robocop overrides programming due to "humanity." Previously the best it could do was wait to have a Prime Directive switched off or the cyborg equivalent of deleting system 32, which is shoving a spike into an electrical socket. Diet Robocop wants you to know deep down that Robocop has flesh and is Alex Murphy. The original had to force you to accept maybe the man in the man-machine was just as artificial and just as adept at evolving its software to appease the masses.

Spike Jonze's Her takes this to the emotional level. Diet Robocop goes out of its way to assure you the Murphies will stay together and be a nuclear family model for the Singularity. But before that, it was the Noid with an automatic weapon.

Robocop is aware it is Alex Murphy 2.0. As an operating system and a being, which was something the original Diet Robocop script got into, the stages of death are essentially the same as becoming a futuristic hybrid. The original Murphy's dying moments turned to fear and acceptance before being reborn. This acceptance, along with a random mention in Robocop 2 that Murphy's "faith" kept him from committing suicide as Robocop, breeds a better operating system. It's a gradual transformation as Robocop accepts it is no longer Murphy, brushing off steel girders or instantly accessing data and Clarence Boddicker's throat with the same spike. Taking this further, Robocop is both OCP's crowning achievement and an ever-lasting fluke like a sentient Slinky.

I lost count after the tenth penis exploded and the rapist thumbed the gaping wound for the camera. Scene 27, a re-imagining of the second introduction we have to the reborn Alex Murphy in Robocop, is over the top and comically violent. It is exactly the "joke" that Paul Verhoeven was making when he unironically refers to his monster as an "American Jesus."

It's part of Our Robocop Remake by members of the Channel 101 community. Part of the joke in remaking it is how low-rent you can go to still capture the look and feel of Robocop.

SFW Version

Scene 27 is a second, darkly comic introduction to this machine that deals with problems (here's a rapist) as efficiently as possible (shoot him in the dick). From there, when the second rapist enters with his cock out there's a brief moment of surprise on Robocop's face. The third time? Just another trigger pull. When the full stampede happens, there's no turning back on the weirdness and violence we have to embrace until the last rapist shouts, "Just fucking do it already."

Before that violence is golden and soft. Team Tiger Awesome interprets Murphy's "crucifixion" as dance, ED-209 is controlled by a puppeteer that gets kicked in the crotch and the Detroit Police locker room is a crudely animated joke. Our Robocop Movie is a sweded--a made-up term popularized with Be Kind Rewind's low-fi remakes-within-a-film--homage that doesn't try to change itself and abandon the story like today's Robocop (née Diet Robocop).

Gondry's own version of Robocop from 2007.

Diet Robocop promises the same great taste we remember with Robocop. Disregard the fact most of the younger audience knew Robocop not only through film, but also through cheap Canadian TV, two cartoons and another cheap Canadian TV Movie series. Going as far to say Diet Robocop "feels much more like a meditative character study than an energetic techno-thriller" seems pointless. Even if you're going to change the plot around, why not call it something different and rely on a title that barely belongs to your film?

If you're calling a movie Robocop you immediately play on the meaning of that. It means "I buy that for a dollar," the immediately familiar theme song and not answering who is exactly in charge (is it a program with a human consciousness, is it a human stuck in a machine, is it Johnny Depp as The Lawnmower Man?). What you're left with after finishing a Diet Robocop is "it's kind of like every other stupid PG-13 action movie of our time, except, you know, the Emotional Robotic Killing Machine part is something this potential franchise owns."

Our Robocop Movie relies on the key strength of a reboot: interpretation and adaptation. Target practice becomes a duet, animation arrives to stand in for effects and what does ED-209 see before it dies? It goes beyond minor ideas like reversing the question of Robocop's humanity. One of the strongest segments--Emil bathed in toxic waste--doesn't make a joke but instead drags out the character's death into a psychosis that only Bixby Snyder can help him out. What was a 20-second sequence in the original becomes the last moments of a droopy-fleshed man that goes splat.

Comparing Diet Robocop and Our Robocop Remake are like looking at Diet Coke and Cheerwine. One is a pale imitation of an original product. The other knows it is different from the original, but it shares similar traits (being delicious with Indian rum, being delicious without Indian rum).

Also Diet Robocop eats shit.

Watch Our Robocop Remake.