Does RoboCop get paid and pay taxes?

The TV series constructed a lighter version for Richard Eden to wear, so it's certainly possible. It could probably be made even lighter today.

In the action scenes, sure, but for dialogue scenes and the like, it makes more sense to use a physical costume. CGI is good for creating images that can't be created for real, but for something that can be created for real, like the RoboCop costume, the real thing is always going to be better. If there's an issue with Weller's ability to wear the suit, then his motion-captured lower face could be matted onto the double who wears the suit onstage. VFX works best when you mix techniques and choose the best one for each particular goal, rather than trying to do every single thing with the same technique.

I don't think Weller would be needed for performance capture for Robo's overall movement. The reason for performance capture is to replicate an actor's distinctive performance style, but RoboCop's movement style wasn't really Weller's; it was created by his movement coach, choreographer Moni Yakim. It's a style of movement that was learned for the movies by Weller, Robert John Burke, and their stunt doubles, and for the series by Richard Eden and his stunt double Ken Quinn. (And not learned by Page Fletcher of the Prime Directives miniseries, which is why he flailed around ridiculously like a kid in an oversized Halloween costume.) So if anything, it would be better for the suit to be worn, and for any necessary performance capture to be done, by a dancer or stunt performer who could duplicate the official RoboCop body language invented by Yakim.

 

Am I the only soul here that has a soft spot for the Robocop reboot movie?

 

Yes.

 

Oh....... Oh well at least I have my blanky

 

It wasn't bad. I liked its fresh take on the material and its deeper exploration of who Murphy was pre-Robo, but it didn't quite hold together. Ultimately it wasn't really about anything -- its attempts to touch on the ethics of drone warfare and the surveillance state and so on were just lip service. And Gary Oldman's character lacks consistency, changing from good to bad at the convenience of the script.

The remake is easily the second-best RoboCop movie to date (not counting the TV pilot movie), but that's only because 2 & 3 were so weak.

 

The 2014 remake had no soul, like ED-209. I wouldn't even buy it for a dollar.

 

Well lets say Robo Cop is real, that Alex Murphy signed that Organ Doner card, and is "Legaly" dead..
OCP puts his brain and a few other parts in a robot body..
Not overly concerned with the initial question.. does he pay taxes.. Maybe, if the second part of the question is Yes.. he gets paid.. if not.. there's nothing to tax!
For the get paid part.. being a prototype cyborg.. his maintence costs would be millions a year.. sooo.. I doubt he'd get paid..
What it does start is.. who owns your brain? In the remake, the wife signs the waiver to make him a cyborg.. so.. is he OCP Property, or just an employee? Thats where the Lawyers etc. come in,
Now, lets take Ghost in the Shell, particuly Arise series.. Initially the Major is with some army unit, and the army unit is paying for her body, pretty much on the brain left.. and in the series, the army pretty much owns her because her body requires a ton of high cost maintence.. so.. at the top end an indentured servent, at the bottom end a Slave.. She eventually gets her freedom and a healthy bank account to do the maintenece cost.

It brings up a good chat topic.. in the future, some of us may end up as cyborgs.. The rich could afford it, but do some people who need a robot body.. or robot body parts sign away our life to some company to afford the surgery and maintence?
So in the end Robo is technically alive.. his brain is still kicking, so what then.. what happens in 10.. 20 years? a newer body? what if OCP goes tits up? then what? alot of ideas and stories to mess with

 

This isn't some future conjecture. Many people today already have bionic limbs, implants to restore hearing or sight, etc. So we already know how that works. They're medical equipment, no different from a pacemaker or a hip joint replacement or the like. They're paid for by your medical insurance, so you own them. I mean, think about it -- if you couldn't afford to pay the doctors, they wouldn't do the surgery in the first place. Any implants that get put in your body were paid for up front, so they belong to you.

So in a dystopian society where there was no universal health insurance and people couldn't afford to pay for cyborg surgery, the likely result wouldn't be a lifetime of indentured servitude for poor cyborgs who didn't own their own body parts; it would be a society where only the rich get to be cyborgs.

 

I don’t think he gets paid anymore than police cars get paid.

 

One could say he gets "paid" in all the services OCP provides for his maintenance and upkeep -- recharging, repairs, sustenance for his organic components, equipment upgrades, etc. Basically the equivalent of providing his room and board at the precinct where he "lives."

 

If he could paid I could see OCP garnishing his salary to recover costs.

 

So his pay packet would be 25 cents

 

For all the good he does Robo has more than earned the cost of his upkeep.

 

Would be interesting to see a story, maybe not robocop, but the idea is, you have this person, he/she either dies or signs there body away, and they get plugged into a cyborg body, either like robocop, for a purpose, or just as an experiment to see if they can.. then, say 5-10 years latter, either the company that done it went bankrupt, or it was a success and led to others being cyberized.. The initial prototype, what happens to him/her? do they spend the money and upgrade the body? or if they went bankrupt, who's going to pay for the maintence? Does someone who is already declared dead.. have any right to life? can they just be turned off?

 

It's hardly unprecedented for someone who was declared legally dead to turn up alive (e.g. because they were missing for years), so as long as they can prove their identity, they retain the same rights they had before.

The thing to keep in mind about RoboCop is that, in the original movie, the survival of Murphy's personality and memory was unplanned and unexpected. His brain was just intended as wetware to assist in the motor control and data storage of the RoboCop mechanism. It's quite different in the remake, where Murphy never actually dies and is just a guy who gets a lot of prosthetic parts attached to keep him alive and functional. The latter is far closer to how cyborgs would (and already do) exist in real life.

 

How is the miniseries..? (I never watched it...)

 

Terrible. I think I gave up less than halfway through. Page Fletcher was terrible in the role; aside from flailing around comically in a suit that was too big for him, he played Robo (and Robo was written) as just a generic wisecracking tough cop, rather than the nuanced human-AI hybrid he was in the TV series.

Also, the makers of the miniseries failed to understand that RoboCop is a comedy/satire, and so they made it ultraserious and grim. This is another reason the TV series is the only continuation I like -- because it kept the humor and social satire of the original, even if it did so in a goofier and more kid-friendly manner. (Unlike RoboCop 2, which mistook gratuitous excess for satire and the mere depiction of random ultraviolence for a punch line.)

 

The original Robocop walks a fine line between satire and seriousness. The satire is thoughtfully restrained to the newcasts, the commercials, and "I'd buy that for a dollar!" guy. I'd describe the satire as an extrapolation of American cultural decay from the 1980's, seen through the eyes of an European. Of course the script also pokes fun at corporate yuppies and the military industrial complex. It takes an intelligent director to walk that line. When people die and suffer Paul Verhoeven doesn't make light of it.

 

Well, satire and overt comedy are not the same thing. Satire is anything that holds its subject up for criticism or ridicule, and that can be done through sarcasm and irony as much as through spoof. The entire premise of RoboCop is darkly satirical -- it's a satire of American corporate power and its culture of violence, exaggerating those things to an extreme. The characters are cartoonishly broad, the situations ludicrously excessive. It's a story about corporate executives' petty infighting leading to many violent deaths and urban chaos, which is farcically disproportionate. It's not blatantly goofy, but it is absurdist.

Fundamentally, humor is nonessential to satire. There are lots of unfunny satires -- Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Animal Farm. It's about exposing and mocking absurdity, but the kind of absurdity that does real damage and makes us angry and frustrated, rather than the kind that's just funny. A satire can mock its subject in a way that's funny, of course, but it's not really satire if it doesn't make you uncomfortable with what you're seeing.

Yes. The last time I watched the films, I realized that RoboCop is a lot less lethal than people tend to assume. Most of the time, he shoots to wound, and only escalates to lethal force when the situation leaves no alternatives, which is believable for someone programmed to follow proper police procedure to the letter. That's in contrast to the stupid excess of the sequel, where every single shot RoboCop takes is an instant kill shot except for the one time when he needs to take someone alive for questioning. So the original has a balance and restraint that the sequel manifestly lacks.

 

or as the film has been described elswhere "fascism for socialists"