Bigger. Faster. Stronger.

Robocop. To be completely honest, I never thought I would come across this film in an academic setting. I mean, seriously, it's ROBOCOP. The first time I saw this movie was when I was about seven years old. Even then I remember thinking that it was a bit corny. Now, thirteen years later... well, yeah, it's still a really corny movie.

That being said, it actually seems a lot more poignant in this day and age. Technology is actually starting to get to the point where we can effectively replace lost limbs. Mobility is a bit limited, of course, but more and more breakthroughs are being made in the science of the brain. Hell, just the other day I cam across an article about how they have made an artificial hand that can actually detect the difference between hot and cold. It gives me hope that in my lifetime losing a limb will be only a minor setback.

What interested me most in the film though was the whole idea of bringing someone back to life. In this area the film seemed to stay the most vague. After all, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering they never even mentioned anything about reprogramming his brain or anything. It makes me wonder how they transformed his corpse into a super cop. Because if, and this is a big assumption, they used him as a cop because he once was a cop, then it stands to reason that they (being his makers) should have expected more of his past life to show up at some point.

This leads to the whole theme of humanity. The two opposing business ideas in the film consisted of one total robot and one cyborg. The idea seemed to be that ROBOCOP was superior because he was based on human anatomy whereas ED-209 was weak because he was too bulky and poorly programmed. What confused me, however, was that everyone seemed so shocked and upset that ROBOCOP began to show human emotions and traits. I thought that the whole point of making this robot out of a human was precisely so that he would have necessary human traits. Apparently they hadn't taken consciousness into account.

Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" was a fun read. Perhaps I was supposed to take it seriously, but in my head I pictured it as being written by a robot who was angry at human society. The idea that we are all cyborgs now due to our increasing dependency on technology seems to have a certain amount of truth behind it, but the way it was written made me laugh because of just how seriously it was taken. Nevertheless, it calls to mind so many of the dystopian futures that sci-fi films like to present. Being a child of the Internet-age, the Matrix is the first film to come to mind. Unlike so many, I am not frightened at all at the thought that we are slowly integrating technology into our very consciousness. After all, who wouldn't want to have a direct uplink to the Internet at all times? I absolutely love the theory of mystic Collective Consciousness, and the Internet is truly bringing that to life in a tangible way.