10 "Important" Movie Characters Who Were Mere Plot Devices

5. Anne Lewis - RoboCop

I tried to go about this by initially sidestepping the obvious 'sassy female role' that Anne Lewis fulfils in the original (and far superior) Robocop but I found myself at a loss. We never find out much about her as a person, only that she's a sister doing it for herself. Not a bad thing by any means but we can all agree that it is pretty one dimensional. He place in the narrative can be best summed up as viewer surrogate, allowing us to humanize the robotic policeman we spend the duration of the film with. Without her we'd just have the senseless violence and endlessly quotable one-liners but that doesn't mean that there's anything more to her character than an audience stand-in cleverly executed. While it may sound like an insult to the character, in this case I'd argue that it isn't; Anne Lewis may be a thinly veiled plot device as opposed to a fully fleshed out character but without her the movie would have devolved into a parody of itself devoid of emotional depth. We need someone to latch on to in fiction and Lewis was the empty vessel of choice for Robocop. This technique saved the writers having to add any real emotional depth to Alex Murphy post overkill. All credit to Peter Weller's mouth acting but there's only so much you can convey through gurning.