Detroit in the original RoboCop was a crime ridden, economically deprived, pit of a city. Sadly in real life, the current state of Detroit is not far off from Verhoevens depiction. Detroit even filed for bankruptcy in 2013 and there are very little signs of recovery anytime soon. So you would think that with RoboCop being set in Detroit, it would be a no brainier for any writer or director to use Detroits plight as the backdrop for the movie. It would make a far more interesting setting than the off-the-shelf city that Jose Padilha went with. Crisp and clean, Detroit could have been LA, Chicago or a futuristic London. It was Detroit because the subtitle told us. Showing us that crime was rampant would have given the pro-robot argument in the film an extra dimension. Other than corporate greed, the viewer would have been challenged that maybe robots are necessary and that Omnicorp might be thinking about their profit margin, but maybe deploying robots is just what a city like Detroit needs. It would also have given RoboCop a few more interesting criminals to take down rather than the couple of dull scenes we were presented with. Detroit in this RoboCop looks like a pleasant place to live. We don't see any street crime take place, it's mostly sunny and it appears to have had a lot of investment. So why would Detroit need a RoboCop? A boring, clean and bland Detroit renders RoboCop unnecessary. That might be why we see RoboCop do very little in actual crime-fighting in the film. Jose Padilha missed an opportunity to make a statement about the current dire situation that some parts of America finds itself in and how big corporations can exploit that for profit. Instead we get told that America needs a robot police force but are not explicitly shown why.
