We’ve already reported on the RoboCop panel that took place at Comic-Con last week, but the film’s press conference was interesting too, with director Jose Padilha discussing the film’s philosophical themes and suggesting that the film will be more than just a sci-fi action flick. Here's what he had to say on the subject:

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“The original RoboCop was very ironic and very violent and it was a critique of fascism, at least in the way I saw it. But it was also very smart, and dealt with concepts not everyone caught onto, but they were there. The relationship between fascism and robotics, for example: it’s very clear it’s going to become more important as time goes by."If you think about the war in Vietnam, or the war in Iraq even, the war in Vietnam ended because American soldiers were dying. It’s the same thing that’s happening in Iraq – we’ve got to get out of there, right? Now if you picture the same war with robots – autonomous robots instead of soldiers – then you don’t have the political pressure at home. So there is a relationship between being able to use robots for war and fascism. The issue is already being posed by the ability to use drones.“The other part of it is about what it feels like to be a robot as opposed to being a human. Say you have footage of the Hiroshima bomb exploding, and then you play the footage backwards. So the bomb goes up into the plane, the plane flies back. At the end of this you are going to end up at Harry Truman’s table, and he makes the call to drop the bomb. Because Harry Truman is a man, he has free will and he can make choices. We can argue about whether he made the right choice or not. Same thing goes for a criminal. If a criminal shoots someone in the street, we say this is a man, he knows what he’s doing, he takes someone’s life, and we can argue about whether he’s right or wrong. Now once you replace men with autonomous robots, accountability goes out the window. Say you have a robot in the Amazon forest hunting drug-runners, and the robot is there and nobody can see what it’s doing and it goes to shoot the drug dealers and it kills a kid. Now who is responsible for that? This is a huge philosophical issue that’s going to be debated and in the media more and more as robots evolve."It's interesting stuff from the director, suggesting the new RoboCop won't just be dumb fun (though he did add with a laugh: “It also has gun-fights!”) It wasn't all serious, though - the cast exchanged funny stories about the shoot. We learned that Star Joel Kinnaman – who plays Alex Murphy/RoboCop – loved the first movie so much so that he watched it 25 or 30 times and was practicing his robo-walk long before he got the part. He checked out 30 minutes into RoboCop 2 and didn’t see third film or TV series. Samuel L. Jackson, meanwhile, was excited by the prospect of appearing in a modern-day RoboCop because of advancements in CGI and robotics.The remake will spend more time with Alex Murphy when he’s at work as an undercover cop and when he’s at home with his family. Jose jokingly said he missed the drug dealers and corrupt cops that he came into contact with while working on the Elite Squad movies in Brazil. Joel most enjoyed shooting the sequence in which Alex wakes up for the first time and experiences the disbelief of his new reality – a scene in which he works closely with Gary Oldman.Former Batman Michael Keaton had no sympathy for Kinnaman in the air-conditioned RoboCop suit, claiming “I was the pioneer of bad suits.” The next film will address the question of whether RoboCop is now a property: is he owned by OmniCorp? The remake won’t feature the classic line “Your move, creep”, but does retain a couple of lines from the original.And finally, Jose doesn’t know what the film’s certificate will be, as that decision is down to the MPAA. But he said he is making it for the largest audience possible, which is PG-13. He explained “This whole idea that RoboCop has to be R rated because the original was amazingly violent and R rated [is something] I never really bought into. Dark Knight was PG-13, so you can get away with a lot.”RoboCop hits screens in early 2014.

Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN in the UK and saw some cool stuff on the RoboCop set that will be hitting the site soon. He can be found talking nonsense on both Twitter and MyIGN