The first trailer for José Padilha's RoboCop reboot has rolled out online, giving fans the first look at how the Brazilian director plans to reinvent Paul Verhoeven's 1987 cult sci-fi action film.

The movie follows Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) - a loving husband, father and good cop - who is critically injured in the line of duty, giving the multinational conglomerate OmniCorp their chance to create a part-man, part-robot police officer.

Of course, the original movie was more than just a man in an aluminium suit shooting at things - it featured a political undercurrent as well as dark humor, intense action and over-the-top gore. It also earned two Oscar nominations.

Padilha's movie appears to hint at similar themes and although the first trailer features plenty of action, it sets out RoboCops' task - essentially to help clean-up a crime-ridden dystopian Detroit, a city very much in the throes of depression in real life.

In a new interview with the Los Angeles' Times Hero Complex website, Padilha was reminded of the original movie's politics, on which he mused, "Yes, absolutely, and we kept that. The thing that distinguishes "RoboCop" from most superhero movies is if you look at a movie like "Spider-Man" or "Iron Man," every kid wants to be Spider-Man or aspires to be Iron Man...RoboCop, he cannot touch his wife and his son, he cannot relate to humans in the way he related before he became RoboCop, so there's no aspiration to be RoboCop."

Watch the RoboCop trailer:

The ground-breaking original was also ahead of its time in that it featured fake ads for consumer products, including a board game called 'Nukem' - something Padilha was keen to retain, though from a more current and politicized angle. 

"Instead of having ads, now we have a right-wing media mogul who is Samuel L. Jackson's character, who distorts reality to his own purposes, and he talks about RoboCop all the time. So he kind of like is the parallel to the ads, but instead of being ads, it's the media itself," he explained.

RoboCop hits theaters in the U.S. on February 7, 2014.

Samuel L JacksonSamuel L Jackson Stars in RoboCop.