Movies robots aren't just mindless automatons. They can often be metal marvels with their own charismatic personalities. TIME looks at cinema's long tradition of smart silver screen machines.
ROBOTS: Terminators QUOTE: “I’ll Be Back.”
—One of the Terminator machine’s few but most memorable conversational utterances.
Before The Terminator, movie robots, while almost always our enemy, had distinct limitations. They could always disguise themselves as humans and avoid detection, but they were often clumsy, cumbersome and slow-moving constructs — not all that unlike the slow-moving bloodthirsty zombies of horror films.
But in The Terminator, with the awesome body-building barbarian Arnold Schwarzenegger, director and co-writer James Cameron gave us something we’d never seen before. As an indestructible machine sent back from the future, the Terminator did not need to eat or sleep but existed only to fulfill one solitary mission: to kill you.
In 1991, Cameron took that concept even further in Terminator 2, where another robot with the exact same mission was not built out of steel but of liquid metal, capable of shifting shapes and almost impossible to destroy with conventional weapons.
In the process, Cameron, Schwarzenegger and co. gave us a new way of seeing robots, as machines that would one day overrun humanity, and travel back to the past with a relentless and unstoppable quest of destroying their masters. Unlike puny humans, who must sleep and eat and feel fear and exhaustion, these Terminators have no needs, no wants, no remorse — only an objective. For millions of moviegoers, the idea of the robot was brought into the modern realm, into the computer age, with a vengeance.
ROBOT: Sonny QUOTE: “I am unique.”
—Sonny, upon realizing special features his creator included in his own design that made him slightly more advanced than all other NS5 robots.
Adapted from the Cold War-era stories by Isaac Asimov, I, Robot feeds from our worst fears and asks: what would happen if robots controlled every aspect of our lives, from commerce and public safety to handy housework? Yes, they’d work more efficiently than humans, but they would also lack our values, logic and reasoning.
These fears are harbored by a troubled and bigoted cop, Del Spooner. Spooner hasn’t trusted robots since one plucked him out of dangerous waters but let a little girl drown. The robot had calculated that Spooner had a higher chance of survival. In Spooner’s view the honorable choice would’ve been to save the child. “A human being would’ve known that,” he says.
Spooner’s concerns prove to be well-founded as the NS5s, the newer and more cognitive models of helper bots, rebel against the trusted older NS4s, wreaking havoc on the humans they were created to protect and serve.
Sonny, an NS5 model who was programmed personally by the founding father of all robot technology, manages to develop higher mental abilities such as dreaming and reasoning. In the end, when the good guys, both man and machine, are holding their own against rabid attack bots, Sonny is capable of making a “logical” choice — proving that it’s Spooner who may have to reprogram his prejudices.
