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.
ROBOT: Ash QUOTE: “I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.”
—Ash, science officer of the commercial starship Nostromo after being exposed as an ‘artificial person,’ expressing the crew’s odds of survival against the creature.
The alien may have created the suspense in Ridley Scott’s Alien, but it was the robot that caused the suspicion. Alien revisited the fears of 2001 and further advanced the idea that the real nature of robots, if left to their own devices, is to destroy humankind.
The crew of an outer space mining colony ship figures that out the hard way. Already coping with a 9 ft. acid-bleeding angry E.T. onboard their ship, they learn that disguised among them is an ‘artificial person’ named Ash, sent along by the mission’s financiers in the event of just this sort of close encounter. Ash’s top secret instructions are to study, preserve and return the lifeform at all costs, even at the risk of the crew.
Hollywood’s view of robots in this movie is that we don’t yet know how to program something as unquantifiable as our humanity, and, no matter how advanced robotics gets, we probably never will. Of course, the creature leaves you frightened, but to leave you feeling deeply disturbed this movie taps into our fears of finding out that our human-like inventions have no real humanity at all.
ROBOT: Rachel QUOTE: “Replicants are like any other machine — they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit it’s not my problem.”
—Blade runner Rick Deckard speaking with Rachel before either realized the truth about her.
Very often robo-plots go like this: A group of humans discovers that an artificial look-alike lurks among them and they have to determine if it’s dangerous, trustworthy or lovable. (see Alien, Terminator, Stepford Wives). But in the Los Angeles of 2019 created by director Ridley Scott, the characters face the opposite scenario. The humans know who the robots are, but the robots themselves, called replicants, are the ones kept in the dark. Admired by their inventors but neglected by the rest of the world, replicants are deemed unfit for society, declared illegal and targeted to be “retired” by special cops called blade runners.
The replicants’ Dr. Frankenstein is Eldon Tyrell and his Tyrell Corporation; the stiff but beautiful Rachel is Tyrell’s latest and greatest experiment. Her makers implanted her brain with a lifetime’s worth of memories — memories that in reality belong to Tyrell’s niece. She also falls for none other than the blade runner assigned to kill her, raising questions about the human element of love, and the love element in humans.
