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: C-3PO and R2-D2 QUOTE: “It wasn’t my fault, sir, please don’t deactivate me. I told R2-D2 not to go, but he’s faulty, malfunctioning. Kept babbling on about his mission.”
—C-3PO to Luke Skywalker after R2-D2 escapes to search for Obi-Wan Kenobi and deliver Princess Leia’s message.
While many robot tales aim to instill robo-phobia, the first installment of Star Wars treated audiences to a softer and completely humorous side of their mechanical personalities with the quaint and quirky relationship of the ‘droid’ characters R2-D2 and C-3PO. At first glance, they are an unusual pair — the robot equivalent of Bert and Ernie. With a spindly gold body and the gait of a toddler, Threepio plays the anxious prude complete with prissy, butler-esque speech, while Artoo, a squat, blue and silver barrel, is the robot’s robot, a courageous fixer who talks in a digital symphony of chirps and whistles.
It’s chatterbox vs. music box, and this dynamic provides comfort and comic relief throughout the Star Wars films — their constant bickering reminiscent of our own delightfully dysfunctional relationships. When a badly damaged Artoo is rescued in the film, Threepio pleads with Han Solo: “You must repair him, sir! If any of my circuits or gears will help, I’ll gladly donate them.” Threepio is willing to give up his virtual kidneys for Artoo — now that’s love.
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.
