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: HAL 9000 QUOTE: “The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, fullproof and incapable of error.”
—The HAL 9000 computer answering a question about his vast abilities in an interview.
In Stanley Kubrick’s epic sci-fi classic, HAL 9000 is the central computer in control of every aspect of the spaceship. HAL gets into a power struggle with the ship’s captain, Dave Bowman, after making a tiny little computing error. HAL, a model of artificial intelligence, claims to be so immeasurably perfect that any mistake on his part weighs heavy in the eyes of the crew; they come to believe that their onboard version of the world’s most perfect computer is actually a lemon. It’s when they plot to disconnect him that they get a full display of crazed emotion from the big brain of the ship. Speaking in his signature monotone, HAL explains his mutiny to Dave: “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”
HAL’s AI-gone-awry was just the beginning of the computer as villain. Decades later, HAL’s fingerprints can be found on films from Strange Brew to The Matrix. Now that’s reliable.
ROBOTS: Almost every wife in Stepford, Connecticut QUOTE: “I won’t be here when you get back! … There’ll be somebody with my name! And she’ll cook and clean like crazy, but she won’t be me! … She’ll be like one of those robots in Disneyland!”
—Joanna Eberhardt, a new arrival to Stepford, trying to explain her conspiracy theory to a psychiatrist.
Robot movies often terrify, none perhaps in the manner of The Stepford Wives, which explored a man’s ideal mate and a feminist’s worst nightmare. This film introduced a completely new robot concept to the big screen: a human reproduction equal parts Doris Day and Playboy Bunny. For female moviegoers still reeling from Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, these household sexbots are the ultimate enemy, wholly consumed by vanity, cleanliness, cooking and pleasure. What’s worse, these robo-Barbies look so realistic their own children don’t even notice the difference.
Imagine the horror of liberated mother and wife Joanna Eberhardt, who reluctantly leaves Manhattan to settle down in suburban Stepford, Conn., with her husband and two kids. Joanna blames water contamination for the hyper-domestic behavior until she watches one of her neighbors malfunction — freakishly repeating the same household task over and over again (while eerily simulating the tedious repetition of domestic chores).
But the Stepford robots are not the real enemy, men are the true problem — the Stepford husbands to be exact. While the men belong to the Stepford Men’s Association, the women belong nowhere. In this film, if you’re a woman (human or otherwise), you’re doomed.
