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: 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.
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.
