80 Years Of Robots In Hollywood Options

[noorie]

The Eyes of the State
Metropolis (1927)

ROBOT:Maria

QUOTE: "There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."
—Maria, the leader of the underground world of the workers, calling out to her followers.


Alfred Abel and Rudolf Klein-Rogge in Metropolis.

Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece set many of the ground rules for the sci-fi epics to come, not just in the way it depicted a dystopic future, but also the way it dealt with mad scientists and of course, their creations.

Depicting a world in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are literally divided by the Earth's surface — the elitists living above ground and the workers living in the dark, dank caverns beneath the surface — Maria is a robot used by those in power to pry their way into the workers' world. A silver machine created in a secret lab, Maria takes on the face and characteristics of the female leader of that underground world, the one who the workers trust and rally around. By controlling the robot, the surface-dwellers manage to control the underground populace, turning Maria's words of uprising into words of reassurance: Get back to work, and be happy.

One of the very first big-screen depictions of a robot in this, the first great sci-fi film, is that of a mole and an imposter; of an enemy that can't be defeated, much less identified. For so many of the movie robots to come, Maria was the defining transition from the robots of sci-fi literature to the artificial intelligence of the sci-fi movie.

[noorie]

The Psycho
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

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.


Hal 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey.

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.