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 Mole
Alien (1979)

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.


Sigourney Weaver and Ian Holm in Alien.

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.