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 Romantic Interest
Blade Runner (1982)

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.


Sean Young in Blade Runner.

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.