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]

Indestructible and Unstoppable
The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

ROBOTS: Terminators
QUOTE: "I'll Be Back."
—One of the Terminator machine's few but most memorable conversational utterances.


Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2

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.