Introduction: Throughout cinematic history, especially in science-fiction tales, robots have played a primary role. Throughout history and popular culture, robots have reflected the mood, social and cultural issues, and technology of their times. For example, in the Cold War 1950s, robots were generally viewed as threatening forces, but in later years reflected both the conflict and the continuity between man and machine. Robots have also functioned as both servant-helpers or oppressors of humanity, portraying the good and evil sides.

This compilation is not designed to be too strict in its choices of 'robots'. Herein are examples of various films with robotic characters.

Note: The films that are marked with a yellow star are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the 100 Greatest Films.

The Iron Giant (1999)

Iron Giant

Brad Bird's enchanting animated Cold War parable, adapted from poet Ted Hughes' 1968 The Iron Man, told about the friendship between a 50-foot alien robot (voice of Vin Diesel) with a steam-shovel mouth from outer space and a young, isolated, fatherless preteen Hogarth Hughes (voice of Eli Marienthal); the "iron giant" was originally created to be an inter-stellar weapon, but whose nature was changed due to crashing into the ocean during a hurricane; it was capable of munching metal as food, flying, and speaking a few English words; the young boy told the robot after hunters shot a deer: "I know you feel bad about the deer, but it's not your fault. Things die. That's part of life. It's bad to kill, but it's not bad to die...You're made of metal, but you have feelings, and you think about things, and that means you have a soul. And souls don't die"; the plot concerned the efforts of odious and villainous federal government agent Kent Mansley (voice of Christopher McDonald) to capture and destroy the misunderstood Giant; in the film's conclusion, the robot was nobly self-sacrificial before an army. ''I am not a gun" - he made a climactic, tear-jerking sacrifice to save the small Maine town of Rockwell from a nuclear missile -- just before an explosion in outer space, the Giant realized his heroism: "I'm Superman!", and then was seen in a final shot smiling as he self-repaired in an Icelandic glacier.

The Matrix (1999)

The Sentinels

In this popular and imaginative, nighmarish sci-fi film (and also in its two sequels) from the Wachowski Brothers, sentinels were described as "a killing machine designed for one thing...Search and destroy"; they were autonomous, multi-tentacled, metallic clawing killing machines (resembling squids or octopi, hence their nicknames "squiddies" or "calamari") that relentlessly patrolled the ancient passageways and sewers of the dead human cities, equipped with sensory devices, lasers, bombs, and other weapons; these lethal, fast-moving mechanized nautilus' were covered with red spider-eye-like lenses, manipulative crab-like arms and tentacles with gripping, razor-sharp claws; they floated on anti-gravity generators in order to roam and pursue; in the film, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) ordered a Sentinel strike against the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar shortly before Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) was rescued from the Agent's stronghold by the heroic Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss).

Red Planet (2000)

AMEE (Autonomous Mapping Exploration and Evasion)

This unsuccessful science fiction thriller film set in the year 2045 followed a small, six-person team of astronauts on an investigative rescue operation to the red planet of Mars, led by pretty Commander Kate Bowman (Carrie-Anne Moss); their mission was to investigate further terraforming of Mars for future human colonization; during a solar flare incident and subsequent shipwreck on the planet, a multi-purpose, unspeaking quadripedal (crouching) or bipedal (7 foot tall) robot named AMEE, an ex-military android (completely CGI-created) designed for mapping and exploration of the Martian surface, was damaged in the crash and reverted to its original programming as a hunter/killer, stalking the crew members with its infra-red and X-ray vision; the metallic, skeletal monkey-like AMEE had four limb appendages with joints that swiveled, turned, pivoted, and spun around, and clawlike 'fingers'.

Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001)

David
Gigolo Joe and Gigolo Jane
Teddy

Steven Spielberg's futuristic science-fiction fairy tale was based on Brian Aldiss' story; it starred Haley Joel Osment as 10 year-old Pinocchio-questing David, a Cybertronics android child "mecha" (robot of the future), with his 'animatronic' robotic teddy bear; it had a similar plot-line retelling Disney's Pinocchio about a search of a puppet to become a real boy and find real love; through imprinting, David believed he was capable of real emotion and unconditional love toward his adoptive mother Monica Swinton (Frances O'Connor), although when their real son recovered, David was abandoned; rather than being returned to Cybertronics for destruction, he was forced to take a long journey to become "real" by encountering the "Blue Fairy" (a submerged Coney Island statue, actually) - although he eventually learned the horrifying truth that he was a mecha-nical robot boy; by film's end, he was able to experience a poignant one-day reunion with his reconstructed/resurrected adoptive human mother.

During his adventures, David met up with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) and Gigolo Jane (Ashley Scott) - male and female pleasure robots by design, able to change their hair color or accent based on clients' needs: "Patricia... once you've had a robot lover, you'll never want a real man again" and Joe's contemptuous statement about the humans who made him: ''They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us.''

S1m0ne (2002)

Simone

In writer/director Andrew Niccol's fantasy Hollywood film that satirized synthetic celebrities, big-budget director Viktor Taransky's (Al Pacino) latest feature film titled Sunrise, Sunset was on the verge of collapse, with the walk-off of his narcissistic main star Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder); when dying software designer Hank Deleno (Elias Koteas) proposed a non-human, computer-simulated, virtual leading lady as an alternative, the computer disk was labeled Simulation One, i.e., Sim One -- "Simone"; the fraudulent film became a smash-hit, but no one had ever seen the pretty, thin, slim but enigmatic blonde starlet Simone (real actress Rachel Roberts in her film debut) off-screen; the CGI star described herself as "the death of real", although one reviewer described her as possessing "the voice of Jane Fonda, the body of Sophia Loren, the grace of Grace Kelly and the face of Audrey Hepburn mixed with an angel".

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Terminator Series X, or T-X (Terminatrix), and the T-850

The Incredibles (2004)

Omnidroid

I, Robot (2004)

Sonny, an NS-5 (Nestor Class-5) Robot

From Australian director Alex Proyas, this futuristic film was inspired by the stories in the 9-part anthology of I, Robot stories from Isaac Asimov and penned in the 1940s; the premise of the CGI/live-action thriller film was that a U.S. Robotics (USR) Corporation creation in the year 2035 - a humanoid NS-5 robot named Sonny (Alan Tudyk) with free will, was uncharacteristically suspected of murder of its creator (Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell)) by robot-hating Chicago homicide Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) - a cyborg himself - and robot psychologist Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), thereby breaking the First Law of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (that "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"); the robots were no longer being programmed properly by V.I.K.I., the USR computer mainframe, due to the belief that some people needed to be killed in order for mankind to survive; after V.I.K.I. was destroyed (by an injection of nanites), the revolting NS-5 robots were shut down.