Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Giant robots

Writer/director Kerry Conran's directorial debut film was a significant yet gimmicky milestone, in that it was one of the first major films to blend live actors with digitized backgrounds and surroundings.

In the futuristic fantasy film's plot set in 1939 New York City at the film's start, robots sent by megalomaniacal, terminally-ill German scientist Dr. Totenkopf (deceased actor Laurence Olivier) attacked.

First was a squadron of giant airborne robots (inspired by a 1941 Superman cartoon by Max Fleischer called "The Mechanical Monsters"). They descended and became an army of 90 foot tall stomping Machine Age, radio-controlled robots (like metallic King Kongs). The robots marched down Fifth Avenue and sent out laser blasts (this was part of a world-wide attack on various cities).

Then there were other mechanical monsters with tentacles.

The madman's robotic army, led by a goggled, latex-clad leader or Mysterious Woman (Bai Ling) (revealed later to be a robot too, carrying out the deceased Totenkopf's plans), were plundering the generators and oil refineries of the world, as part of a plan to start life anew with a spaceship Ark after incinerating the Earth.

The Stepford Wives (2004)
See also earlier The Stepford Wives (1975)

Perfect "Stepford Wives"

The feminist satire was remade as a dark comedy almost 30 years after the original by director Frank Oz, with Nicole Kidman as the Katharine Ross character. She was a TV executive threatened to become an automaton housewife.

It also starred Matthew Broderick (as Nicole's husband), Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, and Glenn Close.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

Marvin, a GPP (Genuine People Personalities) Prototype Android created by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

This feature-length film was an adaptation of Douglas Adams' classic wacky sci-fi satire, originally a 1970s BBC-radio series that became an early 1980s TV series hit and a best-selling series of books.

It featured a 6-foot tall, bubble- or moon-headed, all-knowing, permanently dour, pessimistic, and complaining Marvin the Paranoid Robot (Warwick Davis, voice of Alan Rickman) onboard the Heart of Gold starship.

Marvin purportedly had a "brain the size of a planet" in its head, with a face drawn to accentuate its sad features. Its miserable, self-pitying attitude was part of its programming that included GPP "Genuine People Personality."

ROBOTS (2005)

Rodney Copperbottom, and all the other robotic characters

An inventive animated film, it told about an entire mechanical universe of robots -- including a young, enterprising, idealistic robot named Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor) from the small town of Rivet Town. He was called an 'outmode' (he was an older model made from hand-me-down parts).

In a Wizard-of-Oz quest, he set out to find the mechanical wizard of Robot City, a metropolitan utopia, to get a job building robots with his heroic idol, industrialist inventor Bigweld (Mel Brooks).

Once there, he realized that evil industrialists had taken over, including vain, profit-driven Phineas T. Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) and his evil mother, the spider-like Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent). Both wanted to rid the world of outmodes and replace them with new and perfect upgrades.

Automatons (2006) (aka Death to the Automatons)

Various robot armies

Director and scripter James Felix McKenny's independent, low-budget sci-fi film (shot in Super-8 Black and White) termed the film's look "Robo-Monstervision." The film's tagline was: "Men started this war. The machines will finish it." It updated the post-apocalyptic robot-run-amok flick within another dystopic futuristic tale set on an inhospitable, contaminated Earth.

The character of the Girl (Christine Spencer) lived alone in an underground bunker with a mini-army of antiquated robots -- various rattle-trap, broken robot assistants (resembling water-heaters with round heads and drainage pipes). She sent them out each day to battle against an unnamed Enemy Leader (Brenda Cooney).

The enemy leader was capable of also sending out a robot army and radio signals that turned the Girl's robots against herself.

Electroma (2006)

Daft Punk robots

Two robots -- silver and gold helmeted, black leather-clad Hero Robots No. 1 and No. 2 (Daft Punk band members Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich, French dance music superstars) drove through the Southwestern American empty desert landscape in a 1987 Ferrari 412 on a quest to become human.

In the dialogue-less film, they entered a robot-inhabited town in Inyo City, California, where they went to a high-tech lab to unsuccessfully construct prosthetic latex human faces to place onto their motorcycle helmets.

Afterwards, they left town and went on a long, slow trudge across Salt Flats.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) (aka X-Men 3)

Sentinel

Director Brett Ratner's state of the art sci-fi adventure/thriller was the third chapter in the series.

In the film's opening Danger Room sequence, the X-Men (teacher Storm (Halle Berry) and substitute teacher Wolverine/Logan (Hugh Jackman) with young mutant students Rogue (Anna Paquin), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), and Kitty (Ellen Page), etc.) participated in a simulation training. The program was devised by the head of the School for Gifted Youngsters, Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart).

A giant metal Sentinel was created for the X-Men to fight against. These mutant-hunting Sentinel robots were designed to hunt down, capture, and/or kill the X-Men.

To end the simulated session, superstrong Colossus threw Wolverine (who had commanded him, "Throw me, now!") at the Sentinel and single-handedly decapitated it with his long metal-claws. Its giant robot head fell back to the ground, as Wolverine emerged from behind it and announced: "Class dismissed."

Meet the Robinsons (2007)

DOR-15 (or Doris) and Carl

This Walt Disney Studios computer-animated 3D-film, based on the best-selling children's book by William Joyce, and with a Back to the Future storyline, contained two robotic characters:

• DOR-15 (aka Doris or Helping Hat) (voice of Ethan Sandler) - a robotic retro bowler hat with mechanical, tentacled arms (with rotating claws), a partner-in-crime with the Bowler Hat Guy (Stephen Anderson)
  When reactivated, the villainous DOR-15 became megalomaniacal, intent on conquering and dominating the world, until 12 year-old orphan/inventor Lewis (voices of Jordan Fry and Daniel Hansen) declared that he never invented her - and she disappeared forever
  
• worrywort android Carl (voice of Harland Williams), the witty and charming Robinson family robot of the retro-futuristic world of Todayland

Transformers (2007)

Optimus Prime, Autobots, Decepticons and other robots

In this loud Michael Bay sci-fi thriller, two robotic clans, that had fought in an ancient civil war against each other on the planet Cybertron, were now in a quest to take over the universe and Earth. They were both searching for an all-powerful, intergalactic magic cube called the Allspark (revealed to be in the Arctic). The two clans or races were:

• the heroic and benevolent Autobots, led by good Transformer Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen)
• the evil Decepticon robot race, led by Megatron (voice of Hugo Weaving)

The live-action film featured a headliner battle between the two metallic autobot robot leaders, Optimus Prime and Megatron.

In the film, there were also metamorphic, extra-terrestrial robots -- cars and helicopters were transformed or shape-shifted into giant robots in an instant.

Meet Dave (2008)

Dave Ming Chang

Brian Robbins' science-fiction comedy starred Eddie Murphy as a giant white disco suit-wearing robot named Dave Ming Chang.

He was actually an alien machine (or space vessel) in the shape of a human commanded by an internal crew of humanoid space aliens, each one responsible for a part of Dave's body and controlling his speech and movements.

Eddie Murphy also portrayed the tiny, British-accented captain of the ship.

After crashing near the Statue of Liberty, he searched in Manhattan for the aliens' missing precious meteorite orb designed to rob Earth of all of its water in order to bring back its salt and thereby save their endangered planet (that ran on salt).

WALL·E (2008)

WALL·E, EVE, and other robots in the spaceship AXIOM, including:

M-O (or "Moe", Microbe Obliterator)
AUTO (the ship's Auto-Pilot)
GO-4 (AUTO's assistant)
BUF-4 (Buffer cleaning robots)
BRL-A (Umbrella robots)
D-FIB (Defibrillator robots)
PR-T ("Pret-ty", Beautician robots)
HAN-S (Massage robots)
NAN-E (Nanny robots to care for children)
THIRST-E (Drink dispensing robots)
VAQ-M (Vacuum robots)
VEND-R (Food dispensing robots)
VN-GO (Paint robots, take-off on Vincent Van Gogh's name)

Pixar's and Disney's animated science-fiction love story was set in the year 2805. The almost dialogue-free tale told about the title character, the last lone garbage-compacting robot on Earth named WALL·E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class) (voice of Ben Burtt).

For seven centuries, the industrious robot had been cleaning up Earth's harmful trash (with the aid of his cockroach friend) after inhabitants were evacuated to live on the giant orbiting spaceship AXIOM until Earth was habitable again. The ecological robot (similar to the robot in Short Circuit (1986) and to Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)) was composed of a pair of binoculars (for eyes), with a turtle-like body and tank treads for locomotion.

In the film, WALL·E fell in love with EVE (short for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) (voice of Elissa Knight), a sleek, white-shelled probe droid-robot that was sent to check on the progress of the clean-up and to locate plant life.

Another robot on the spaceship, among many, was named M-O, concerned about wiping up the "foreign contaminant" tread tracks left by WALL-E, as well as the one-eyed, tyrannical AUTO-pilot, HAL-like robot (voice of MacinTalk)- finally shut off by the corpulent Captain (voice of Jeff Garlin).

Moon (2009)

GERTY 3000

In director Duncan Jones' plot-twisting sci-fi film (with obvious filmic references to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Silent Running (1972), and others), lone astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) was at the end of a three-year contract on the far side of the Moon at a moon base named 'Sarang.'

Sam was supervising the strip-mining of lunar rock (with gigantic robotic machines) to obtain Helium-3, a major component of fusion technology for green solar fuel energy. His only contact and companion was a semi-mobile, multi-tasking AI robot named GERTY 3000 (voice of Kevin Spacey) with a robotic arm.

The questionably-helpful, smooth-voiced, programmed GERTY used yellow smiley face emoticons to communicate emotions and monitored Sam's every move (as well as engaged in a clandestine conversation with HQ). Communications with Earth were reduced to only video-taped recordings, and Sam was beginning to show signs of stress and homesickness.

The film took a turn when he was repairing a stalled harvesting mining machine, crashed into a thrasher while experiencing an hallucinatory mirage of his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott), and found himself in the infirmary. After evading GERTY in order to leave the base, he took a rover to the crash site, where he found an injured version of himself.

The film's major spoiler was that the fraudulent Japanese consortium (LUNAR Industries) that was running the operation had cloned him, and replaced him. The company sent a menacing "rescue team" to erase the problem created by Sam's discovery of his own younger-looking, mirror-image, healthier clone, and the film became a race against time to seek ways to return to Earth.

The plot became even more complex when he found that neither of the two Sam's might be an 'original' - after entering a basement filled with hundreds of cloned Sams in 'cryosleep' boxes.

9 (2009)

Nine "Stitchpunk" Robots, each cloth-skinned mechanical doll identified by a Number on their back

Director Shane Acker's debut feature film (Tim Burton co-produced), a PG-13 rated animated fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic world, centered on a group of nine robots, identified by large numbers on their backs. They sought to escape the terrors of large, super-powerful destructive robotic Machines, including:

• a red-eyed monster known as the Beast
• a giant Bat
• a scissors-handed "Seamstress" creature
• and the deadly Fabrication Machine, wrought by a Scientist (voice of Alan Oppenheimer)

The machines, ordered to be created by a Hitler-like Chancellor in a fascistic regime had turned against their creator, and left a Matrix-like, dystopic, bombed-out world.

The small robots (with wooden hands and copper fingers) were also the creation of the Scientist, possibly the last man to survive on Earth after a genocidal war between man and machine, although he was dead on the floor.

The main heroic character was the youngest and most daring 9 (voice of Elijah Wood) - a zippered, goggle-eyed burlap sock-puppet.

Others included:

• a stern, authoritarian and conservative self-appointed leader 1 (voice of Christopher Plummer) with a bishop's miter and crook
• a kindly inventor 2 (voice of Martin Landau)
• a renegade warrior-heroine 7 (voice of Jennifer Connelly) with a skull mask
• one-eyed puppet 5 (voice of John C. Reilly)
• a black/white striped artist 6 (voice of Crispen Glover) haunted by a design
• large and illiterate, clownish 8 (voice of Fred Tatasciore) - 1's bodyguard.
• robots 3 and 4 were non-speaking twins
  

The Deadly Machines
	The Beast	"The Seamstress"	The Fabrication Machine

Terminator Salvation (2009)

Aerostats, Harvesters, Moto-Terminators, Hydrobots, Series T-600 Terminators, a T-RIP (Resistance Infiltrator Prototype), and a new T-800 Series Terminator

Robots created by self-aware machines of Skynet in the year 2018 included older-model Series T-600 Terminators (Skynet's main foot soldiers, "a primitive design" with a lot of firepower, but "heavy and slow"). Also, there were the following:

• small Aerostats (flying, infra-red equipped Hunter-killer scouts for the Terminators that could identify and upload the identities of opposing Resistance fighters)
• Harvesters (massive, six-story high robots with multiple clawed pincers that grabbed and collected humans to be imprisoned in cages)
• Moto-Terminators (two-wheeled motorcycle-like Terminators that were launched from the feet of Harvesters)
• H-K Aerials (a large airborne jet-powered machine of various sizes with mounted lasers, missiles, and cannons)
• Hydrobots (whirring, worm or snake-like water-borne Terminators)

One other Terminator was a T-RIP (Resistance Infiltrator Prototype) - developed from the Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) character, a Texas prison death-row inmate who was executed in 2003, and signed his body over to cellular regeneration researcher Dr. Selena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter) for a single kiss.

Skynet used Kogan's research findings to advance Cyberdyne's work. Marcus was turned into a cyborg - a T-RIP (Resistance Infiltrator Prototype) - "the only one of your kind...the human condition no longer applies to you" - although he had a human heart and brain (with chip).

His main programmed mission was to lead future father Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), with Resistance leader John Connor (Christian Bale) trailing, back to Skynet Central so they could be killed.

Also, this film included the new cybernetic organism, the T-800 Series Terminator with a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 living-tissue covering - (a combination of CGI and composite shots of Arnold Schwarzenegger from The Terminator (1984)). When its tissue covering was burnt off by blasts of grenades, its metal-skeletal frame was revealed.

T-800 Series

Real Steel (2011)

Ambush, Noisy Boy, Atom, Midas, and Zeus

Director Shawn Levy's sci-fi action-thriller was also a dramatic boxing film set in the near-future about giant humanoid robots in battle with each other. The gleaming gladiators engaged in prize fights with each other, ranging from small underground cage matches to larger media events.

The main character was Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman), a broke, down and out ex-boxer (now a robot fight promoter) who eventually reunited with his estranged 11 year-old son Max (Dakota Goyo). Charlie was enroute to a rural fair to match his discarded, older model robot (Ambush) against a large rodeo bull. Another of his robots was Noisy Boy (with LED screens on his wrists), once a fighter in the World Robot Boxing (WRB) League with a 15-1 record.

Fighting in the circuit were other robots, including:

• Atom - the underdog "Rocky" character, with a titanium mesh face cage, and blue LED eyes behind it
• Midas - a punkish, dirty-fighting, gold-colored robot with a red, fiber-optic Mohawk on its head, who fought in the underworld Crash Palace
• Zeus - the undefeated, reigning champion of the WRB, with a powerful 1,300 pound frame of steel and carbon fiber; the only fully autonomous robot in the league; funded and built by the Lemkovas (a family of Russian oligarchs)