Robots in Film

Robots in Film
A Complete Illustrated History

Part 12

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.

Film/Year Name of Robot	Description	Example
*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 with a squadron of giant airborne robots (inspired by a 1941 Superman cartoon by Max Fleischer) that descended and became an army of 90 foot tall stomping Machine Age, radio-controlled robots (like metallic King Kongs) that 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 his plan to start life anew with a spaceship Ark after incinerating the Earth
*The Stepford Wives (2004)* Perfect "Stepford Wives"	See earlier The Stepford Wives (1975) 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 - a TV executive threatened to become an automaton housewife, and stars 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	This inventive animated film 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, who 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: vain, profit-driven Phineas T. Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) and his evil mother, the spider-like Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), who wanted to rid the world of outmodes and replace them with new and perfect upgrades.	Rodney Rodney and Fender
*Automatons (2006)* 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"; it updated the post-apocalyptic robot-run-amok flick within another dystopic futuristic tale set on an inhospitable Earth; the character of the Girl (Christine Spencer) lived alone in an underground bunker with a mini-army of robots -- various quaint, rattle-trap, broken robot assistants (resembling water-heaters with round heads and drainage pipes), whom she sent out each day to battle against an enemy leader (Brenda Cooney) - who 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*) The Sentinels	Director Brett Ratner's state of the art sci-fi adventure/thriller was the third in the series; it featured mutant-hunting sentinels, programmed to hunt down, capture, and/or kill the X-Men, in the Danger Room sequence.
*Transformers (2007)* Optimus Prime, Decepticon 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: the heroic and benevolent Autobots, led by good Transformer Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), and the evil Decepticon robot race led by Megatron (voice of Hugo Weaving); the film also featured a headliner battle between the two metallic autobot robot leaders; they were both searching for an all-powerful, intergalactic magic cube called the Allspark (revealed to be in the Arctic); in the film, there were metamorphic, extra-terrestrial robots -- cars and helicopters were transformed or shape-shifted into giant robots in an instant.
Meet Dave (2008) Dave Ming Chang	In Brian Robbins' science-fiction comedy, Eddie Murphy starred 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	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; the ecological robot was composed of a pair of binoculars (similar to the robot in Short Circuit (1986)), 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.

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