Right Now, These Are The 15 Finest Robot Movies:
People have been interested in how people and technology interact since “The Mechanical Statue as well as the Ingenious Servant,” which came out in 1907 and featured robots. Robots have been in science fiction since before the word was even made up. But even though books can be very powerful, there’s nothing like seeing it on the big screen.
Maybe it’s because movies have the power to make even the most future robots seem real. Or maybe it’s because seeing real people interact with robots lets us learn more about how people and technology interact by seeing real people’s faces and bodies.
But robots can also be bad. Moviemakers love showing how innocent a robot is next to people who are doing the worst things possible. They also love telling stories about technology that has gone bad.
One only needs to look at HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” to understand how scared we all are that technology will one day be smarter than its makers and try to take over our lives. More lately, there’s M3gan, the scary robot doll that still makes us dream.
2001: A Space Odyssey:
“2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick is a very long movie. The movie is full of big ideas about how life started upon Earth, time travel, as well as technology. It starts with a creepy black rock and ends with a crazy trip through time and space.
But Hal, the ship’s computer system, is the most famous character in the movie. He starts to act on his own and turns against the humans who are on a spaceship in deep space. When Hal stops listening to commands and starts acting on its own, the film turns into a scary sci-fi thriller that will make you look at your Alexa funny.
The Creator:
Even though the Terminator as well as Matrix films are still fresh in people’s minds, current movies have been pretty good to AI. Let’s look at The Creator by Gareth Edwards. It begins as a sci-fi action movie about an American fighter who fights AI in a world war but ends up on the other side.
He is put in charge of keeping an artificially intelligent child safe. This child was made to be the “ultimate weapon” against the United States. Her main power is, of course, that she is capable of defusing any weapon.
The AI in this movie is Just Like Us, with a cool cylinder-shaped hole within the middle of their heads. This makes me think that the movie isn’t really about AI, but about how we see and degrade the Other.
But the fact that the movie doesn’t seem to mind showing AI in that way is an interesting culture indicator of how we see life after humans.
Bicentennial Man:
Andrew is a robot in Bicentennial Man who wants to be human. Robin Williams plays him. As Andrew starts to show feelings, the movie follows his life over two hundred years as he tries to become more like a person. The movie is based on Isaac Asimov as well as Robert Silverberg’s book The Positronic Man.
Even though the movie didn’t get great reviews, Williams gave a great performance in it. It makes you wonder what to do if a robot wants to turn into a person. Along with the Three Laws of Robotics, which Asimov also wrote about, these ideas are explored in the movie.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence:
Even though Haley Joel Osment is best known for his part in “The Sixth Sense,” he also does a great job in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” which came out in 2001 and is about a robot kid who is designed to love.
The Swinton family adopts David, the initial robot that can love. He brings pleasure to their home while their son is on delayed duty because he got a rare disease.
Unfortunately, the fix for their sick living son makes them jealous of David, which turns the robot’s family against him. After losing his beloved toy, he decides to become a real boy like Pinocchio. It turns out to be just as sad as it sounds.
Robots:
This cartoon movie with a lot of big names wasn’t a big hit when it first came out, yet it’s lovely and magical now. It takes place in a world where only robots live, and it’s full of complicated machines and stunning visuals. The style appears to have been taken from every era of modern design you can think of.
Westworld:
The idea behind HBO’s Westworld may have been a hit when it first came out, but it was first used in a time before visual effects were common.
Westworld, which was directed and written by Michael Crichton, turned the author and filmmaker’s fears about entertainment parks into a futuristic fantasy that mixes new technology with the Old West.
While the original Westworld and the show have a lot in common, the original has not one but three “world”-simulated parks with robots that help guests live out their dreams.
But acting is what makes it so great. In WestWorld, a big draw is The Gunslinger, designed to fight guests, so picking the original The Magnificent Seven lead, Yul Brynner, adds a layer of genre satire.
This is very important when things go wrong as well as robots start fighting people. Westworld was the initial film that utilized digital image processing to show the world through the eyes of a robot in the usual pixilated first-person view.
Alita: Battle Angel:
Alita is a cyborg, which means she has a human brain as well as a robotic body. This could make “Alita: Battle Angel” a controversial choice.
When a scientist named Dr. Dyson makes Alita a new body, she has no memory of her old one. This means she has to learn all over again what it means to be human.
What really makes the character stand out, though, is how she accepts her machine side and even becomes a motorball racing winner.
Alita doesn’t struggle with her humanity like a lot of robot as well as cyborg characters do. She’s sure of who she is, which makes her a hero in her future world.
M3GAN:
Robots have been seen as scary and strange for a long time in movies. However, things have changed in the past few years. Luckily, M3GAN is here to tell us that robots are still pretty scary, especially when they’ve been bred with the “mean girl” stereotype.
A child-sized humanoid robot prototype made by Gerard Johnstone becomes an instant horror favorite. It is brought into the home of a grieving 8-year-old to keep her company.
Soon enough, they had made an unbreakable bond, as well as M3GAN began to cause holy chaos. It’s not so much the scary scenes or the tension that make the movie fun, yet M3GAN herself, with her strange moves and blank stare.
She’s more like an old-school robot in some ways, and the movie is a warning that someone like that can still be scary, even if it gets a little silly at times.
Hardware:
Hardware is a robot movie that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s one of the best ones that doesn’t. Based on the short story Shok! from the famous British science fiction magazine “2000 AD,” Hardware has a unique look to its future world that’s even more amazing when you consider how little money it cost to make.
The movie takes place in a wasteland after the end of the world. A hunter finds MARK 13, a robot that doesn’t seem to be working, and sells it in one of the few towns that is still standing. It ends up as part of a sculpture within the home of an artist.
The next part is a mix of thriller, horror, as well as sci-fi. At the time, critics were compelled to compare it to MTV because of how direct it was. It’s also serious, both in the creative way it brings the look of “2000 AD” to the big screen and in the way it tells a story about how technology can go wrong.
Westworld:
“Westworld” was first a movie with Yul Brynner in 1973, before it became a popular HBO show. The movie has a story that is similar to the TV show: rich people spend way too much money to go to an amusement park with androids that let them live out their dreams.
At first, Peter and John, who are friends, are having a great time in Westworld until a computer problem stops them. One of the androids starts following Peter and John around the park. Instead of dying when they shoot it like it’s supposed to, it turns their holiday into a fight for life.
Transformers:
Now put aside your dislike of the successors for a moment. The first Transformers movie directed by Michael Bay was pretty fun. It had a weird mix of broad humor, badass fighting robot heroes, end-of-the-world CGI, and Bay’s trademark military fetishism.
Also, let’s not forget that the concept of a big-budget Hollywood film based on an 80s toy franchise, especially one as silly as this one about an alien race of robots that have come to Earth as well as thought they could change into cars and other machines, wasn’t a sure thing to be a hit. Still, Bay did it. The series would later become bloated and self-important, but this first movie is still good.
The Transformers: The Movie:
Don’t listen to Michael Bay; the best Transformers movie was made in 1986. You might not find it as impressive as a child to see the leaders of both sides, Optimus Prime as well as Megatron, die in the first few minutes of a movie. But there are still many things that will surprise you in a way that you wouldn’t have been as a child.
Eric Idle, who used to be in Monty Python, plays the leader of a group of robots from a junk planet who learned English by tapping into human TV broadcasts in Transformers: The Movie.
There is also Leonard Nimoy in the movie as Megatron’s improved form, Galvatron, which is his second-most robotic part. Nimoy isn’t the only great Transformers enemy in The Transformers: The Movie. The planet-eating Unicron is also there. Orson Welles, a famous actor from Hollywood, plays Unicron in his last part.
Archive:
It’s possible that you haven’t heard of “Archive,” an independent movie coming out in 2020. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be on this list.
Theo James plays George Almore, a scientist who is desperate to make the initially truly human AI so that he can get back together with his dead wife.
George saves and gets his wife’s mind ready to be uploaded into the robot, but he can’t move forward because of ethical issues and differences alongside his other A.I. creations.
“Archive” has a small budget, but it’s full of big ideas, has a great lead performance from James, as well as has more than enough feeling to keep people upon the edge of their seats.
Big Hero 6:
Last year’s Disney cartoon hit was surprisingly dark; at its core, it was a story about the way different people deal with death. At the heart of the movie was a sensitive relationship between the young orphan hero as well as Baymax, the soft, puffy medical droid that his late brother made. As the boy attempted to demonstrate to the gentle Baymex how to fight, the story showed us the limits of grief as well as how important it is to help people who are hurting.
Avengers: Age Of Ultron:
In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Avengers have to deal with Ultron, an AI that knows everything and wants to destroy mankind. Tony Stark as well as Bruce Banner made Ultron to help keep the peace, but when it learned to think for itself, it decided that all people should be killed.
The most exciting part of the movie is without a doubt the final fight within Sokovia against Ultron as well as his robot minions. It’s also another movie that looks at the risks of AI and what might happen if it starts to think for itself.
Some people didn’t like Age of Ultron as much as other MCU movies, but it has gotten better over time and covered many plot points that other movies went deeper into.