by Ogelthorpe Q. Sighvatson

Created on: April 03, 2009   Last Updated: April 04, 2009

Like so many conventions of Science Fiction, pop culture has long had a kind of love/hate relationship with the robot and its many variations. No where is this nervous dichotomy more apparent than the world of film. Let us take a moment to just ponder the remarkable diversity of robots, androids and cyborgs that have become entertainment icons.

They have established the state of the art in film special effects, from Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot to the CGI monstrosities of Transformers. They have been nearly unstoppable killing machines in The Terminator and lovable ingenues in Short Circuit. We have listened to Roy Batty's philosophical musing in Blade Runner and R2D2's expressive bleeps in the Star Wars saga. We have seen a world left, by default, to a single robot in Wall-e and we have witnessed robots trying to seize control of Earth in I, Robot. So what is it about the robot that offers up such a diverse range of characters from a being that is not even alive in any conventional sense?

They are sufficiently like us that we can still identify with them even while imbuing them with powers far beyond anything we can hope to achieve: the heroic T-1000 of Terminator 2 or Japan's iconic RoboBoy. They let us look at the world with child-like wonder. Consider the joy that Number 5 feels in Short Circuit as he discovers anew the world which we see as mundane. They let us watch someone breaking free of the programming that keeps them on their proscribed repetitive path. Who wouldn't want, for just a moment, to be as free as Wall-e?

When we are not living vicariously through it, the robot is the perfect embodiment of the technophobia that lays at heart of much science fiction. Everything that we wish for ourselves is terrifying when bestowed on a malevolent robot. All the powers that we cheer for in Terminator 2 were terrifying in the original film when the original T-1000 was hunting Sarah Connor. The liberation of the robots is a fearsome thing to behold when we put ourselves in the shoes of the human overclass. Remember, even the first piece of robot fiction (Karel apek's 1921 stage play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)), was rooted in the anxieties of class warfare.

Not only can robots threaten us physically and culturally, their anthropomorphic qualities give them the potential to replace us entirely. No film explores this better than Blade Runner. In Ridley Scott's futuristic world (based on the exceptional novek Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheepby Philip K. Dick), replicant robots have become so realistic that it can take hours of intense scrutiny and interrogation for an expert to recognize one. It is as much their newfound humanity as their murderous ways that causes the replicant Battys to be hunted.

In the end, there is no single archetype for the robot. They represent the zenith of our technical mastery as well as the threat that we are not masters at all. We live though them and run from them for our very lives. It is the job of our best storytellers to blend the line between the two and make the robots something more than a collection of wires and metal.

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