"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave." Thus speaks replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner (1982), having turned the tables on his would-be executioner, Deckard, while neatly summarizing the predicament of creatures created to serve mankind. As Deckard clings to the ledge of a high building, it is now the replicant who holds the power of life and death over the human.
This Frankensteinian dilemma, the morality of playing God, lies at the heart of many stories that explore the science fiction premise of artificial life. Such films ask tough, existential questions such as: What is "human"? Do we have souls, and does self-consciousness presume the existence of a soul? Are there such things as "laws of nature," and do we break them when we try to imitate the godly act of creation? Do we have the right to enslave conscious beings, even if we created them? Can machines ever "feel"?
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Allen's Top Ten Must-See Artificial Life Movies
10. RoboCop
A tough-as-nails cyborg in a biting social satire.
09. Forbidden Planet
Robbie the Robot -- unplugged!
08. The Iron Giant
Beautiful animation and a brilliant piece of storytelling.
07. The Terminator
Arnold as the proverbial one-man slaughterhouse.
06. The Matrix
Hip, stylish, non-stop action and some seriously mean machines.
05. The Day the Earth Stood Still
If you don't know what "Klaatu barada nikto" means, you're out of the loop.
04. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Hal sings "Daisy," and then the acid trip begins.
03. Metropolis
One of the most visually influential films of the century.
02. Colossus: The Forbin Project
Presents the most evil, scary, cold bastard of a computer, ever.
01. Blade Runner
Redefines all science fiction films to follow it, and asks all of the tough questions about artifical life.
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The best films never answer these questions, but merely ponder them, and instead of asking "To be or not to be?" accomplish the same effect by quietly emitting a string of ones and zeros.
The central myth, that of Dr. Frankenstein's monster, was made into a film as early as 1910. But is only after several other attempts that James Whale's seminal version was made (Frankenstein, 1931), which clearly shows both the terror and damnation of the poor monster's short life as the misshapen attempt of a madman to publish his own smudged photocopy of humanity.
But Doctor Frankenstein's monster was neither man nor machine, but something in between, an overreaching feat of engineering that should not have been attempted. In this gap between nature and technology, several kinds of synthetic creation have emerged, each the focus of numerous films.
Robots
It's hard not to picture clanking, buzzing automatons when hearing this word, famously derived from Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) and coined by his brother, Josef, from the Czech word robota, meaning "drudgery" or "servitude." The play describes a robot uprising, a logical slant considering the socialist sentiments of Eastern Europe in 1920. Capek's robots aren't metal monsters, but synthetic humans, closer to Blade Runner's replicants than a tin can.
The Golem (1920). It tells the tale of a Rabbi who seeks to save his people from an impending massacre in the Jewish ghetto. He gives life to an immense clay man (as Prometheus gave life to mankind from clay) by the inscription of a magic word upon its forehead. Yet like the unstoppable brooms in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Disney's Fantasia (1940), once the Golem is used for selfish personal reasons by the Rabbi's assistant, it runs amok. This unexpectedly negative result lies at the heart of the technological debate, and suggests that technology itself is neutral, but can easily be adopted for good or evil means.
The same debate lies at the heart of one of the most famous films to star a robot, Fritz Lang's German Expressionist vision of a future both dark and awesome, Metropolis (1926). Based on a book by Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, the film posits a society divided by technology, with exhausted laborers running monstrous machines in a hellish underworld, while wealthy elite frolic within Art Deco skyscrapers. When the city leader, Freder, discovers that the lovely laborer Maria is preaching tolerance and influencing his male heir, Frederson, he tells a mad scientist, Rotwang, to create a robot double of her. The robot's evil, lascivious deeds, which include leading a worker revolt (again a socialist theme), contrast with Maria's purity and goodness, resulting in a moral ending that recommends reconciliation between the head (logic as represented by the elite) and the heart (emotion as represented by the workers).
This fusion of opposites is often recommended as the recipe for the perfect artificial being, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (1939), who believes he needs a heart in order to be complete. The implication here is that technology is imperfect without moral and emotional guidance, or at least sound judgment. Indeed, when a charming alien, Klaatu, lands on earth accompanied by the imposing robot Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), he warns the human race that they curtail the enormous power of the atomic bomb lest they ultimately become a danger to other citizens of the galaxy and be destroyed by them.
Forbidden Planet (1956) also shares this theme and features a group of space explorers who encounter an ancient alien technology on a dead planet. The machines, buried deep beneath the planet's surface, are so advanced that they are able to materialize anything simply through the power of thought, which ironically creates an unforeseen, terrifying side-effect derived from subconscious emotion. The message here is that science, no matter how amazing, will never allow us to rise above our base nature. The film stars one of the greatest, most recognizable metal men, Robbie the Robot, whose ellipsoid glass dome and Michelin Man body have appeared in numerous other films and television shows, from the original Twilight Zone TV series to Gremlins.
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