A History of Movies About Robots.
You might have to skip the 10:30 hole to Wonderland; the swirling time-portal too, ‘cause that doesn’t quite lead to where we’re going…Venture discreetly down history’s vortex of truly great robot movies, and it’ll likely astound you to find there really aren’t that many. Late last year anthropologists, or archaeologists – or was it really old fan-boys? – had to dig up chunks of South America to eventually reveal long-lost props from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the world. This German production, a silent picture, is and was acknowledged to have been a work of lyric beauty, for the ironically bleak and desolate landscape Lang depicted with a kind of symphonic brutality.
In Metropolis, a kookily-named inventor, ‘Ratwang’, transfers a lady named Maria’s soul into the cold, harsh jigsaw of a metallic anatomy, and cinema’s first robot is born. Critical acclaim other than ours likens Lang’s world to the one whose society watched the Industrial Revolution unfold with foreboding and contempt, but the story-telling tradition of technology as the simultaneous destiny and anti-hero of mankind stems from the artistic mores of the early 20th Century; that is, when ordinary people were actually embracing the symbolism of machines, and not worried anymore that the beasts would take their jobs.
Vorticism was an aggressive, if niche movement among poets and critics that flourished in the years shortly after 1910. A lovechild of Modernism and perhaps futurism, which sharply reject concepts of the past and celebrate technology respectively, Vorticism was all about violence, energy and the machine, waging war on all forms of cultural sentimentalism. Particularly illuminating, as one traces the evolution of thought in terms of… uhh, robots, is this ditty from The Golden Bough, by Sir George Frazer, who helped influence the psychological spirit of the Vorticists: man progresses from magical thought to religious to scientific. Cinematically, this translates as robots representing the height of civilization, from whence our species is meant to either thrive or fail.
By the time Lang’s film set about addressing 19th Century concerns at the rise of the machine, it was 1926, and the general public rather felt it had ‘regained’ control. It was about as disturbing for folks to imagine machines taking over the world as it is for too many of us to picture a planet fried by global warming one and a half millennia from now: not that disturbing. When the 1930s brought with them the Great Depression, and Hitler, the prospect of robot-driven destruction excited us. The worse their economic circumstances got, people wanted more robots, and they wanted them to be bad.
There’s something deliberately crude and overly emphatic, for instance, about Phantom Empire, which starred Gene Autry – the singing cowboy of his generation – as a ranch-owner who discovers a lost city 20,000 feet under his property. Queen Tika, empress of a kingdom of robots, wants to rule the world. The robot as art-form is a grisly entity, Frankensteinian, a threat to human safety whose menace is clouded by our curious affection for something we’ve actually created ourselves. Bela Lugosi, who later went on to embody Count Dracula, tries to take over the earth with a gargoyle-resembling robot in 1939’s The Phantom Creeps. Mad scientists were all the rage once, if you were a producer planning on gluing together a horror show, so it was perfectly natural to cast their inventions as the things that went bump in the night.
Before Superman, or just roundabouts, all the boys wanted to be Flash Gordon, and he regularly found himself squared up against scheming robots; Bucky Rogers, another seminal hero-type, once overcame robotic possession with the sheer force of human will. (Yes, exactly – the same way one might overcome a demon.) So long as times were hard, robots were the ideal adversary – man-made but unpredictable, just like the economy. With robots, however, victory could be made up.
World War 2 detonated the atom bomb, and the ordinary tax-payer’s skepticism with advancements in technology had its suspicions confirmed. But the fear was more contemplative now; it wasn’t about robots, it was about what mankind did with robots. Just have a look at the titles – Mysterious Doctor Satan, King of the Rocket Men… Robots, suddenly, were just misguided pawns in man’s own path to self-destruction. Author Isaac Asimov went on to pen stories borne of anti-war sentiment, including I, Robot, warning that we could soon be the architects of our own downfall.
The Fifties were practically dominated, at least in the United States, by the fear that the Cold War might escalate into a nuclear confrontation with Russia, and that an alien invasion was right around the corner. These were boom times for science fiction, and for advertising, too. More and more everyday products slipped into the hemisphere of things you could touch and maybe care for, and would consequently be joined there by robots. This despite the fact that at the start of the decade, Gort the protector had wreaked unholy havoc in the original Day The Earth Stood Still motion picture.
MGM’s The Forbidden Planet introduced Robby the Robot, who went on to make cameo appearances in Earth Girls Are Easy, Gremlins and The Addams Family, amongst others. Kids loved him. Adults loved him. When the robot on TV’s Lost In Space developed a knack for saving the day, it became evident that boys and girls, men and women, just about everybody had fallen in love with robots.
Space exploration began to command a place on the national budgets of super-nations everywhere, and before we knew it, R2-D2 and C3PO were putting up their satellite dish on the planet next door. But technology kept getting better, and in some sense, we didn’t have all the control anymore. What if it was all a ruse? What if in reality, when a robot came into your home, it was actually taking the first step in hatching some sinister master-plan?
1973’s Westworld, about a theme park whose circuits go haywire, signified a dazzling return to terror, and its effect ripples through entertainment even today. This was the first true exhibition of technology as lord and master of the haunted house, that sacred temple of the movies. The birth of the microcomputer in the 1980s suggested that by attaining portability, intelligent machines had attained freedom, and with it free will. Since the release of the first Terminator, the relationship between movie-goers and movie-robots has been an ambivalent one, a coin-toss stuck in mid-air.
We seem to have reached our tipping point, whence we must either thrive or fail, yet all that stands before us is Darwinism. Either we survive because we are the fittest, resettling on the moon with machines at our beck and call, or robots finally become our overseers, reducing us to the puniness of downloads.
Chances are we’ll dig it either way.
Transformers 2, another movie about robots, is in cinemas now.
You might have to skip the 10:30 hole to Wonderland; the swirling time-portal too, ‘cause that doesn’t quite lead to where we’re going…Venture discreetly down history’s vortex of truly great robot movies, and it’ll likely astound you to find there really aren’t that many. Late last year anthropologists, or archaeologists – or was it really old fan-boys? – had to dig up chunks of South America to eventually reveal long-lost props from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the world. This German production, a silent picture, is and was acknowledged to have been a work of lyric beauty, for the ironically bleak and desolate landscape Lang depicted with a kind of symphonic brutality.
In Metropolis, a kookily-named inventor, ‘Ratwang’, transfers a lady named Maria’s soul into the cold, harsh jigsaw of a metallic anatomy, and cinema’s first robot is born. Critical acclaim other than ours likens Lang’s world to the one whose society watched the Industrial Revolution unfold with foreboding and contempt, but the story-telling tradition of technology as the simultaneous destiny and anti-hero of mankind stems from the artistic mores of the early 20th Century; that is, when ordinary people were actually embracing the symbolism of machines, and not worried anymore that the beasts would take their jobs.
Vorticism was an aggressive, if niche movement among poets and critics that flourished in the years shortly after 1910. A lovechild of Modernism and perhaps futurism, which sharply reject concepts of the past and celebrate technology respectively, Vorticism was all about violence, energy and the machine, waging war on all forms of cultural sentimentalism. Particularly illuminating, as one traces the evolution of thought in terms of… uhh, robots, is this ditty from The Golden Bough, by Sir George Frazer, who helped influence the psychological spirit of the Vorticists: man progresses from magical thought to religious to scientific. Cinematically, this translates as robots representing the height of civilization, from whence our species is meant to either thrive or fail.
By the time Lang’s film set about addressing 19th Century concerns at the rise of the machine, it was 1926, and the general public rather felt it had ‘regained’ control. It was about as disturbing for folks to imagine machines taking over the world as it is for too many of us to picture a planet fried by global warming one and a half millennia from now: not that disturbing. When the 1930s brought with them the Great Depression, and Hitler, the prospect of robot-driven destruction excited us. The worse their economic circumstances got, people wanted more robots, and they wanted them to be bad.
There’s something deliberately crude and overly emphatic, for instance, about Phantom Empire, which starred Gene Autry – the singing cowboy of his generation – as a ranch-owner who discovers a lost city 20,000 feet under his property. Queen Tika, empress of a kingdom of robots, wants to rule the world. The robot as art-form is a grisly entity, Frankensteinian, a threat to human safety whose menace is clouded by our curious affection for something we’ve actually created ourselves. Bela Lugosi, who later went on to embody Count Dracula, tries to take over the earth with a gargoyle-resembling robot in 1939’s The Phantom Creeps. Mad scientists were all the rage once, if you were a producer planning on gluing together a horror show, so it was perfectly natural to cast their inventions as the things that went bump in the night.
Before Superman, or just roundabouts, all the boys wanted to be Flash Gordon, and he regularly found himself squared up against scheming robots; Bucky Rogers, another seminal hero-type, once overcame robotic possession with the sheer force of human will. (Yes, exactly – the same way one might overcome a demon.) So long as times were hard, robots were the ideal adversary – man-made but unpredictable, just like the economy. With robots, however, victory could be made up.
World War 2 detonated the atom bomb, and the ordinary tax-payer’s skepticism with advancements in technology had its suspicions confirmed. But the fear was more contemplative now; it wasn’t about robots, it was about what mankind did with robots. Just have a look at the titles – Mysterious Doctor Satan, King of the Rocket Men… Robots, suddenly, were just misguided pawns in man’s own path to self-destruction. Author Isaac Asimov went on to pen stories borne of anti-war sentiment, including I, Robot, warning that we could soon be the architects of our own downfall.
The Fifties were practically dominated, at least in the United States, by the fear that the Cold War might escalate into a nuclear confrontation with Russia, and that an alien invasion was right around the corner. These were boom times for science fiction, and for advertising, too. More and more everyday products slipped into the hemisphere of things you could touch and maybe care for, and would consequently be joined there by robots. This despite the fact that at the start of the decade, Gort the protector had wreaked unholy havoc in the original Day The Earth Stood Still motion picture.
MGM’s The Forbidden Planet introduced Robby the Robot, who went on to make cameo appearances in Earth Girls Are Easy, Gremlins and The Addams Family, amongst others. Kids loved him. Adults loved him. When the robot on TV’s Lost In Space developed a knack for saving the day, it became evident that boys and girls, men and women, just about everybody had fallen in love with robots.
Space exploration began to command a place on the national budgets of super-nations everywhere, and before we knew it, R2-D2 and C3PO were putting up their satellite dish on the planet next door. But technology kept getting better, and in some sense, we didn’t have all the control anymore. What if it was all a ruse? What if in reality, when a robot came into your home, it was actually taking the first step in hatching some sinister master-plan?
1973’s Westworld, about a theme park whose circuits go haywire, signified a dazzling return to terror, and its effect ripples through entertainment even today. This was the first true exhibition of technology as lord and master of the haunted house, that sacred temple of the movies. The birth of the microcomputer in the 1980s suggested that by attaining portability, intelligent machines had attained freedom, and with it free will. Since the release of the first Terminator, the relationship between movie-goers and movie-robots has been an ambivalent one, a coin-toss stuck in mid-air.
We seem to have reached our tipping point, whence we must either thrive or fail, yet all that stands before us is Darwinism. Either we survive because we are the fittest, resettling on the moon with machines at our beck and call, or robots finally become our overseers, reducing us to the puniness of downloads.
Chances are we’ll dig it either way.
Transformers 2, another movie about robots, is in cinemas now.
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