Robot Movies: A Mechanism for Discussing Humanity

The way that people view themselves can come from a lot of sources — their beliefs, their families, and even the work they do. Even our creations can tell us a lot about ourselves. That’s all the truer when your creation can walk and talk and fight crime, fall in love or commit murder. You may know where this is going already. That’s right, we’re talking about robots… more specifically, robot movies.

Machines that do our bidding, until they don’t, robots are a symbol of the question that runs through all of our minds in science fiction stories: What makes us human? Is it the ability to create and ideate? Is it the convention of falling in love? It’s hard to pick any of these as a universal qualifier, but we can see machines interact in the way humans do in a crime thriller, a high-octane action movie, or even a heartfelt love story. Which robot movies do this best?

Look at the following iconic films to answer that question.

Scripts from this Article

Blade Runner

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Wall-E

Blade Runner 2049

Ex Machina

The Terminator

The Iron Giant

Her

I, Robot

Blade Runner

This robot movie begins with a steep version of that question about humanity by asking, “How can you tell a human from a machine?” In Blade Runner, the replicants are machines that are just as human as everyone else to the untrained eye. In fact, it takes a special test to tell whether someone is a replicant or not — and even then, the results are dubious. The most moving moments of it are filled with robots who feel — and isn’t that a very human quality in and of itself?

Read More: Blade Runner: A Seminal Sci-Fi Classic

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Sometimes, robots go rogue — and that can make for a great story. That said, when Skynet goes live, it’s not a simple matter to resolve. In fact, it’s the end of the world as we know it. The future is a machine-run disaster zone, and the only person able to end the robot uprising is hunted by a killer robot. The Terminator we know and love from the first film is sent back to the past to save John Connor from certain doom, and the resulting adrenaline-fueled chase is markedly not only the best film in the Terminator franchise but also one of the best robot movies ever. No arguments allowed.

Read More: 5 Plot Point Breakdown: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

WALL-E

Let’s take a break from the dystopian and shoot-em-up flavor of robot movies for a kinder version that’ll give you the warm and fuzzies.

A waste disposal bot left on a trashed planet Earth shouldn’t have this much personality — but it’s beautiful to see. WALL-E is a robot who is lonely and has found EVE, another bot sent to check on Earth in its current state hundreds of years in the future. WALL-E then falls for EVE, willing to follow her not just to the ends of the Earth, but beyond that. Along the way, we see what becomes of humans — their indulgence and laziness reflecting a monotony in them that isn’t present in WALL-E: a clever look at the human-robot dichotomy from the inside out.

Read More: Pixar Movies: The Digital Disney

Blade Runner 2049

K is a blade runner after Deckard’s time, and he’s answering a new question in his pursuit of the truth: How human can a replicant be? After all, if machines can feel and fall in love, who’s to say they can’t do more? With the idea of a born replicant being in existence, K has to wrestle with that possibility by doing detective work of his own. His relationship with a companion projection, as well as his search for Deckard, bring him to some surprising conclusions about the nature of replicant “life” — whatever that may mean. 

Read More: From Mad Max to Blade Runner: How to Make a Long-Awaited Sequel Work

Ex Machina

It’s not every day that someone falls in love with a robot — but it can be a convincing and compelling idea when you think about the way artificial intelligence is developing. Ava is an android whose conversations with Caleb, a young programmer, make for a mounting and deepening companionship. That said, there’s a dark side to all this, as Ava explains that Caleb’s boss is a dangerous liar. It’s through the closeness Caleb gains to Ava and the truths he learns along the way that he even questions whether he himself is human — and he even checks to make sure.

Read More: Science Fiction Lovers, You’re Going to Want to See Ex Machina

The Terminator

A classic robot movie if we’ve ever seen one.

We offer a lot of trust in our machines, our automation, and our AI. Of course, machines could overthrow us humans if they’re given enough freedom and credence. In fact, that future exists and looks bleak in the world of The Terminator, where humanity’s struggle is rougher than you can imagine. That said, there’s hope in the form of an unborn child in the 1980s, and the robots know it. They send a deadly android into the past to kill this child before it becomes the savior of humanity, and the only thing that can stop it is a human soldier sent back from the future as well.

Read More: The Hero’s Journey Breakdown: The Terminator

The Iron Giant

There’s a lot that can be gained from real friendships with robots. Many meaningful relationships are great for your formative years, but the companion a boy makes in an alien machine might just take the cake. This animated film shows Hogarth, a kid in the 1950s, befriending a gargantuan war machine whose crash landing on Earth gives the so-called Iron Giant the opportunity to relearn a purpose for himself. Thanks to the machine’s presence, though, there’s a lot of danger just around the corner. It’s up to Hogarth and a loner artist to come up with a way to stop the US military from harming the robot — and their own planet.

This is certainly a robot movie that you must watch with your family… or by yourself… or literally with anyone who has a heart and soul.

Read More: Out of This World Sci-Fi Screenplays

Her

Loneliness makes you imagine companionship in the strangest of places. You’ll have conversations with yourself, with your dog, with your fridge, and even with computers. But what if they talk back? In that case, you have Her, a story about a writer falling in love with an operating system named Samantha. Samantha’s a machine in a different sense — an AI rather than a physical machine. All that said, this robot movie does a great job looking at how humans define romance — and how machines might come up with definitions of their own for the same thing.

I, Robot

Crime isn’t all that’s being solved in this science-fiction narrative — there are also existential questions, like what it means to interpret laws and logic. After all, laws are a human construct, but we assume that means they’re the same when in the hands of our creations, robots. When that no longer holds true, Isaac Asimov’s age-old Laws of Robotics even start to fall apart, creating a dilemma that can pose a threat to humanity as a whole if interpreted the wrong way. Detective Spooner and Sonny, a robot different from all the others, soon must figure out if that’s already happened.

Read More: 10 Films That Teach You Everything You Need to Know About Sci-Fi

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The biggest questions about humanity can be asked through a number of genres, but sci-fi does it so well that we have kept on doing that for decades. That said, it’s stories about robots that dominate the landscape when asking what it means to be human. From the start, human constructs or ideas like love, law, or beauty are jeopardized or evolved when they are met with a different consciousness. Just because humans make robots doesn’t mean the robots are human. These robot movies keenly demonstrate why it’s wise to remember that.