I owe James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day some special thanks. Following its release in the summer of 1991, I entered my senior year of high school. A few weeks into the first semester, a parent who worked in finance presented my class with the Stock Market Challenge, a game in which students invest fake money in real companies to gain some economic understanding and experience.
Since the Christmas season was approaching, I sank most of my funds into toy companies like Mattel and Hasbro. The remainder I spent on shares of Carolco Pictures, the maker of T2, wagering that the summer blockbuster here in the States would also become the top grossing film internationally.
At the end of the Challenge months later, I had put $60,000 into the market and taken out more than $20,000 in profit, making me the winner. As my prize, I received a corporate day-planner, an item meant to encourage me to pursue a career in some corner of the corporate world. Yet one look at the lengthy address book and minutely compartmentalized calendar of this pleather and paper wallet, now made obsolete by the smartphone, was enough to convince me that I never wanted to work in business.
To Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), however, I owe nothing, and I have made no effort to see the fourth installment in the series, Terminator Salvation (2009). I am equally pessimistic about this summer’s entry, Terminator Genisys.
Fortunately, though, fans of science fiction generally and robots in particular no longer have to settle for formulaic Hollywood fare. The growth of other national cinemas around the world and the decreasing cost of high quality computer generated imagery are providing alternatives, influenced in part by the movies of the United States, but also offering some distinctly local flavor. Below are a handful of robot and cyborg films from abroad recently made available here.
First, from Weimar Germany, comes Fritz Lang’s silent epic Metropolis (1927). In its dystopian future, hyper-industrialization and advanced technology have created a wide gulf between a few elite managers and the impoverished, dehumanized masses. Freder (Gustav Frolich), the architect and chief executive of the super city, enlists the help of the inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) in creating a “machine-human” in the likeness of the beautiful Maria (Brigitte Helm), so that “she” might infiltrate and sabotage the growing resistance movement.
The colossal sets, enormous cast, and elaborate visual effects of Metropolis made it the most expensive production in German filmmaking at the time. Its subject and themes also demonstrated that Germany was then the world’s leading power in science and technology. Early Hollywood, by comparison, continued to reflect the largely religious and agricultural character of the United States in outdoor historical dramas like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and Fred Niblo’s Ben Hur (1925).
The same industrial power that made Metropolis would build the Nazi war machine and network of death camps in the following decades, and the United States would race to convert itself into a comparably mechanized nation. Lang himself, offered the position as head of all German filmmaking by its new Nazi masters, immediately fled the country, ultimately arriving in the United States.
The Complete Metropolis, with a modern soundtrack and a cleaner picture than the first audiences likely saw in theaters, is now streaming on Netflix as Metropolis Restored. Choose this edition over the lower quality Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis of 1984.
The colossal sets, enormous cast, and elaborate visual effects of Metropolis made it the most expensive production in German filmmaking at the time. Its subject and themes also demonstrated that Germany was then the world’s leading power in science and technology. Early Hollywood, by comparison, continued to reflect the largely religious and agricultural character of the United States in outdoor historical dramas like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and Fred Niblo’s Ben Hur (1925).
The same industrial power that made Metropolis would build the Nazi war machine and network of death camps in the following decades, and the United States would race to convert itself into a comparably mechanized nation. Lang himself, offered the position as head of all German filmmaking by its new Nazi masters, immediately fled the country, ultimately arriving in the United States.
The Complete Metropolis, with a modern soundtrack and a cleaner picture than the first audiences likely saw in theaters, is now streaming on Netflix as Metropolis Restored. Choose this edition over the lower quality Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis of 1984.
On the other side of postwar American dominance in science and science fiction filmmaking, comes Caradog James’ The Machine (2013) from the UK. As in Metropolis, a brilliant, but misguided man builds a cyborg in the image of a beautiful woman. Likewise, The Machine's villain is an agent of the government. The resistance movement has a more contemporary touch, though: war veterans, whose brain injuries the military has forcibly augmented with electronic implants, may soon act upon their own agenda. The Machine also raises modern questions about the likelihood of consciousness arising in an artificial organism and, if it were to do so, whether the rights that we usually reserve for humans ought to attach to the new creature as well.
The English-language production Automata (2014) from Spanish director Gabe Ibanez does not cover its metal men and women with flesh; these are more straightforward robots. Still, Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas), an insurance agent for their manufacturer, begins to suspect that they are beginning to exceed the parameters of their original design as laborers for a dwindling population of humans in a world ravaged by climate change.
The cityscape and detective work will remind viewers of Ridley Scott’s robo-noir Bladerunner (1982), and the plot twist that arrives late in Automata will likely come as no surprise. Nevertheless, the film offers some new variations on familiar themes. Sadly, Melanie Griffith's cosmetic surgery may be the most shocking visual effect and the strongest argument against tinkering with nature.
The middle story of the three-part Korean picture Doomsday Book (2012) may provide the most extreme answer to the question of synthetic consciousness: in Kim Jee-woon’s “Heaven’s Creation,” repair technician Park Do-won (Kim Kang-woo) confronts a service robot (the voice of Park Hae-il) dispatched to a Buddhist monastery that has managed to gain Enlightenment. The robot’s makers do not approve and demand that the technician “fix” it. The first and last episodes in Doomsday Book, tales of a zombie apocalypse and an internet purchase gone horribly wrong, are less successful, but Netflix’s streaming service allows viewers to skip to electro-nirvana in the middle easily enough.
Next is Kike Maillo’s thoroughly Spanish Eva (2011). After years of absence, engineering prodigy Alex Garel (Daniel Bruhl) returns to his university town to complete his work on the first self-aware robot and to confront the romantic and familial tensions that drove him away. He chooses his precocious niece Eva (Claudia Vega) as the model for his emotionally sensitive machine, complicating his human relationships further.
Eva is like an Iberian AI: Artificial Intelligence, the Kubrick-turned-Spielberg project made ten years earlier. Eva wisely stays small, though: the setting remains largely domestic, and the themes interpersonal; as in AI, we do not follow the child robot away from the home and into larger speculations about consumerism, corporate misbehavior, environmental degradation, and alien visitation. Eva also offers one especially notable visual effect: programming the robots does not appear as typing out miles of cold, inscrutable code. Instead, a process that evokes a high-tech version of Medieval alchemy makes the idea accessible to lay-audiences and maintains the warmth of the movie as a whole. Again, a plot twist near Eva’s end is foreseeable, but generally its treatment of robots as inventions that reveal our most human traits is strong.
Last of today's international sci-fi offerings is a brief video lecture, rather than a feature film. There are many TED Talks regarding robots, most of which deal with particular design and build issues. Some address mobility, others interfacing with humans, including ‘bots growing abilities to detect and respond to our emotions.
The most terrifying presentation, though, is Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “What happens when computers get smarter than we are?” Like others in the forefront of science and technology, including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, Bostrom chooses the conjunction “when” not “if,” and the collective answer of the experts is “soon.” In the final minutes, he discusses measures to avoid the worst outcomes, but suddenly Sarah Connor’s armed assault on Cyberdyne Systems in T2 looks a lot less crazy.
Finally, if talk of the Terminator series has awakened in you an undeniable desire to see AAH-nuld on screen again, scoot over to Netflix and have a look at The Last Stand (2013), the English-language debut of the same Kim Jee-woon behind the Enlightened robot in Doomsday Book. Here our favorite “black sheep herder,” the literal meaning of Schwarzenegger in his native Austria, plays an L.A. cop who has left the city after a bust-gone-bad and become the sheriff of a sleepy Texas border town. He soon learns that a ruthless drug lord, pursued by the FBI, is racing toward his little outpost, where he plans to cross into Mexico. Only AAH-nuld, his inexperienced deputies, and a local kook stand in the villain’s way.
The Last Stand is pure popcorn entertainment: there are fast cars, sexy ladies, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a musclebound, let’s-settle-this-like-men fistfight. There are no robots or cyborgs, but, oh, the one-liners!
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