Six Movies Featuring Robots as Protagonists.

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Six movies featuring robots as protagonists.

By Matt Prigge

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jun. 25, 2008

Infra-man (1975): Robots have always been a staple of cinema, but it's a touch unnatural for moviegoers to follow around an artificial, non-carbon-based lead character incapable of real emotions. But it happened and it required baby steps--say, going to bionic hybrids first. Shortly after Steve Austin stormed America, Hong Kong was met with this colorful and cheerfully silly Shaw Brothers production--a proto-Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in which a part-robotic superhero smacks around alien invaders, including skeleton bikers and guys in rubber demon suits.

D.A.R.Y.L. (1985): Long before Haley Joel Osment was even born, there was Barret Oliver, star of The Neverending Story and this family sci-fi about an android boy adopted by Michael McKean.

Making Mr. Right (1987): Right up there with the Lea Thompson-Howard the Duck romance in the realm of creepy cross-species film hookups, this Susan Seidelman comedy romantically pairs scientist Ann Magnuson with a space-bound android, played by a young and arguably never more eccentric John Malkovich.

AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001): Osment was already robotlike even when he was Murphy Brown's toddler, so casting him as an actual robot feels a bit redundant. Still, no film has so seriously treated an artificial lead with the sensitivity it would a human one, or played so intriguingly with audience identification figures. With a lead whose emotions are as artificial as the rest of him, AI--rather than such desecrations as Bicentennial Man or I, Robot--is the true filmic heir to Isaac Asimov.

Daft Punk's Electroma (2006): Hand it to the French electronica duo to make their film debut with a painfully slow and wordless portrait of a world just like ours populated only by metal-headed robots.

Wall-E (2008): So what if he looks like Johnny-5?