Tears of a Robot
This week I’ll be looking at robots in a couple of modern franchises. It’s pretty shocking what some film makers will do to robots just because they aren’t human.
Let’s get down to the core of the issue. Robots are machines. The problem comes when people either want to make them unnecessarily human or put in purely robot scenes that make humans uncomfortable.
Let’s look at the first point. Star Wars: the Clone Wars goes to great lengths to give battle droids personality. “But Threepio and Artoo have personality and they’re robots in Star Wars.” True, but not in the same way. Firstly, they are meant to be characters. Secondly, from a design stand point, they are designed to interact with humanoids. Thus there is the expectation that they would be more human-like in appearance and demeanor. Artoo doesn’t fit this criteria but gets as pass based on the fact that he is a good guy. The problem with battle droids is that they are meant to be machines of death and destruction. Why on earth would you give that a personality, much less a goofy comic relief personality? In case you aren’t familiar with the Clone Wars series, the droids have discussions among themselves about what is going on and chastise each other for incompetence. I personally think that they shouldn’t talk to each other and if they need to vocalize, it should be tactical information delivered to non-robot commanders. Seems a waste of time for them to talk at all when they could transmit data at super speeds. Also, on some level, they are meant to be cannon fodder so it seems to be a huge waste of resources to give them all personalities. Getting back to my point, battle droids should be scary to kids; a never ending march of automotons bringing death. They shouldn’t be the comic relief. The makers could learn a lot from the Terminator movies. Those are some badass silent killing machines!
My second point is robots doing robot things that would be creepy if humans did them. The mark of any good film is that the characters are relatable no matter their circumstances. This gets weird when you consider robot characters. In a good film, you stop thinking of them as machines and more as organic creatures. Which is all well and fine until you have robots scavenging parts from other characters. To put it in organic terms: if I was walking down the street and saw someone fall over dead and went over and removed their hand in case I needed it later, i would be locked up for a very long time. The first time I really came across this sort of robotic cannibalism was in the fox animated movie, Robots. The scene I described happens in the movie except that it was robots. As long as they are just robots it’s fine, but once you start thinking of them as people, it all falls apart.
What happens when you have both of these scenarios in one movie? You have Micheal Bay’s Transformers franchise. Bay attempts to give the robots personality and human behaviors so you see them as living creatures and then mutilates them horribly. After seeing the second one, I’ll never look at Optimus Prime the same again. It’s not so much that he acts out of character or overly goofy. We are expected to look past all of the hyper violence because it’s between robots and not organic characters. In the first movie, Megatron tears Jazz in half on screen (which, while ultra violent, was at least done by a bad guy). Bumblebee has his legs blown off and Prime stabs a Decepticon through the throat and decapitates him. At the time I didn’t really think much of it. They just took the knock out brawls of the original series and made them more adult. Then I saw the second one.
[SPOILER ALERT]
In this one, Bay cranked up the level of robot violence. Prime uses hooks to rip someone’s face off. Not only that but you have the robots spurting “blood” when punched, and getting “teeth” knocked out. The ultimate scene is at the end when Prime punches the Fallen’s face off, punches through his chest, and crushes his beating “heart” in his hand. Now I’m not saying that I would have prefered a movie where the final showdown involved long discussions about feelings and then a group hug, but I wasn’t expecting to see what I saw. Also, I’m not under any pretensions that the original transformers series wasn’t violent but it was mostly laser gunfights and bare knuckle brawling. The worst that could happen was someone was “knocked out” but was back for more in next week’s episode. More importantly, I wouldn’t have expected this kind of conduct by the leader of the Autobots. They are supposed to be the paragons of good and fair play not ultraviolent killing machines. I don’t know if I can see Prime as a hero to be idolized after this. That makes me sad in ways I can’t even begin to count. My inner child is cowering in the corner, weeping in fear of Optimus Prime.
