Films About Robots

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April 10, 2026

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April 10, 2026

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"I don’t like to talk about messages so much with films simply because it’s a little more didactic. The reason I’m a filmmaker is to tell stories and so you hope that they will have resonance for people and for the kind of things you’re talking about, but what I always loved about Jonah’s original draft, and we always retained this, was the idea of blight, the idea of there being an agricultural crisis, which has happened historically if you look at the potato famine and so forth. We combined this with ideas taken very much from Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl and spoke to Ken at great length and availed ourselves of his resources, because what struck me about the dust bowl is it was man-made environmental crisis, but one where the imagery – the effect of it was so outlandish we actually had to tone it down for what we put in the film. But the real point is they’re non-specific, that we’re saying that in our story man-kind is being gently nudged off the planet by the earth itself and the reason is non-specific, because we don’t want to be too didactic or too political about it. That’s not really the point. For me it goes back to something Emma said earlier, which was that my excitement about the project was addressing a possibly extremely negative idea, in terms of the planet having had enough of us and suggesting that we go somewhere else, but that being an opportunity, that being a great exciting adventure to be on was something I found very winning about it."

- Interstellar (film)

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"The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. ("We love people who have died—what's the social utility in that?" "Accident is the first step in evolution.") After a certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan, aren’t trying to one-up the spectacular rationalism of “2001." The movie's science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.) While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. "Interstellar" features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who's separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead."

- Interstellar (film)

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"The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling. It's not afraid to switch, even lurch, between modes. At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, or a Steven Spielberg film made in the spirit of a Ford picture: a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one. Bruising outer-space action sequences, with astronauts tumbling in zero gravity and striding across forbidding landscapes, give way to snappy comic patter (mostly between Cooper and the ship's robot, TARS, designed in Minecraft-style, pixel-ish boxes, and voiced by Bill Irwin). There are long explanatory sequences, done with and without dry-erase boards, dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, and tearful separations and reconciliations that might as well be played silent, in tinted black-and-white, and scored with a saloon piano. (Spielberg originated "Interstellar" in 2006, but dropped out to direct other projects.) McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he's given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper's farewell to his daughter Murph—who's played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird." When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain—a key member of Caine's NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand "lost' to the Endurance's mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it's about a man who feels he has been "called" to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)"

- Interstellar (film)

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"[Opening narration] Ever had one of those nights that starts out like any other, but ends up being the best night of your life? It was June the 22nd, 1990: our final day of school. There was Oliver Chamberlain, Peter Page, Steven Prince, Andy Knightley, and me. They called me the King...because...my name's Gary King! Ollie was funny, he fancied himself as a bit of player, but really, he was all mouth. We called him "O-Man" because he had a birthmark on his forehead that looked like a 6. Haha He loved it! Pete was the baby of the group. He wasn't the kind of kid we'd usually hang out with, but, he was good for a laugh...and he was absolutely minted! Steve was a pretty cool guy. We jammed together, chased the girls... I think he saw us as rivals! Hmph! Sweet, really. And Andy... Andy was my wingman, the one guy I could rely on to back me up. He loved me, and... I'm not being funny, but, I loved him too. There was nothing we were gonna miss about school! Maybe Mr Shepherd, he was definitely one of the good guys. He used to ask me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him “I just wanted to have a good time”. He thought that was funny. It wasn't meant to be funny - not that night! Newton Haven was our hometown, our playground, our universe. And that night, it was the site of a heroic quest. The aim? To conquer the Golden Mile, twelve pubs along a legendary path of alcoholic indulgence. There was The First Post, The Old Familiar, The Famous Cock, The Cross Hands, The Good Companions, The Trusty Servant, The Two-Headed Dog, The Mermaid, The Beehive, The King's Head, The Hole in the Wall, all before reaching our destiny: The World's End! We took my car into town; I call it The Beast, because she was pretty hairy! And so our journey into manhood began. We were off! We didn't waste any time; we hit pub one, and we hit it hard! There was drinking, there was fun, there was controversy, there were ladies, there were shots, there was drama, and of course, there was drinking! By pub five, we were feeling invincible, and decided to purchase some herbal refreshment from a man we call The Reverend Green. Pint six put O-Man out of commission, so we carried on without him. Good thing; I bumped into his sister in the next pub, we went into the disabled's and I bumped into her again! Sam tagged along for a while, but then I had to let her go; I had another date that night and her name was Amber! Nine pints in, and it was us against the world. Things got mental in The Beehive, so we repaired to the bowls club, or as we liked to call it, the 'Smokehouse' - which is when it all went fuck-up! Everyone got Para(noid) and Pete chucked a whitey, so we had to bench him. In the end, we blew off the last three pubs and headed to the hills. I remember sittin' up there, blood on my knuckles, beer down my shirt, sick on my shoes, seeing the orange glow of a new dawn breaking, and knowing in my heart that life would never feel this good again. And you know what? It never did."

- The World's End (film)

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