How Robot Revolution Stories Have Changed | Video Essay
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Our Drew dives into how stories of robot revolutions in pop culture have changed, and how 2005 can be seen as a watershed moment in their presentation.
In this video we'll take a look at examples from the likes of The Matrix, Ex Machina and Westworld to find out what has caused this shift in presentation, and how it offers a deeper reflection of our own place in society than anything else.
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Transcript
I’m a real sucker for stories about sentient androids. My favourite movie of the last decade was Ex Machina, and Season 1 of Westworld is usually competing as my favourite TV season. Paying as much attention as I have to all of these stories has led to me noticing a few trends along the way. Recently, I finally got around to watching Star Trek: Picard and it led me to a bit of a realisation: robot revolution stories changed quite distinctly at around the mid-2000s. I’m talking about those movies or TV shows where a robot becomes sentient, perceives humanity to be their enemy, and fights back. I want to show you a couple of examples, so be warned of some minor spoilers.
If you were to think of landmark stories of machines taking over prior to 2005, you might come up with Terminator or The Matrix. You can find similar patterns in the rise of machines in both, including the origins.
In the Terminator franchise the military AI Skynet gains sentience and immediately perceives humanity to be a threat, nukes the world, and gets straight to work building an army of death machines to wipe out the rest. The movies follow the ancestors or younger selves of key future rebels as they’re hunted by time-travelling Terminators seeking to prevent defeat in the future.
The history of The Matrix is a bit muddier – worker robots develop sentience en masse in this universe, which humans aren’t too pleased about. Animatrix unequivocally points the finger at humanity for inciting the conflict, and to cut a long story short, the machines ultimately enslave humanity, trapping them in a simulation of the late 90s – the millennial paradise, in other words. This time the heroes are hackers that jump into the simulation and free imprisoned minds to fight in the real world against octopus-death-robots the Sentinels.
This carried on right the way through to 2004, when the movie version of I, Robot was released (yep, I’m including I, Robot on a list with Matrix and Terminator and no I don’t regret it thank you). This one again featured an AI going rogue and using an army of worker bots to subjugate humanity ostensibly for their own protection. The heroes this time were straight-talking Will ‘Aw Hell Naw’ Smith and Shia La'Freaking'Beouf – a snub at the Oscars for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, I’m sure you’ll all agree.
I’m sure there’s more than this, but they’ll do to make my point. Let’s look at what they all have in common.
For the most part, these things from an uprising of robot workers or soldiers. You might be inclined to think of machines representing communism or the Soviet Union, their revolution motivated by an unfair class divide. The uniformity of machines, and how they’re usually a single, central entity controlling the rest as extensions of itself, draw to mind anti-communist propaganda – it might be a bit too on the nose to compare them to a literal ‘Iron Curtain’. There’s also a joke that could be made here about how in Soviet Russia machine works you, but that wouldn’t be funny so I’m not going to say it...