War Robots as a Movie's Heroes

Zor · Post by **Zor** » 2008-07-21 02:12am

I was thinking about WALL-E For a bit and a few old RAR! Scenarios of mine and this came across it.

In Science Fiction Military Robots are generally used as antagonists, either as cannon fodder (like in Star Wars) or as unstopable killing machines (like in Terminator). It is an easy thing to do, but i was thinking about something else.

Basically, it involved using NON-ANTHROPOMORPHIC Military Robots as the protagonists. Not a humaniod infiltrator, but something like having a meter and a half tall quadropedal robot with a turret with Emotion and Focus being conveyed via cameras of various forms. One idea i had floating around my head was set after a nuclear war in a Roughly Mad-Max style Earth. On day, a Catch of Advanced Military Robots (that are quite intellegent and capable of Learning) stored in some underground activates and moves out. Said Machines are intellegent and capable of learning, but have Drives. Think of it like the Three Laws of robotics, but in the way of things such as Protect Civilians, Neutralize Threats, Obey Military Commanding Officers and so on. The Machines have to deal with various threats in this Post Apocaylptic nightmare world and gather up and protect what they consider to be innocent civilians while dealing with roving bands of Barbarians and such. The Main Charecter being a specific War Robot which has a relationship with a few notable humans, i am thinking a mother and her child would be a good thing for this. But this is just my petty little idea.

What do you say?

Zor

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2008-07-21 03:25am

A catch of robots? You mean a fisherman caught them?

2000AD · Post by **2000AD** » 2008-07-21 04:20am

Hmmmm..... I was going to suggest a movie based on the ABC Warriors, but they are anthropomorphic.

JointStrikeFighter · Post by **JointStrikeFighter** » 2008-07-21 05:01am

Didnt we have this movie; Short Circuit

Coalition · Post by **Coalition** » 2008-07-21 05:20am

Bolos?

Still, most movies typically have the hero fighting against a greater opponent, and defeating them due to gumption/rage/something emotional. You'd have to find a way for people to connect with the machine, or just make the villains worse. Heroes apparently must have a Fatal Flaw.

Some decent robot hero movies:
Solo
Short Circuit

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2008-07-21 08:31am

Tachikoma: The movie!

tim31 · Post by **tim31** » 2008-07-21 10:42am

Jesus, skirting a bit close to Iron Giant here.

Mind you, when I read the thread title I thought of a Cyberdyne ground-assault HK with the personality of WALL-E.

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2008-07-21 11:35am

Conveying emotion in this scenario will be damn tricky. Note that even in movies where the characters are human the directors and producers don't like using masks because of this very reason - humans are wired to do a great deal of facial recognition and processing. Cutting that out of the look makes it harder to get the feelings across. In very very good movies e.g. Wall-E it can be done, but most of the time it falls flat.

Manus Celer Dei · Post by **Manus Celer Dei** » 2008-07-21 12:47pm

2000AD wrote:Hmmmm..... I was going to suggest a movie based on the ABC Warriors, but they are anthropomorphic.

Not all of them. Mek-Quake and Steelhorn, for example, and Deadlock was only vaugely anthropomorphic.

Luzifer's right hand · Post by **Luzifer's right hand** » 2008-07-21 12:59pm

I once wrote a very short story about a robot called Agent Emoticon, he uses holographic smilies to convey emotions.

Ted C · Post by **Ted C** » 2008-07-21 01:17pm

Coalition wrote:Some decent robot hero movies:
Solo
Short Circuit

Solo is not a decent movie. The books upon which it is based are pretty good, though.

VF5SS · Post by **VF5SS** » 2008-07-21 05:48pm

I've heard Gunhed does a pretty good job of that. They even give Gunhed some funny quirks like his love of baseball.

Enigma · Post by **Enigma** » 2008-07-21 06:59pm

I wouldn't mind a Bolo movie. Who doesn't love a WMD that can think?

Manus Celer Dei · Post by **Manus Celer Dei** » 2008-07-21 07:21pm

Enigma wrote:I wouldn't mind a Bolo movie. Who doesn't love a WMD that can think?

The crew of the Dark Star?

Eleventh Century Remnant · Post by **Eleventh Century Remnant** » 2008-07-21 07:49pm

The entities on the recieving end?

Bolos aren't exactly animatronic, nor lend themselves well to such; They're huge with lots of rigid surfaces, difficult to empathise with unless you can hear them think, and most of their moving parts go 'bang' in some way or other.
That and the fact that the sentient marks do think at vastly greater than human speeds is going to pose a real problem for scene setting.
I mean, the idea of a fourteen thousand ton tread-and-contragrav thermonuclear armed monster issuing a staff college lecture in bullet time just doesn't sound right.

Sure, the stories are there to tell, (just avoid the Melcon-Concordiat War- bit too downbeat with the genocide and whatnot), but the cinematography could easily turn out to be a bastard, and the wrong director could make a dog's breakfast of it.

The ABC Warriors- one big problem. Deadlock. How in the name of smeg do you explain him to an audience? He's a tarot- using, khaos magic wielding warlock robot. I mean, I get it, but I'm damn sure the majority of the cinemagoing public won't.

As a digression, one thing I would love to see filmed but never expect to are the Retief stories- the dates are all wrong but the internal continuity suggests post- Concordiat, rebuilding period. There's a lot of material, but I can't think of a studio or a director who I would trust with the tone of cheerfully, openly acknowledged cynicism.

Some of the Leadies (nickname, radiation- resistant robots) in Philip K. Dick's "The Penultimate Truth" were non- anthropomorphic- or am I thinking of the short story that was based on? Anyway, it could work but it's probably too Cold War- ish.

2000AD · Post by **2000AD** » 2008-07-22 06:05pm

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote: The ABC Warriors- one big problem. Deadlock. How in the name of smeg do you explain him to an audience? He's a tarot- using, khaos magic wielding warlock robot. I mean, I get it, but I'm damn sure the majority of the cinemagoing public won't.

Yeeeeaaaaahh, Deadlock is a problem. Personally I reckon you could cut him if you want to go mainstream and focus on the others.
Or seriously dumb him down to a robot magician, no need to go into too much detail unless a franchise actually gets going.
Either way you're pissing off the fanboys.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2008-07-22 07:12pm

VF5SS wrote:I've heard Gunhed does a pretty good job of that. They even give Gunhed some funny quirks like his love of baseball.

That's actually in the original Manga.

oh, and K-9, gotta love man's best robotic friend.

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2008-07-22 11:36pm

Ted C wrote:
Coalition wrote:Some decent robot hero movies:
Solo
Short Circuit
Solo is not a decent movie. The books upon which it is based are pretty good, though.

There is more then one? I only read Solo, and it was ok. Different from the film, but still pretty good.

Sidewinder · Post by **Sidewinder** » 2008-07-23 11:52pm

Having a non-anthropomorphic killing machine as the star MIGHT work if there's an anthropomorphic character (read: biological life form) travelling with it and emoting for it, like K. W. Jeter's Boba Fett novels, in which Boba Fett is an unemotional killing machine accompanied by Bossk and Dengar, who ARE emotional and often let the readers know how Fett's lack of emotions freaks them out.

Gullible Jones · Post by **Gullible Jones** » 2008-07-24 11:38am

I thought it was Dengar who was unemotional?

(As for Fett, I do recall a Wilhelm scream when he got knocked into the Sarlacc pit...)

Oni Koneko Damien · Post by **Oni Koneko Damien** » 2008-07-24 07:17pm

Johnny 5 would like to have a word with you about ideas that were done several decades ago.

Sidewinder · Post by **Sidewinder** » 2008-07-25 02:07am

Gullible Jones wrote:I thought it was Dengar who was unemotional?

Dengar IS capable of feeling emotions deemed "useful" by the Imperials who turned him into a cyborg, e.g., hatred; in the 'Tales of the Bounty Hunters' anthology, he obsessively calls his targets "Solo" because he blames Han Solo for the accident that would've crippled him if the Imperials hadn't operated on him. In the same anthology, he regains the ability to feel "positive" emotions, e.g., love, after hooking up with a female empath who can make others feel what she feels; he agrees to become Fett's partner (despite the tendency of those partners to get killed, sometimes by Fett himself) so he could earn enough money to retire and live happily ever after with that woman.

Teleros · Post by **Teleros** » 2008-07-25 09:12am

Ender wrote:Conveying emotion in this scenario will be damn tricky. Note that even in movies where the characters are human the directors and producers don't like using masks because of this very reason - humans are wired to do a great deal of facial recognition and processing. Cutting that out of the look makes it harder to get the feelings across. In very very good movies e.g. Wall-E it can be done, but most of the time it falls flat.

Wall-E did have a face of sorts however - would military robots have one? I can see some having faces or holograms / screens to display faces on in order to reassure civilians and the like, but there'd be no need to switch them on outside of such situations, and any robots built specifically to go in and kill people rather than interact with them wouldn't need one at all.

Still, as for the OP:

1. The robots aren't war robots as such (or perhaps only a few are), but are (relatively) lightly armed peacekeeping versions, which would allow for some sort of face (even something as simple as EVE's in Wall-E). It also makes any opponents they face more of a threat, because the humans won't be automatically outgunned - peacekeeping robots don't need to be as well armoured as urban warfare robots would have to be, so lighter weapons pose more of a threat to them.

2. How far ahead do they think? Under their normal programming, I'm sure that they wouldn't hesitate to take the hit instead of the civilian they're protecting, but with no possibility of resupply, do they continue to do this or sacrifice a few humans in order to protect the rest for longer?

3. There are still other ways of showing emotion beyond faces. Having a robot crouch protectively over mother & child is an obvious one. Another might be a badly damaged robot in a last stand situation.

4. At the same time, this could be contrasted with their lack of emotion in other areas. For example, they have no need to administer the last rites to their own, and you could contrast one scene where the humans mourn over one of their own to the robots, stripping a fallen comrade for spare parts and equipment, or just leaving it lying where it fell.

5. What if there are military forces of some description in this post-apocalyptic world? What if some of them are mistaken for the robots' long-gone superiors (perhaps due to uniform similarities)?

Oni Koneko Damien · Post by **Oni Koneko Damien** » 2008-07-25 04:04pm

Teleros wrote:Wall-E did have a face of sorts however - would military robots have one?

Again, take a look at Short Circuit. Johnny 5, a military robot, managed to convey emotions pretty damn well with just his lens-focus and lens-shields.

Zixinus · Post by **Zixinus** » 2008-07-25 04:44pm

The Main Charecter being a specific War Robot which has a relationship with a few notable humans, i am thinking a mother and her child would be a good thing for this. But this is just my petty little idea.

Wouldn't that make him in a certain sense, a father? Protecting mother and child from the treats of the world?

Beyond that, I would like the idea.