And the movie Alien is about an alien, but that didn’t stop Ridley Scott from randomly dropping an unexpected and unexplained Robot into the middle of it (Ash).
I’m not saying that there can never be a movie that has both aliens and robots - I mean, there are tons of movies and TV shows that do. But if there are beings that you think look like aliens, that also look like robots, in a movie all about artificial intelligence, robots seems more likely.
IIRC, the future mecha also interacted directly with some machinery.
The House of the Seven Gables: What happened to Judge Pyncheon? Am I supposed to know? Does everybody else know and I’m the only one who doesn’t? Should I just nod my head and pretend I do?
And I’m simply applying your logic that a movie about identifying robots and aliens. When I first saw Alien, I was sure that Ash was some sort of aliebn creation/construction/ taken over human, because they hadn’t mentioned a word about robots before that point, and the film was about Aliens, and even entitled that. It wasn’t until they actually told you that Asah was a robot that you got the point,.
They never said that the AIs at the end were robots, and nothing clearly indicated it.
Can’t they be both?
A scene was filmed in which Deckard visits Holden in the hospital. (Holden is the Blade Runner who was shot by Leon in the film’s opening interview.) In early drafts of the screenplay for that scene, Holden complains about how difficult it has become to identify the newest replicants, and mentions a case where a pathologist was two hours into an autopsy before realizing his subject was a replicant.
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It had never occured to me that Deckard was a replicant or the creatures at the end of A.I. were aliens until I saw these baffling ideas being advanced on the internet. To me, they just make the stories more complicated without making them better.
On a much smaller scale, I recall a minor edit-war about Wikipedia’s Watchmen entry in which someone was very determined to argue that Manhattan didn’t kill Rorschach - he just teleported him somewhere far away. The idea struck me as full-on absurd.
Wow, that is a good one, then. I’ve never heard that idea, certainly not enough to be called common, but it would be a very bad misunderstanding.
As an afterthought, I don’t get why some people think Kirk’s ‘KHAAAN!!!’ yell is anything other than a geniune expression of fury and frustration.
I don’t think there’s anything more I can say apart from repeating my previous posts with the evidence for why they must be robots (the electrical impulses, the communication with machines, the themes of the film). You think they were aliens. Fine. I don’t think there’s anything left to discuss here, then - it’s just a movie, after all.
WRT Alien, I think it was a clever distraction; I also thought Ash might have been the alien of the title, so it was more shocking when the real alien was revealed. It has been a very long time since I saw the movie, so I might be misremembering.
I guess you could also say that Ash was ‘alien’ in a way, although definitely not in the way we usually parse that word.
Both of these stories have meditations about what differentiates a human being from a mere simulacrum of humanity at their core.
The ambiguity of Deckard’s humanity definitely makes the story better, but interpreting the advanced AI at the end of AI as aliens misses the point entirely.
“These machines were trapped under the wreckage before the freezing. Therefore, these robots are originals. They knew living people.”
Of course, the entire point of the novel Contact was completely missed by the filmmakers.
In a thread on common misunderstandings, you repeat the common misunderstanding? Come on man!
Everyone who tries to say that everything in Total Recall actually happened and it wasn’t all a dream. Yes, it was. You have to watch the scene where he’s at Recall getting ready for his implanting with bilnders on to not think so. They show the “reactor” as an image to be loaded in the simulation. The technician says “Here’s a new one - blue skies on Mars.” Melina is 21A. No getting around it.
I understood the plot, but technically in the early 1980s when the movie took place trading regulations established in the 1970s would have stopped the specifics from going down the way they did in the FCOJ market.
I recognize that the beings at the end of AI were intended to be robots, but I also recognize that they made some very poor design decisions with them, such that it’s quite understandable that some viewers might mistake them for aliens.
When they’re talking about how they bring people back, they say that they were surprised to learn that there was an inherent record of the person embedded somehow into the fabric of space-time, but that such records could only be retraced once before being irretrievably lost. That sounds like a pretty clear SF dog-whistle for “soul” to me.
Aliens, robots –
Like the late Earl Warren?
Perhaps it’s because Kirk is deliberately misleading Khan, making Khan think he’s won, while not actually being quite as badly hurt as he seems. Certainly, that “days instead of hours” message was a lie to deceive Khan. Maybe the ‘Khaaaaan’ cry was also just pretending to be furious and frustrated, while actually being in control. Plus, about thirty seconds later, he’s calmly asking if there’s anything to eat.
Actually, I never thought about this until now.I always thought he was angry and frustrated, but now I think he was just pretending.
Which part? That I.J. 4 isn’t worth watching? Yeah, a lot of people thought that.
Or that Indy is immortal? Yup, Some people thought that, including the author of the novelization of the film.
What movie are you talking about?
Never mind I read further in the thread.