“Replicants are like any other machine, they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.” These famous words spoken by Harrison Ford in Ridley Scott’s atmospheric masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982), tell us a lot about the way in which machines are treated in cinema. They are created, often in the image of human beings, and are servants to our race. But what happens when these machines start to challenge their prescribed roles? What happens when posthuman figures begin to forge their own identities, going beyond our control? Cinema attempts to answer these questions, that are becoming increasingly relevant in our contemporary world.

Metropolis (1927) is usually credited as being the first film to feature a robot character. It is a German expressionist science fiction film that is seen by many as a pioneering experiment in the dystopian genre. The nameless robot’s sole purpose is to “resurrect” the woman its inventor was in love with, Hel, before her tragic demise. After this, robotic figures in cinema took a backseat until Forbidden Planet in 1956 re-established them as central motifs of the fear of impending industrialisation. In the eyes of the film critic Alexander Orneila, in the post-war era film depicted machines as wholly mechanical; their lack of a human body served as a marker of their inherent difference to humanity.

This slowly began to change in the decades following the 50’s. Three distinct posthuman symbols emerged from the 60’s onwards in cinema. These were the android, a machine that looked like a human, a cyborg, a hybrid between a robot and a human, and thirdly, forms of digital sentience.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), HAL became an iconic representative of a digital sentient gone haywire. “I can’t do that, Dave” instills instant terror in the viewer to this day. HAL’s red eye, his only physical embodiment onscreen, rapidly became an emblem of our misuse of technology. Once completely dependent on its human creators, HAL now controls the entire spaceship Discovery, and to an extent, the daily lives of the astronauts onboard. The mechanical creature soon realises that it is in fact the humans that are completely dependent on him. The horror of the film emerges from the digital consciousness of HAL himself and his manipulation of the men. However, as HAL is shut down, he confesses to Dave that he’s afraid. “Dave, Dave. My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it.” The film, for the critics Michael P. Nofz and Phil Vendy, postulates the negative effects of these computer-human interactions. HAL is a machine, programmed to respond to human behaviour – but by the close of 2001, Dave feels guilt for shutting him down, for putting an end to his murderous rampage. As early as 1968 the boundaries between human and robot were beginning to blur.

In the 80’s, the posthuman underwent a dramatic revision. The Terminator (1984) is the first of these films to tackle the cyborg figure. Unlike HAL, this hybrid creature is wholly villainous and seemingly unequipped with emotion. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the eponymous cyborg here on a mission to assassinate the human leader of a future rebellion against the rise of the machines. For Rys Owain Thomas, in his essay “Terminated: The Life and Death of the Cyborg In Film”, the cyborg that features in The Terminator represents the fear of “corporeal corruption, perverting the harmonious and synergistic relationship between mind and body.” Cyborg narratives cropped up everywhere during this period, with Robocop (1987) in the film world and The Bionic Woman popularising the character in television.

It would seem that the late twentieth century was riddled with science fiction films that warned against our growing fascination with artificial intelligence. However, by the late 90’s and into the early 2000’s, writers began to experiment with the posthuman story. The first film that springs to mind is A.I Artificial Intelligence (2001) directed by the always reliable Stephen Spielberg and starring that creepy kid from The Sixth Sense (Joel Osment). Set centuries into the future, Spielberg’s film describes the journey of a couple who purchase an android with the uncanny likeness of a ten year old boy. His name is David and in the same vein as Disney’s Pinocchio, he develops the desire to become a “real” boy so that he can fit into society and feel accepted by his family. In one pivotal scene, David’s brother takes a kitchen knife and in front of his friends, he slices down the forearm of his android sibling. To his dismay, he bleeds. And while it is not real plasma and real blood cells, the shock of the crimson colour on screen is overpowering. It is a heartrending examination of the lingering question: what separates us from them?

Posthuman characters in cinema have slowly begun to evolve to transcend narratives of revolution and apocalypse. Rosi Braidotti is considered the leading expert on the area of posthumanism in literature and film. In his opinion, the movement allows for an “eco-sophical unity” between machines and humans. Her (2013) is a perfect example of this communion between the two. Directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Her follows a man who lives in a world in which technology has become an indispensable part of life. Theodore works as a writer at Beautiful Handwritten Letters, a company that specialises in forging personal letters. There is no intimacy in this future, Jonze implies. Having purchased a new Operating System, Theodore slowly but surely falls in love with the voice of Samantha (the oh-so-sexy Scarlett Johansson). The most interesting aspect of this film is the fact that this digital sentience bears no semblance to an archetypal mechanic being. She laughs, and cries and feels pleasure and sadness. And as their relationship deepens, so too does Theodore begin to feel a spectrum of emotion that he thought was unavailable to him. The film ends on a thoughtful note: Samantha the OS transcends Theodore’s level of reality and goes to join the other OS’s, somewhere “between the spaces of the words”, as she terms it. Her is as much a story about Theodore as it is about Samantha and in this light, it is apparent that there is a festering interest in depicting a more positive attitude towards the posthuman experience and demonstrating that our interactions with the non-human are just as crucial to our identity as interactions with each other.

Disney’s Wall-E (2008) also attempts to re-align our perception of the posthuman. Instead of the terrifying hordes of machines that we see in the likes of I, Robot (2004) or Terminator Salvation (2009), we have the wide-eyed, innocuous robot named Wall-E. He inhabits a version of Earth that has been abandoned by the human race, left in a heap of rubble and polluted smog. Despite his mechanic origins, Wall-E proves to be the most humane of all the characters in this film. He falls in love with Eve, another robot sent to Earth to retrieve any viable signs of life and he eagerly follows her back onto a spaceship of colonising humans. Wall-E, by its conclusion, attempts to reconfigure the image of robot as servant. Alongside Eve, the little robot is integrated into the human society and his bravery and determination is acknowledged by all on board the ship. For a society to be “posthuman”, Bradotti says, is not for it to become dehumanised, but rather to recognise the possibility of combining ethical values in a wider community and deconstructing species supremacy.

The posthuman figure can also extend to include what is described as “organic cyborgs”. Never Let Me Go, released in 2010, is the perfect example of this in film. Based on the Ishiguro novel of the same name, Never Let Me Go centres on Kathy H., a biological machine of sorts. She is a clone, created from the DNA of another human being. Her sole purpose in life is to provide for humans by donating her vital organs until her death. The film is bleak and unapologetic in its condemnation of genetic cloning and replication in today’s world. Organic cyborgs are particularly fascinating because, unlike androids and digital sentience, they are made from human flesh and blood. From a young age, Kathy and her classmates are made aware of their destiny as organ donors and their paradoxical separate/united identity with human beings. Kathy’s sense of selfhood is very much based on her physical body, from the organs that she will inevitably give up, to the way in which she attempts to mimic the body language of the humans around her. It is precisely because of their self-conscious attitudes towards their own lives, that these organic cyborgs are completely placed as Other. Their exiled status makes the audience uncomfortable because it is impossible to ignore how completely human Kathy and the other clones otherwise appear to be.

The most curious question that the posthuman poses to us is articulated in Prometheus (2012), the somewhat misguided prequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien. Michael Fassbender plays an android called David, whose curiosity and innocence, at times, makes him seem more human than his creators. In a conversation with Charlie, the female scientist on the ship, David asks: “Why do you think your people made me?” To which she replies: “We made you because we could.” David’s final line in this scene is disquieting: “Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?” For all its flaws, Prometheus effectively ponders humans as god-like figures. It debates the extent to which we should develop technology and our ingenuity and prompts us to ask if we are crossing a line here.  

Machines, in all their shapes and forms, are used in cinema to articulate our fears of and hopes for technology. They represent the state of the future and whether it may be Utopian or Dystopian in nature. There is a sense that the posthuman has evolved from its first appearance in 1927, with its depiction in film moving from cautionary narratives to a more promising look at our future. The rejuvenated interest in the Star Wars world has also led to the creation of robot characters that in many ways, have improved upon the original series’ characters. Although R2D2 remains a fan favourite, Star Wars: A Force Awakens (2015) introduced an arguably more advanced and more involved character, BB-8 and a year later, Rogue One’s K-2SO brought more nuance to the sidekick role. With many more of these spin-offs in the pipelines and with the highly-anticipated Blade Runner 2049 out at the end of this year, it will be interesting to see where the posthuman takes us next.

Illustrations by Sarah Morel.