Sci-Fi Films - the Matrix” and Bicentennial Man

In this essay I am going to discuss about the topic:

“Science fiction often plays off the real against the artificial, either in the form of humans versus non-human (androids, cyborgs, synthetics), or the world versus the non-world (cyberspace, inner-space, intentional space)”.

I have chosen the films “The Matrix” and “Bicentennial Man”

An explosion in information access and exchange is fueling the Information Superhighway that was created as a result of the computer revolution. If technology has truly become a god, then cyberspace is definitely its bible. Its scope is endless; its breadth enormous. Although the foundation of cyberspace, the computer, definitely serves to dehumanize culture, the Information Superhighway itself does not. If anything, cyberspace is re-humanizing the computer revolution. The World Wide Web, through pictures and graphics, has added personality and more personal contact to a technology that for years was ‘just the facts.’ Although the statement might be made that this is a pseudo-rehumanization that masks true human characteristics with digital ones, this is at least a step in the right direction. Something that removes the human qualities or attributes from culture can be said to dehumanize it.

This technology destroys our view of truth and meaning. The basic presupposition of the Information Superhighway is that it contains information on any subject and can answer any question. It causes people to search places other than God for direction, truth, and meaning. Involvement with the technology serves to replace our involvement with reality. There is a tendency for people to start thinking of themselves and others in terms of their online personalities. Many people develop a whole other life on-line and some even end up being unable to separate their on-line identity from their real one. Recent movies such as The Matrix and Bicentennial Man serve to further blur this already fuzzy line.

Bicentennial Man, directed by Chris Columbus (US, 1999), is based on a story Isaac Asimov wrote in 1975 and like many of his stories, it deals with the enigma of a machine with the intelligence of a man, but without the rights or the feelings. As we might expect the film presents Asimov's concept of the intelligent robot, a concept that, like Asimov himself, pre-dates the modern world of personal computers, video games, the Internet, 'expert systems' and so on. As a result, in many ways the film echoes the themes we saw in the films of the early 1970s - films like WestWorld and The Stepford Wives.

It shows robots that act like humans, performed by real actors. I'm going to criticize them because in my opinion they exercise pernicious influence upon the public. In brief, The Bicentennial Man (BM) tells the story of a robot that lasts for about 200 years. His creator and his descendants change this robot, in order to acquire more and more human features. In the beginning he uses a kind of armor, looking like a machine; during the night he connects a plug into the electric outlet to recharge his batteries. Gradually, his appearance becomes more and more humane, to a point where he acts as any normal human, with thinking, feeling and willing, that is, the robot would have passed the total turning test. It is not clear if it would have passed the total total turning test. At the end, the woman with whom the robot is in love is going to die, so he decides that he cannot suffer her absence and should also "die" (Setzer 2002)

A 'cyborg', a contraction of Cybernetic Organism, is a hybrid of man (or woman) and machine. The machine parts endow additional strength and physical capability while the human provides the intelligence and will as well as much of the body, which makes them largely irrelevant to this dissertation. Occasionally things are more complicated; when the machine part provides some mental functions as well

The story of a reluctant Christ-like protagonist set against a baroque, MTV backdrop, The Matrix, directed by Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski, is the definitive hybrid of technical wizardry and contextual excellence that should be the benchmark for all sci-fi films to come (Menor 2000)

Almost all the films we have been discussing assume that conflict between robots and people is unavoidable. If anything that conflict has become more violent and inimical, with the film, the Matrix, it is featuring a world in which intelligent machines are at war with humanity. More importantly we see little sign of machine intelligence in them. True they are machines - under the 'cyborg' skin and flesh that is designed to allow them to pass as human they are constructed of the same metal and electronics