Top 10 Movie Robots of All Time

Top 10 Robots in Movie History: Let's face it - robots are cool. Robots in movies are even cooler. Engineers might like to take credit for the first robot, but robots, from the beginning, were the product of fiction. Even the word "robot" originated in a work of fiction. Karel Capek, a Czech playwright used the term robot in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). In the play a factory makes artificial people that look human and act as servants to do the drudge work of humanity. The play's success popularized the word robot, and movie monsters have never been the same since. Karel, by the way, credited his brother Josef for actually coming up with the term. But it was Karel's play that made the term a household word.

Robots and movies have a long history together, stretching back to the silent days and continuing on until today. With so many movie robots to choose from it was tough to narrow the list down to just ten, but top 87 movie robots just doesn't sound as cool, and nothing's cooler than movie robots.

Just for the record, this list makes no distinctions between robot, android or cyborg. If it was created and not procreated, it was considered.

10. Any Transformer - The Transformers (2007)

I'm kind of partial to Megatron, but they're all pretty cool. Any robots with so many moving parts can't be all bad.

9. The Gunslinger - Westworld (1973)

Yul Brynner plays a grim, Wild West robot who gets tired of getting blown away by wannabe cowboys in Michael Chrichton's 1973 tale of a theme park gone horribly wrong. Brynner is perfect as an unemotional robot that somehow manages to project menace as he pursues a couple of guests through various sections of the park.

8. Robby the Robot - Forbidden Planet (1956)

In the xenophobic 1950s, if it wasn't American, it just wasn't right. Into this came Robby the Robot, a walking piece of technology that didn't want to destroy all humans. Forbidden Planet features a young Leslie Nielson as a red-blooded, got the hots for the beautiful girl so I must be cool, space traveler who comes upon a planet where the true evil consists of monsters from the id. The story is an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

7. Robot Maria - Metropolis (1927)

I know it's blasphemous, but Metropolis is not that great a movie. There I've said it. Is it visually stunning? Yes, of course - ahead of its time. But the convoluted tale of some woman leading some underground worker revolution thing only to be replaced by a robot to manipulate the workers back in line before they get flooded out by the evil machinations of the above-ground proletariat loses me every time. As a result, the amazing robot designed for the movie drops a few notches on the list. It's still a cool movie robot, but it's hard to separate the movie from the robot in this case. Even the Moroder-scored version doesn't help.

6. The Iron Giant - The Iron Giant (1999)

Unlike our previous entry, here's a movie robot that benefits from the movie in which it exists. This Brad Bird movie takes the premise of you can't judge a book by it's cover and presents it with tremendous heartfelt emotion, creating a movie robot that is all heart - well, sort of.

5. Roy Batty - Bladerunner (1982)

Bladerunner was one of those movies I wanted to love, should have loved, but in the end, I merely liked it. That said, Rutger Hauer's portrayal of a robot facing his own mortality is a powerful statement on the duality of life itself. Not to mention, he had some really cool robotic hair.

4. Huey, Dewey and Louie - Silent Running (1972)

These three little robots from Douglas Trumball's cult classic aren't necessarily cool, but they make up for it in sheer cuteness. Reminiscent of Wilson, in Castaway, you can't help but develop a bond to the little drones, one of which (Dewey) winds up caretaker to the last remaining forest from Earth. Check out the movie if you haven't seen it.

3. R2-D2 and C-3PO - Star Wars (1977)

The Laurel and Hardy of robots, it's hard to list one without the other - hence they are combined here. The narrative vehicle of the first Star Wars, the popularity of these two had nearly every movie in the late 1970s and early '80s trying to insert some kind of cute robot from Vincent in The Black Hole to Bebo the mechanical owl in Clash of the Titans.

2. Ash - Alien (1979)

It was hard for me to choose between Ash and his counterpart in Aliens. Here, the original backstabbing robot wins out. You gotta love a robot with milk for blood and lots of plastic parts as opposed to metal.

1. The Terminator - The Terminator (1984)

Although the different films refer to him by differing model numbers, we're talking about the Terminator as portrayed by Arnold. The T-1000 (liquid metal) Terminator was cool, but nothing beats that chrome skeleton face for menacing evil.

So there you have it, the top ten movie robots of all time. Obviously for every robot that made the list, many more movie robots were left off. Fortunately, robots have no feelings to be hurt.