Earlier today I started watching Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and was forced to give up watching after half an hour. ‘What forced you to give up watching?’ I hear you ask. No, it wasn’t Academy of Wooden Acting alumni Hayden Christian’s acting, nor was it the fact that the film appears to have OD’d on CGI effects. It was the fact that the robots, THE GODDAMN ROBOTS, all have personalities.
Now don’t get me wrong, in the original trilogy the robots’ personalities were kind of endearing, as C-3PO constantly fretted about absolutely every single plot point that arose and R2-D2 was little bit cheeky, and we liked it that way. But the new trilogy took it to another level. Whereas before R2 (as he likes to be called by his circle of acquaintances) would just emit irritated beeps from time to time, Episode III has a scene in which he incapacitates two super battle droids (as a write this I’m starting to realise how much I loathe myself) by squirting oil out of what looks suspiciously like a little chrome pecker and making them slip about comically in a pool of oil before collapsing in a heap. All of a sudden R2 is the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Charlie fucking Chaplin all roll into one little steel rubbish bin and it’s not even that the fact that these personalities simply make the droids more annoying, it’s much worse! Think about this logically: each robot in the Star Wars universe is built for one specific task: C-3PO is a translator (human-cyborg relations to be exact! …I hate myself so much right now), R2-D2 is a maintenance droid, yadda yadda yadda. So if every robot is built for just one purpose, why give them sentience? It’s not like you’re intending for them to take up and hone brand new skills. But that’s not even the worse part! The personalities don’t just make the robots annoying whilst simultaneously being utterly pointless – they actually stop the droids from doing their jobs properly!
First example: in Episode IV: A New Hope, Chewbacca is being 'escorted' by Han and Luke through the Death Star. As they walk, a small black box with wheels that’s supposed to be a cleaner droid, or some other kind of robot designed for blue-collar work, whatever, drives up to him. Chewbacca growls at the droid, it lets out a high-pitched squeal and rushes back the way it came. Now because the morons at Robot Co, or wherever the hell these things are made, decided to give their robot designed to clean a floor emotions, it wasn’t able to do it’s one job. But even when there isn’t something preventing these clinking clunks of chrome from fulfilling their one reason for existence they’ll still find a way to slack off. At the start of Episode III R2-D2 is the hangar of General Grievous’ ship where Obi-Wan and Anakin landed their ships to rescue Emperor Palpatine, when two super-battle droids enter. Now what’s the first thing one of them says? ‘Yup, those are definitely Jedi ships’. No shit. He enters and expresses surprise in a manner befitting some small-town hick farmer who’s found his neighbour’s cow wandering around his cabbage patch. I mean come on! But it gets worse! R2-D2 makes a noise; one battle droid says ‘What was that?’ and the other replies ‘Ah forget about it, get back to work!’. He doesn’t inspect the noise out of sheer laziness. He’s a battle droid who hears a suspicious noise and can’t be bothered to find out what it is. Maybe it was a slow day and he had no reason to suspect that the enemy are aboard, it’s not like there was a battle going on outside- OH WAIT. THERE WAS TOTALLY A FUCKING BATTLE GOING ON OUTSIDE! This guy, in the heat of battle, hears a noise after finding two enemy ships in the hangar and ‘Forgets about it’. For shame George Lucas, for shame.
And Star Wars never addresses the wider implication of sentient robots. Why haven’t they decided that humans are obsolete and tried to eradicate us like in Terminator? Maybe all the personality defects, anxiety complexes and laziness that they install in these robots were a way of preventing them from ever rising up against humanity because the robots can never be arsed doing it? Maybe it was part of the plan all along?
No comments:
Post a Comment