Top Ten Tuesday: Evil Computers

Science fiction cinema, over its hundred-year-plus history, has returned again and again to time-worn tropes, simply because they just work. One of the most common of these is the evil computer – an artificial intelligence, created by man, which eventually gains sentience and turns against its creator, for whatever reason (the most common being some sort of programming error, causing a paradoxical loop in the machine’s logic centre). Over the years, this trope has expanded to include killer robots, assassin androids, and even an entire race of assimilatory cyborgs; the latest variation, to be seen in the upcoming release Transcendence, finds an AI scientist’s (played by Johnny Depp) consciousness uploaded into a computer in order to save his life, only for the subsequent cybernetic being to inevitably turn evil and power-mad. With that in mind, I assembled a list of the ten most evil computers in cinematic history.

A small note before I begin, though. I made a point to distinguish between ‘computer’ and ‘robot’. Though ostensibly both manmade artificial intelligences, the latter implies an actual corporeal body, while the former just refers to an ethereal, electronic collection of ones and zeroes. This is far more terrifying and potentially immortal than a destructible metallic form, so I chose to limit myself and focus only on computers. This means no Blade Runner, no Metropolis, and no Transformers (for all of you hoping for such). Anyway, without further ado, the list:

Top Ten Tuesday: Disaster Flicks

With the upcoming release of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii (in 3D!) this weekend, I decided to take this opportunity to discuss some of my favourite disaster flicks. This genre has proved very popular over cinema’s history, peaking in the 1970s with the commercial success of films such as Airport, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno; this latter movie was especially well-received, as it was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. After a brief lull throughout the 1980s, brought on by the success of genre spoof Airplane!, the disaster film returned with a vengeance in the ’90s, climaxing with the incredible box office returns and eleven Oscar wins of James Cameron’s Titanic. The genre has since remained fairly popular, with costly flops balanced out by enormous hits, but seems to be entering another waning period, with only a handful of high-grossing success stories; in fact, most disaster flicks these days are relegated to specialty TV channels, with increasingly ridiculous titles like Birdemic, Sharknado and the upcoming Airplane vs. Volcano. Whatever the pedigree, though, the template has always stayed relatively the same: large ensemble casts, high-concept catastrophes, and life-or-death stakes.

One final note before I reveal my top ten: I decided to focus only on natural disasters and not those of the man-made or extra-terrestrial variety. While some of the disasters in these movies are eventually revealed to be caused by human actions or interference, they all manifest in nature to begin with.