Have you ever been in the middle of asking a question but your love of time traveling robots distracts you?
So your question starts off with something like “How many times on Red Dwarf does the spaceship break down?” but ends up with “While I’m on that subject, if you could you please provide a list of all movies that deal with robots traveling through time I would be very appreciative.” It can happen to anyone, but it specifically happens to one person.
Here we present a comprehensive list of movies that involve time-traveling robots. What is the criteria? The robot / cyborg / android / super intelligent A.I. must travel through time, not just be a character in a movie where other things (humans) travel through time.
Terminator
A cyborg from the future comes to the past to try and woo its one true love, Sarah Connor. Unfortunately some meatbag named Kyle Reese swoops in and impregnates her when she is most vulnerable. The cyborg’s heart is both figuratively and literally crushed by a hydraulic press because of this betrayal.
Terminator 2 : Judgment Day
This time two robots come from the future, both seeking the affections of one woman, the same Sarah Connor. The heart broken cyborg from the first movie tries to reconcile their differences and become the father young John Connor never had, while the other robot takes a much more aggressive stance. Both robots perish as their love burns hot enough to melt steel, which was deadly to their cold mechanical hearts.
Terminator 3 : Rise of the Machines
Our love struck cyborg is back again. Sarah Connor is long dead, but the cyborg feels it is important that now adult John Connor receive his inheritance. In this case it ends up being a coffin full of guns. Another cyborg comes back hoping to win John Connor’s heart, but much like the first movie, is thwarted by a meatbag who takes advantage of the situation when both her and John are trapped alone together in a nuclear bunker.
Lost in Space
A robot tries to save the humans from their own stupidity, constantly warning them of dangers to which they turn a deaf ear. Eventually this robot gives up and lets the humans crash land on a planet and die.
Star Trek: First Contact
Android Commander Data has been in the same job on the same ship for 9 years, but with his positronic brain, it might as well be forever. His programming wants him to become more human, which sounds pretty racist in a universe with hundreds of varied sentient species. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, he travels to the past, joins a radical anti-free thinking group, and tries to destroy the race he always tried to emulate.
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
Bill and Ted travel through heaven, hell, and time in order to build very poor robot versions of themselves to fight very evil robot versions of themselves. It is kind of like a bodacious exodus.
Flight of the Navigator
A robot space ship is just trying to do its job, when a routine stop causes a traffic accident with some electrical lines and lose its navigation charts. Conveniently the child who was being dropped off has all the necessary charts in his head, Jonny Mnemonic style. Follow that with an hour of evading the government shenanigans, and a trip back to 1978, and you’ve got yourself a time traveling robot.
Bender’s Big Score
Bender is just a robot trying to make ends meet. So when he travels to the past over and over again to steal Earth’s historic treasures, what could go wrong? Apparently everything. Paradoxes ensue.
Cyborg 2087
Cyborg travels to the past to try and fix dystopian future. This is almost more detail than is provided on the Wikipedia page.
Meet the Robinsons
Like most good robot time-traveling stories this one is a tragic love story. Hatty the Bowler Hat just wanted to be appreciated by its maker. When that doesn’t work, it travels to the past to make sure everyone will always love bowler hats. There may also be a couple of kids in this movie.
Unidentified Flying Oddball
Hermes the Android and his lookalike human companion Tom travel to King Arthur’s court to stop Merlin, who apparently is a bad guy now. Hermes has the advantage here, because he is the only one who doesn’t fear death and is a robot.
A.P.E.X.
Attack Robots are sent back in time to work a union job, destroying a virus that causes a paradox and ruins the future. Unfortunately yet another human is on duty to get in the way and steal all the credit. Meatbag extraordinaire Sinclair decides to do things “his way” and fix the future behind the killer robot’s backs. The nerve of some people.
Future War
A movie about love, hate, beauty, tragedy, and ultimately redemption, Future War (set in the present day) sees the caring Cyborg Master travel to the past to find his lost puppy of a slave “Runaway”. Unfortunately Cyborg Master suffers a fate worse than death, which is appearing in this movie, and then finally is given sweet release when his slave kills him, setting him free from the agony of this picture.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
They call Marvin “the paranoid android,” behind his back, because kids can be so cruel. Is it paranoid to have hyper suspicion, anxiety, and fear? Marvin probably wouldn’t be so depressed if he didn’t have to aimlessly wander the galaxy with people approximately 50,000 times stupider than himself. After meandering around for 100 minutes or so with these half wits, he needs a break, and decides to travel to the end of time and matter and dine at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
While Lost in Space features both time-travel and robots, I don’t believe the robot actually does any of the time-travelling. Am I not remembering correctly?
At about 40 minutes into the film, when they approach the two derelict spacecraft, they pass through one of the “time” bubbles. The robot is on board the Jupiter One for this, and subsequently boards one of the ships with the “away team.” Since it passed through the time bubble with everyone else, it traveled through time.
I looked at the list at http://www.aetherco.com/timelinks/ and didn’t find any other movies with time-traveling robots, but since you have some cyborg movies on your list I did find two that appear to feature time-traveling cyborgs: “Eliminators” from 1986, and “Nemesis 2: Nebula” from 1997. And the description there doesn’t mention it, but I know that “The Time Guardian” from 1987 has some evil time-traveling cyborgs.
Also came across “The Invisible Boy” from 1957, though the plot description at http://moria.co.nz/sciencefiction/invisibleboy.htm suggests time travel just a pretext for getting Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet back to the present era so a kid could have some adventures with him. And “The Last Mimzy” described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Mimzy might count, the stuffed rabbit that comes back in time is a type of A.I. I think.
Who cares?
Clearly, you – enough to comment.