Bicentennial Man (1999)
Directed by Chris Columbus
Written by Nicholas Kazan, based on writings by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

In the not-too-distant-future, robot Robin Williams is delivered to Sam Neill’s palatial seaside home. As he makes his first appearance, clanking around in a bad Tin Man costume, Sam’s younger daughter sensibly backs away, with a whispered, “Scary!” The elder daughter retorts, “It’s not scary—it’s stupid,” demonstrating that this film employs the same advanced technology as the self-cleaning oven—it lambastes its own idiot conceit, so you don’t have to.

Anyway, Robot Robin is so gentle and benevolent that he removes a spider from the house rather than kill it, but Sam’s wife doesn’t seem convinced, and always looks as though she’s waiting for Robin to try the same nonconsensual shenanigans that computer pulled on Julie Christie in Demon Seed.

Unable to bear the strained atmosphere of whimsy wherever Robin goes, the Older Daughter orders him to jump out the window. The robot complies, sustaining damage to his delicate and sophisticated microprocessors, which causes him to talk like Charlie Callas.

Younger Daughter lets Robin hold her favorite possession, a glass figurine of a horse, but he breaks it in an effort to convince the bored audience they’re actually watching The Glass Menagerie. Robin then shocks the family by carving a tiny horse out of wood to replace it, causing Sam to wonder if his robot is in fact showing signs of human-like behavior. This leads to a hilarious and heart-warming scene, in which Sam awkwardly explains the birds and the bees to Robin, presumably to facilitate that upcoming Demon Seed sequence in the second act.

Years go by. Older Daughter becomes a sullen, foul-mouthed cycle slut. Mom becomes a jumpy, ill-tempered wino, while Younger Daughter develops an inability to relate to her own kind and a severe erotomania directed toward the robot, who will apparently vibrate for you if you give him a quarter. Yes, it’s clear that Robin has had a profound effect on each member of his adopted family.

Younger Daughter, who is now inexplicably older than Mom, receives a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, but hesitates because he lacks the Magic Fingers attachment. She makes it plain to Robin that she’s got a yen for some android booty, but he rejects her by symbolically severing his thumb with a band saw.

12 years later. Robin is sick of picking up after Sam’s family, and offers to buy his freedom. Sam is so relieved to be rid of the weird-faced golem that he tears up the check and kicks him out on the spot.

Robin finds himself sitting alone on the beach. He is on his own at last, no longer a slave, and free to pursue his dream of becoming human. Unfortunately, the first human he becomes is Martha Stewart, and proceeds to build a gorgeous Craftsman bungalow out of driftwood and kelp.

16 Years later. Sam dies, and Robin celebrates by going on a quest to see if other robots have also evolved toward consciousness and become hobos.

Another ten years go by, and we’ve finally got those flying cars they’ve been promising us ever since the October 1939 issue of Popular Mechanics. But Robin has failed in his quest, discovering that all the robots like him have been deactivated, dismantled, and had their operating systems deleted, proving that not everyone in America is as stupid as Sam.

Just as it looks like we’re heading for a happy ending, Robin finds a female robot dancing in a fruit market and blasting Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” out of her pelvis. She leads him to Oliver Platt, who gives him a face made from Silly Putty.

Now looking exactly like Robin Williams, he goes home to horrify Sam’s survivors. He finds that the actress playing Younger Daughter is now playing her granddaughter, so we’re still not through with her. Younger Daughter, now a crone, dies with Robin’s hand-carved wooden horse figurine in her hand, inspiring him to want to have sex with look-alike Granddaughter.

Robin hooks up with Oliver again, who solves the dilemma by installing a faux phallus, in a tragic-comic scene I imagine is similar to what happened with Elon Musk’s allegedly botched penile implant. (Mercifully, Robin wears a T-shirt during the subsequent sex, so we don’t have to wonder why the android also had a huge amount of back hair installed. But just so we don’t get cocky about our good fortune, he climaxes the love scene with a fart.)

Robin wants to wed Granddaughter, but even in the future there remains a social prejudice against human beings marrying household appliances. So Robin takes his case to Artificial People’s Court, but Justice Samuel Alito (whose deal with Satan is apparently working out quite nicely for him) declares that Robin is legally a machine.

Many years later: Granddaughter is 75 now, and getting a little too brittle for Robin’s jackhammer-like sexual technique. She understandably longs for death, so Robin transfuses his system with a chemical solution that will cause his body, over time, to acquire age make-up and a white wig.

Many more years go by. Now wizened, he goes before the U.N. (whose members are composed entirely of chorus boys from Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” video) and asks to be declared a human being, which will give him legal standing to sue somebody—anybody!—to get out of this movie. Then he dies. Granddaughter asks to be unplugged from her life support, and dies beside Robin, secure in the knowledge that at least she won’t be seeing him in the afterlife.

Bicentennial Man: a thought-provoking exploration of just what it means to be human, but also a sociological fable which asks the important question, “Just what kind of screwed-up future society would manufacture robots modeled on Robin Williams?” More than one, apparently, since Bicentennial Man wasn’t Robin’s only robot movie. No, he also lent his voice to A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the film which showed us that in the future, abandoned Haley Joel Osment mecha-sons, Jude Law brand “Gigolo Joes,” and other feral androids will infest our national parks. It apparently started when Bush rescinded the Clinton-era regulation banning snowmobiles in Yellowstone—and the next thing you know we’ve got kevlar-plated androids using Old Faithful as a bidet.

There is a bright side, however. Most movies portray robots as libidinous monsters, always terrorizing our women and pulling the heads off our men. A.I., on the other hand, indicates that in the future, women will be the ones exploiting the robots, using them as mere walking, talking vibrators that look like Oscar Wilde’s lover. So, ladies, decide who you’d rather do: Twiki, Robby, or the Cylon’s Imperious Leader.

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