Ex Machina2015

‘There is nothing more human than the will to survive.’ Alex Garland’s chilling directorial debut, out 23 January, sees young coder Domhnall Gleeson win a week’s holiday at his reclusive boss’s mountain retreat – only to find he must participate in a strange experiment by evaluating the human qualities of a breathtaking new breed of AI, housed in the body of beautiful robot girl Ava, played by Alicia Vikander.

Human-like rating: 8/10;

Photograph: FILM4/Allstar

The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951

‘Klaatu barada nikto!’ In this classic slice of black-and-white sci-fi, alien Klaatu and his super-robot Gort visited Earth with a warning: humans must live peacefully or be destroyed as a danger to other planets. Made of greenish metal, silent, near-motionless and firing energy rays from beneath his visor, Gort was played by 7ft 7in Lock Martin, an usher at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.

Human-like rating: 3/10;

Photograph: Alamy

A.I. Artificial Intelligence 2001

Adapting Brit sci-fi author Brian Aldiss’s short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long was an unrealised project of Stanley Kubrick that he passed on to Steven Spielberg. David (an unblinking Haley Joel Osment) is a prototype ‘Mecha’ advanced cybertronic humanoid capable of projecting love. A Pinocchio parable followed, with Spielberg adding trademark sweetness to Kubrick’s bleaker vision.

Human-like rating: 9/10;

Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

‘The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. We are all foolproof and incapable of error.’ So says HAL in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke’s visionary epic. Discovery One is on a manned-mission to Jupiter with most of the craft’s operations controlled by the sentient computer, HAL, who speaks in a soft monotone – even while killing the crew. ‘I’m sorry, Dave.’

Human-like rating: 5/10;

Photograph: MGM/Allstar

Metropolis1927

Fritz Lang’s expressionist sci-fi epic has influenced everything from Superman to Blade Runner, while ‘false Maria’ – the robot double of the peasant girl prophet in Berlin 2026, which unleashes chaos among the city’s workers and is ultimately burnt at the stake as a witch – was the first robot depicted on film and inspired the art deco look of C-3PO in Star Wars.

Human-like rating: 8/10;

Photograph: Paramount/Allstar

Interstellar 2014

Christopher Nolan’s epic saw the astronauts about circular ship Endurance joined by quadrilateral robots TARS (pictured) and CASE – lookalikes for the monolith from 2001. TARS sacrificed itself to collect vital data but was rescued and reunited with Matthew McConaughey, with whom it shared a man-machine bromance. Well, with McConaughey’s chiselled looks, who wouldn’t?

Human-like rating: 2/10;

Photograph: PR

I, Robot 2004

Inspired by the Isaac Asimov short story collection of the same name, this Will Smith blockbuster was set in 2035, where a technophobic Chicago cop suspected that an anthropomorphic servant droid called Sonny had gone rogue and pushed its owner to his death from a 50th floor window. A full robot uprising soon resulted. Any resemblance between heartless, blue-eyed, blank-faced Sonny and PM David Cameron is purely coincidental.

Human-like rating: 7/10;

Photograph: 20 Century Fox./Allstar

The Matrix 1999

‘Never send a human to do a machine’s job.’ The Wachowski brothers’ cyberpunk action classic was set in a grim future where intelligent machines had enslaved mankind, keeping us subdued with a simulated reality called the Matrix. Dark-suited, sunglasses-sporting ‘Agents’ – actually powerful, sentient AI programmes – patrolled the Matrix, led by Hugo Weaving’s snarlingly villainous Agent Smith. They suppressed human rebellion by dodging bullets and punching through concrete.

Human-like rating: 8/10;

Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

RoboCop 1987

Police officer Peter Weller was murdered by a criminal gang but revived by malevolent mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products as a superhuman cyborg law enforcer. Inspired by Blade Runner and Judge Dredd, with a steel suit modelled on ice hockey gear, he clumped around dystopian Detroit, cleaning up the streets – but was haunted by buried memories from his human life. It’s a fair cyber-cop, guv.

Human-like rating: 6/10;

Photograph: Orion/Allstar

Short Circuit 1986

‘Number 5 is alive.’ Cutesy creation Johnny 5 was an experimental US military robot which got struck by lightning, gained a sense of free will and escaped. The child-like, ET-esque machine developed human-like intelligence when Ally Sheedy gave him access to books, TV and other stimuli to satisfy his constant craving for ‘input’. Those tank tracks and camera lens eyes were fooling nobody, though.

Human-like rating: 2/10;

Photograph: Tristar/Allstar

The Terminator 1984

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s defining role remains the cyborg assassin sent back in time from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor before she can give birth to the saviour of humanity. The Cyberdyne Systems T-800 Model 101 has living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, designed for combat and infiltration. He’ll be back in summer’s fifth instalment, Terminator Genisys.

Human-like rating: 9/10;

Photograph: Absolute Film Archive

Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery 1997

The opening instalment in Mike Myers’ spy spoof trilogy saw Doctor Evil send seven blonde-beehived ‘Fembots’ to seduce priapic hero Austin Powers, before killing him with their breast cannons. He was powerless to resist, despite reciting ‘Baseball, cold showers, Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day…’ But when Powers performed a striptease, it tipped the Fembots over their ‘sex limit’ and made their heads explode. Liz Hurley and Britney Spears fembots featured in the sequels.

Human-like rating: 7/10;

Photograph: Pathe/Allstar

Blade Runner 1982

Ridley Scott’s neo-noir, based on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is set in a dystopian 2019 Los Angeles, where bioengineered ‘replicants’ are virtually indistinguishable from humans. They have a four-year lifespan and are implanted with false memories to make them believe they are human. Rutger Hauer, Sean Young and ‘basic pleasure model’ Daryl Hannah are among the androids. But is hero Harrison Ford too?

Human-like rating: 10/10;

Photograph: Alamy

The Machine 2013

In last year’s indie Brit future-noir thriller, we were in the midst of a cold war with China. Computer scientist Toby Stephens created a self-aware, fully conscious cyborg for the Ministry Of Defence. Intended as a super-soldier, smooth blonde Machine turned out to be more human and moral than anyone expected. ‘I’m part of the new world,’ it impassively told its creator. ‘And you’re part of the old.’

Human-like rating: 8/10;

Photograph: Capital Pictures

Star Wars 1977

‘Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!’ Thirty-eight years ago two bickering androids played a vital role in George Lucas’s space opera. The golden humanoid and beeping wheelie bin provide comic relief and are the only characters to appear in all seven films so far. They’ll be back in cinemas in December.

Human-like rating: 3/10;

Photograph: Lucasfilm/Allstar

Star Trek: Generations1994

A successor to Spock in providing a non-human perspective, Lieutenant Commander Data arrived in 1987’s Next Generation TV series and appeared in four films as a senior officer aboard the USS Enterprise. Portrayed by Brent Spiner, he was an albino-like Soong android with a positronic brain, eventually fitted with an ‘emotion chip’. He even had a pet cat called Spot. Data also blinked weirdly but that didn’t stop him becoming an unlikely sex symbol.

Human-like rating: 6/10;

Photograph: Paramount/Allstar

Her 2013

Spike Jonze’s sci-fi romcom sees Joaquin Phoenix star as the brilliantly named Theodore Twombly, a lonely writer who falls in love with Samantha – a hyper-intelligent computer operating system with accelerated learning capabilities, personified through a Siri-like female voice (Scarlett Johansson). Romance blossoms, leaving the audience slightly disquieted by our love of gadgets.

Human-like rating: 7/10;

Photograph: Warner Broc/Allstar

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2005

‘I didn’t ask to be made.’ In the film of Douglas Adams’ comic novel, Marvin The Paranoid Android (voiced by Alan Rickman, with Warwick Davis inside the costume, here seen talking with Zooey Deschanel) was the morose robot aboard starship The Heart Of Gold, depressed because he was rarely given a chance to use his planet-sized brain. The best conversation he ever had was 40m years ago. With a coffee machine.

Human-like rating: 4/10;

Photograph: Disney/Allstar

Tron 1982

This Disney CGI milestone sees hacker Jeff Bridges get digitised and beamed into The Grid – the 3D world of a rogue mainframe, where he has to compete in martial arcade games to get back out. Against a backlit setting, characters throw illuminated frisbees, drive ‘lightcycles’ and do all manner of futuristic cyber-stuff. Its special effects were disqualified from the Oscars because in 1982 the academy felt using computers was cheating.

Human-like rating: 4/10;

Photograph: Disney/Allstar

Wall-E 2008

Pixar’s lonely robo-hero is a mobile trash compactor unit cleaning up an abandoned, litter-strewn Earth in the year 2805. His name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class. Reminiscent of Short Circuit’s Johnny 5, he has all-terrain tank treads, binocular eyes and a child-like charm. Wall-E develops sentience, falls in love with fellow robot EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) and follows her into outer space. Aww.

Human-like rating: 1/10;

Photograph: Everett Collection/REX