Entertainment Weekly polled its readers for their Favorite Robot Movie.  Shockingly, I have an opinion on the results.  Instead of listing them by percentage, I will put them in order: #1 Wall-E, #2 tie between T2 & Star Wars, #4 Transformers, #5 Blade Runner, #6 The Iron Giant, #7 I, Robot and #8 Short Circuit.

I have not seen Wall-E yet, but I’m sure that it’s excellent.  Will it be the most popular robot movie in ten years?  Will people remember it?  I don’t know how memorable Pixar’s films are.  Before Toy Story 3 came out, I did not remember that I had never seen Toy Story 2—I still haven’t, actually.  What bothers me is that as many people like a terminator movie as like the original Star Wars.  At first I thought, where the hell is the best Star War, The Empire Strikes Back, but then I remembered that only Star Wars showed the world through those droids’ eyes.  Even worse than that, Trans-fucking-formers is the 4th most popular?  In front of Blade Runner?  I get that people go to see in Transformers and do not netflix Blade Runner, but one is a classic example of science fiction, noir, and philosophy.  The other hates humanity. Instead of dwelling on the negative, I am going to make a list of my favorite robot movies. They used favorite, so instead of “best” I will rank them by how much I like to watch them.

My Super Robot Movie Favorite List For America:
1. Star Wars, a duh.  To understand how fully this is a droid’s story, just watch Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa.
2. Ghost in The Shell. Still great 16 years later.
3. Blade Runner – Ridley Scott’s finest film, yes, even better than Robin Hood.
4. Alien – more movies need robots played by (Sir) Ian Holm.
5. Artificial Intelligence: AI – if Kubrick had done this movie, or Spielberg had done it without people knowing that Kubrick had prepared to make this it would be considered a classic.  I know that I did not see it in theaters and have only watched it once since, but it is a great movie.
6. Star Trek: First Contact – how much of a robot movie is this?  Are cyborgs robots?  What makes a person a person? Ghost in the Shell deals with this issue, particularly in the mangas, but the anime is still amazing and always worth a watch.
7. The Fifth Element – oh, Ian Holm is in this one with a crazy Gary Oldman and a young Milla Jovovich?  Since Luc Besson wrote and directed this, I’m sure that he was able to keep Bruce Willis under control.  You know, since he’s French.
8. I, Robot – very well done genre movie.  The robot gets voiced by Alan Tudyk, who is amazing in everything he is in.
9. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – I understand that this was not the book, but the book was not the audio recording, so stop complaining and enjoy it on its own merits.  I’m tempted to list the cast at you.
10. The Terminator/The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) tie. These are basically the same film, so it’s a toss up.

Are they robot movies? The Matrix, The Empire Strikes Back, Akira. If they were, they would be on the list.