The six best onscreen pairings of robots and the apocalypse

By Cory Casciato Thu., Feb. 14 2013 at 9:33 AM

Categories: Lists, Popular Culture, Theater

The LIDA Project's newest show, RUR/lol (opening tonight at work | space), tackles the ever popular topic of robots and apocalypse. Whether because of our inherent mistrust of technology designed to replace us, a deep-seated suspicion that our artificially intelligent creations are likely to outlive us, or just an intuitive understanding that they're two perfectly complementary flavors, it seems that people have been putting together robots and the end times almost as long, and as enthusiastically, as they have gin and tonic. Considering that the show is loosely based on a play that dates to the Karel Čapek's early sci-fi work Rossum's Universal Robots from the '20s, that's a while. To get you psyched for RUR/lol, we've compiled a quick look at a few of our favorite robot/apocalypse pairings from the world of film and television.

6) The Terminator franchise
Skynet, killer cyborgs and a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger demanding you give him your clothes -- it doesn't get much better than the Terminator series when it comes to the robots exterminating us. At least, it doesn't get much better if you can ignore the last movie in the franchise, the McG-directed Terminator Salvation. Apart from that, the vision articulated in the opening moments of Terminator 2, of a robotic foot stamping a human skull into dust in a radioactive wasteland, pretty much defines most of a generation's vision of why it's important to never, ever let your computer become self-aware, at least as long as it has access to nuclear weapons.