robots – Mark Bould

Things I have learned from the movies: The Machine (James 2013)

machine that it is not in any way at all gratuitous when, from Metropolis (1927) onwards, robots in films are given the appearance of sexy ladies, but actually serves a genuinely vital purpose – as the sinister head (Denis Lawson) of a shadowy organisation notes, when one of his genius scientists (Toby Stephens) gives their robot the external appearance of the recently deceased sexy lady genius scientist (Caity Lotz), ‘glad that we give her tits … we could have had some confused lady-boy robot on our hands’.

So glad that’s finally sorted out.

The robot dinosaurs of Bristol

During the Triassic period, the parts of Pangaea which now constitute Britain drifted from the equator to more or less its current location. But with the break-up of the prehistoric supercontinent, ‘Britain’, which had spent much of the Permian underwater, dropped below sea-level once more. And although that is where it spent most of the Jurassic and Cretaceous, there were periods when the land was above sea-level, some of which lasted for as many as twenty million years.

And during those dry years, dinosaurs walked the land. Not just any dinosaurs – but, as recent fossil evidence reveals, robot dinosaurs!