Scifi Moments – When Machines Die

Science fiction films being what they are can give unique personalities to machines of different kinds, be they computers, robots or spacecraft. The moments when these machines are killed off are moments of sadness. These are some of the most memorable sad moments from science fiction movies. If you can think of others that are more memorable then let me know!

2001 A Space Odyssey- Hal

Hal was the killer computer from 2001, highly intelligent and able to run the entire discovery spacecraft by himself. HAL mysteriously malfunctioned, killing a crewman Frank to get Commander Dave Bowman out of the spacecraft so he could kill those hibernating by evacuating the atmosphere from it.

Dave manged to get back to the Discovery and shut him down. Despite his calm and maniacal voice, you can’t help but feel for HAL as he is gradually deactivated.

Terminator 2

Time, time travel and paradoxes always seem to cause problems and put many heroes to a sticky end. This is very well demonstrated in Terminator 2 when Arnie’s character after having been nearly smashed to pieces allows himself to be lowered into molten steel in order to destroy all trace of Skynet’s Terminator technology to stop Skynet’s creation in the first place.

As Kryten once said: “Today’s been a bit of a bummer really!”

Shame it didn’t work.

The Black Hole – BOB

BOB was the bashed up little droid from the Black Hole, with a southern accent he brought out the love of the underdog in the audience. His memory banks clocked their last cycles after he crossed the formidable Maximilian. His buddy Vincent had to say a sad goodbye to BOB after the fight with the spacecraft disintegrating around them.

The Starship Enterprise

After the death of Admiral Kirk’s son, Kirk had to surrender the Enterprise to his Kingon enemy. But not before he set the ship to self destruct. This created a scene that audiences were nothing less than stunned at.

Drone 3 (Luis) from Silent Running

A little known (I nearly forgot this film too) called silent running saw a crew member defy orders to destroy the lifedomes they were carrying, kill his fellow crew members and go rogue and silent in order to protect the life in the dome that he loved.

In this were three drones, 1, 2 and 3 later renamed to Huey, Dewey and Louie. Louie came to an unexpected end while outside the spacecraft and his foot got stuck.I couldn’t find anything on YouTube on this scene. But this is a very different SciFi flick, it’s a mix of beauty, death and sadness with an ending you don’t expect.

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I hope you liked this, I’m planning on making more SciFi film moments as there are so many. Any suggestions welcome.

Planet Simon

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