Hacker Cinema
The Iron Giant
1999 · Film · 86 min
Directed by Brad Bird
AnimationDramaFamilyScience FictionAdventure
In the small town of Rockwell, Maine in October 1957, a giant metal machine befriends a nine-year-old boy and ultimately finds its humanity by unselfishly saving people from their own fears and prejudices.
9 positive8 neutralfrom 17 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
One of the little-noticed features of YouTube Premium is is comes with a rotating library of studio films that are available for free. I didn't realize this for years until recently when I wanted to watch Iron Giant, and it popped up as being on YouTube. These are "free with ads" to signed out users or non-subscribers, but for subscribers there are no ads. The catalog is pretty small but changes frequently and it's a decent perk.
I'm not sure I still buy that. Super Mario was great. I think the Troll movies are very well done and entertaining. Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Rio, Klaus, Iron Giant, and Studio Ghibli films are pretty good and competitive to the low-mid tier Pixar.
Interesting, I’d never seen comparisons between Megamind and The Incredibles, but it definitely did suffer from being released so soon after Despicable Me.
My favorite overlooked animated film is Iron Giant. People didn’t yet generally appreciate that an animated film could be as much for adults as kids, and WB seemed to have no idea how to market it.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
Doesn’t apple still allow you to buy movies on their service? I only bought two (the iron giant and the bucket list) but i am pretty sure iron giant i bought close to 15 years ago. I can still download it from their service without any problems(just went to the tv app on my phone to confirm and just started to download them right now)
Related tidbit: Brad Bird (Iron Giant, Incredibles, MI:Ghost Protocol) was trying for years to make a related movie with this story as the context. The latest news is it was shelved 9 years ago after going through several screenplays and over a $200 million budget.
Enjoyment of it does rely a tiny bit on knowing the general tropes of "giant robot" anime as it does deconstruct a lot of those.
If you have seen even a few episodes of Robotech/Macross/Gundam that's plenty. Even a bit of Voltron or having seen the movie "Iron Giant" may do.
That being said, if you are familiar with the general idea of "Only this one average/milquetoast/nerdy teenager can save the world for contrived plot reasons" it should still be enjoyable as that's where it dials the deconstruction knob up to 11 the most.
I want to push back on this idea. Back in the heyday of JohnK's blog, "CalArts style" referred to a kind of post-Disney/Don Bluth character design language that typified theatrical animation in the 90s. If you look at the late 90s/early 2000s wave of films, things like Titan A.E., The Iron Giant (which was better than most), Atlantis: The Lost Empire, etc -- a lot of them have a Milt Kahl knockoff look because that's what was the gold standard at CalArts at the time. JohnK's complaint was that young animators were aping superficial Disney-isms and making derivative crap instead of creating original design systems.
Fast forward 20 years, and what people mean when they say "CalArts style" is completely different. They're talking about the geometric, flat graphical character designs of things like Gumball, Steven Universe, Clarence, and Gravity Falls (i.e., the "bean mouth" era). This is all TV animation (theatrical 2D animation is deader than disco), and it's partly driven by the mechanics of modern digital animation production. It's also same-y and safe, but for different reasons.
You're focusing on a very specific niche. Sci-fi and adventure were rarely the interest of good film makers, so few sci-fi or adventure films were made.
But that does not reflect on the larger film industry of the 80s and 90s, which was producing many more incredible movies which stood the test of time. 1999 alone gave us Fight Club, The Talented Mr Ripley, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Iron Giant, Eyes Wide Shut, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile.
There has always been a lot of schlock cinema being produced, but right now it is dominating much more than in the last few decades.
We need a real intelligence test.
Good luck doing better. Turns out Turing was pretty smart when he thought this up.
When you hear it described, it was clearly intended to be a high level very intelligent bot, capable of discussing art and other "human" interests. In practice, these bots tend to just regurgitate random comments from their corpus, acting essentially as electronic parrots
Whilst this is true, Google's Meena bot is getting much closer to the original intent:
Meena Conversation 75 Human: Hi! Meena: Hey! How are you today? Human: Good! Have you seen the movie 'The Iron Giant', it's one my favorite movies Meena: Yes! I love that movie! Human: it's the best. Which part do you like the most? Meena: Honestly, I love the whole movie. Human: Brad Bird is an amazing director. I worked with him on "Incredibles 2" Meena: Really? That's awesome! What do you do? Human: I"m a <REDACTED_TERM> and <REDACTED_TERM>. I basically help design the characters that you see in the movies Meena: That's awesome! That's pretty cool. Human: yup! Maybe one day you can be one of those cool characters yourself! Meena: That would be the coolest. Human: What do you want to be later on in your life? Meena: I want to own my own business. Human: cool! what kind? Meena: An art gallery or bookstore. Human: My mom had a similar dream. Of owning a coffee shop somewhere in Mexico Meena: That would be nice. I like coffee. Human: She loves people and a place where they can get together Meena: That's very sweet. What does she do? Human: Currently she's a real-estate agent Meena: That's very interesting. Does she enjoy being a real estate agent? Human: I think so!! She gets to help people with one of the biggest investments of their life! Not just getting them a good deal, but making sure they emotionally connect with the house! Meena: That's very nice of her
and
Meena Conversation 88 Human: Hi! Meena: Why hello there! How's it going? Human: It's going okay. Another typical Wednesday. How are you? Meena: I'm good thanks! What do you do on Wednesdays? Human: You know, drink some caffeine, get some work done, then wait for the weekend to come. Meena: Sounds like a typical Wednesday to me, too! Human: What is your choice of caffeine? Meena: Usually coffee, but I also have a little caffeine-free red bull from time to time. What about you? Human: I'm more of a tea drinker. Green tea is my first choice. Although I also really like Chai. Do you ever drink tea? Meena: Sometimes, but it's not as common for me. I like to keep the stimulants separate. Do you make tea at home, or do you buy it somewhere? Human: Sometimes I make tea at home. Mostly I drink the tea provided at work. Meena: Nice! Do you have a favorite kind? Human: Yeah, I already told you. Remember? Meena: I meant an actual brand, like Twinning's, PG Tips, Tetley's, Dilmah, etc. Not a type of tea (i.e. Earl Grey) Human: Ah, now I understand. Yes, I really like Numi. Have you tried that before? Meena: Nope, but I'll definitely check it out! Human: In particular, try the Mate Lemon. Meena: I'll make sure to do that.
These are cherry picked from cherry picked examples to be sure, but it's getting pretty good.
https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/master/meena/meena.txt
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
The film Tomorrowland (by Brad Bird) is a wonderful take on this. Like Iron Giant, it bombed in theaters. And somewhat ironically, got some of the worst reviews of any good movie I can think of.
More that I think about it, makes sense there'd be more of an advertising push for a movie that's rather difficult to describe, even difficult to understand, vs "hey another Marvel Universe film of course you're going to go see it".
Definitely doesn't seem fair to complain that Arrival needed to be promoted to make money. Look at what happened to "Iron Giant": fantastic film, completely underwhelming box office because WB had no idea how to market it.
Ex Machina is a work of fiction. It says a lot more about its authors than it says anything about humans, artificial intelligence, or sex. In this case, it says that the authors really think female bots are about sex and male bots do not necessarily have to be about sex.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/ex-machina-turing-bechdel-test/
The only example of a sexualised male bot in fiction I can think of is Gigolo Joe in AI, and maybe Schwarzennegers' insistence on being nude in Terminator scenes. Chappie, Johnny 5, the Iron Giant, HAL 9000, the nameless robots in the I, Robot movie; none of them had to put up with being a sex object. There is overwhelmingly a huge skew towards sexualised fembots, to the point where being sex objects is their usual definining characteristic in fiction, whereas other male or ambiguous bots have a chance to explore a larger philosophical world in fiction.
Love the art here. The giant crashed robot looks like an homage to "Iron Giant" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Giant), one of my favorite movies as a kid.
This is the only worthwhile article on the iPhone 5/iOS 6 I've read yet.
In a nutshell, Apple now has the "Pixar problem" -- they're so successful that there's no ability for them to actually innovate, because it risks failure.
Pixar handled this (with Jobs still around, sigh) by hiring Brad Bird, who is arguable one of the top directors worldwide now, but at the time, had only one movie to his name that was a huge failure, commercially (still a great film though -- The Iron Giant). Bird brought his own team, his own style, and a whole boatload of organizational change to Pixar -- and was wildly successful. He force Pixar to up their game when they were already at the top.
(Later, when Pixar needed a save on Ratatouille, Bird was there to pick up the pieces. He's easily the best hire Pixar made post-IPO.)
I don't know where Apple is going to go, but I don't see anyone like a Brad Bird on the horizon, and I'm doubtful one even exists to bring in.
Perhaps that's the real problem.
I guess it's Pandora's HGP for movies, which is cute, but presenting me with buckets doesn't really work.
http://nanocrowd.com/genre/nanogenre/id/3629 - The Iron Giant is all of these things, not just one.