Andrew wouldn't have been immortal.... - Bicentennial Man (1999) Discussion

[–] uselessness 13 years ago

He had a pretty good understanding of his own construction, and piles of money to boot. I doubt he'd have any trouble making the necessary arrangements to stay functional.

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[–] Slopmaster4001 13 years ago

I think the point is that nothing lasts forever and no matter what, he would have eventually ended. Now wheather or not that would be in 200, 500 or 1000 years, it doesn't matter. Everything dies and a machine would be no exception but I think he wanted mortality sooner than later.

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[–] legendlength 10 years ago

I still don't get it really and I consider myself a deep thinker in this area. I'm sure people watching it were thinking 'why kill yourself' basically.

I know it made for a sweet ending but 100 years of life is very different than 10,000 years of life. I don't know it kind of annoyed me.

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[–] mlaiuppa 8 years ago

I think the point of this movie is the same one of the many vampire movies and Highlander and The Green Mile.

Immortality may sound great, but after many years it gets tiresome. Depressing to see your family and friends grow old and die over and over leaving you behind. Could Andrew have continued to repair and upgrade himself indefinitely? Maybe. But he didn't want that. He wanted to be human.

To be truly human is to be mortal.

That is what Andrew was striving for. He wanted to be human. And humans die.

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[–] rohonnag 13 years ago

you are RIGHT in a way

but read up on this guy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw

he is an asimov creation so this example is wholly appropriate in this context!

I am huge sucker for robot stories and life time stories (Forrest gump)

An Idea is the most resilient parasite - Inception

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[–] whitelion43 13 years ago

Its called science Fiction for a reason. another long lived Sci fi Character is Lazarus Long stories by Heinlein

Oh GOOD!,my dog found the chainsaw

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[–] Democracy_is_Intransitive 13 years ago

This really doens't make sense unless we could equally say that eventually all model T fords will eventually wear out. It is the case that parts wear out but assuming you understand the parts intimately enough you can conceivably replicate and replace them. The problem with doing this for complex machines is that it tends to be cost prohibitive but in andrew's case he, atleast during a 200 year span, desired to exist, and he could generate value. Assuming andrew wanted to continue living he would have presumably replacd or repaired broken parts. He after all installed a central nervous system which wasn't there before which means he must have copied the data from his previous memory networks to this hybrid organic construct he made which would, at least in this universe, demonstrate immortality was possible as long as you can avoid accident.

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[–] watergaia 13 years ago

true, that part about the movie A.I. was a bit silly... the robots, and even the robot teddy bear, stayed functional over a damn who knows how long ice age or something, until aliens came to wake them up...

___________________
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[–] kedem524 9 years ago

But even in that movie the robot eventually dies. He was awakened by the new robots, but only lasted a day before he permanently went to sleep. I completely agree that no machine is immortal. Even if Andrew could make repairs to himself it is inevitable that in the long run he would not have been able to do that anymore and would have died. I do not like the tendency to portray immortality as a bad thing in books and movies. While it is true that everyone that you ever came to know will eventually die, there are always new people to come around. Even if others begin to realize that one is immortal and become jealous, the immortal can simply move to a new town after a certain number of years and form a new identity and still manage to have a fairly good life. Immortality is preferable over mortality, it just is not realistic.

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[–] TVholic 8 years ago

One thing you and the OP have obviously missed is that he was upgraded over and over again in the movie. Why would he need exactly the same parts? Don't you transfer your data to a new computer every few years rather than trying to keep the old one running? Other than his positronic brain, there's nothing that Andrew needed to keep "original," and Rupert did actually take his head off, so I'm guessing the entire body was replaced. And solid state positronic components presumably don't wear out any more than electronic components do. There are control systems in missile silos that have been there since the 1960s.

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