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Robots have featured in movies almost as long as there have been movies. If you consider cinema as we know it to have truly started with 1906’s The Story of the Kelly Gang, when films became the feature length narrative art form they are now rather than some kind of novelty, then it was only twelve years later when audiences first met the formidable ‘Automaton’ which guarded access to a shady cartel in the Harry Houdini’s episodic starrer The Master Mystery. This was two years even before the term ‘robot’ was first used in the Czech-play Rossum’s Universal Robots by Karel Čapek. Then in 1927 we famously had Maria, the Maschinenmensch or machine person in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. For a couple of decades genre films then largely concentrated on horror and monsters but come Soviet paranoia and the hotting up of the space race, the 1950s brought the concept and the word into common usage in cinema, as seen in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet, as well as lots in between.

Since then the notion of independent thinking mechanical life forms has been explored in every possible way with the service droids in Star Wars, Silent Running, Wall.E and iRobot, the replica humans in Blade Runner, Alien, Westworld, Ex Machina, and Bill & Ted 2, flawed defence machines in Short Circuit, Robocop, The Iron Giant and Pacific Rim and toys in Ron’s Gone Wrong, M3gan and Artificial Intelligence. A.I itself was established across the three films, one each from the 60s, 70s and 80s with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Terminator and is a particular focus right now with Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning and this October’s The Creator.

Feminism and representations of women have played into this too with the idea of the female robot seen in several of the above as well as movies like Ghost in the Shell, Alita: Battle Angel, The Stepford Wives and Austin Powers. All in all this is a fascinating and involved theme in the medium, and one that continues to expand and be taken in new and sophisticated directions. If you were to get into the social, cultural and historical development of film, this would certainly be a very rich vein to investigate.

This new film adds absolutely nothing to any of this.

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To be fair I don’t think it cares about its cinematic heritage but it would be nice to see something original in its comedy movie of two robots who fall in love and steal the lives of the humans they are copies of. Mostly it seems to be interested raising a few forgettable laughs.

Maybe that’s enough though. There is the occasional moment of political and social satire here but mostly it aims lower than that. Still, it does raise a smile and Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall have surprisingly effective chemistry. She’s not done comedy before but is good at it, better one supposes than Whitehall would be in a drama, and there are a couple of nice narrative surprises.

Some of the elements that exist in the vast tapestry of robots in cinema do rear their head but this is almost certainly accidental. I’m not sure I’d recommend this film, not when there is so much in this filmic arena that better merits your time. If you want something to switch off and power down to though, you might find it compatible.