Entertainment movies Joaquin Phoenix talking to his iOS girlfriend Samantha in Her. Warner Bros. Picture

Johnny Depp dies and is reborn as a computer brain in Transcendence, the latest science-fiction thriller about artificial intelligence. Smart machines that may serve or dominate mankind are as old as Samuel Butlers 1872 novel Erewhon, or Karel Capeks 1920 play R.U.R. and as recent as this weeks episode of The Simpsons, in which Dr. Frink revives the dead Homer as a chatty screensaver. They have also inhabited some of the finest SF movies, including Dark Star, Star Wars, Star Trek the Motion Picture, Alien, Blade Runner, The Terminator and RoboCop. The list is inspiring and nearly endless.

(READ: Corlisss review of Transcendence)

Here are seven of our favorites, spanning seven decades and the spectrum of mans feelings fearful, wondrous about the smartest machines man has created.

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, 1951. Directed by Robert Wise. Screenplay by Edmund H. North, from the story Farewell to the Master by Harry Bates.

The first known alien visitor to Earth, in the first A-budget science-fiction film from a major Hollywood studio, is a Christ figure Michael Rennies Klaatu whose spaceship lands in Washington, D.C.s Presidents Park. Accompanied by his giant robot Gort, Klaatu has come in peace, but the Cold War U.S. will have none of that: a soldier shoots him. Escaping from the military hospital where he is confined, he assumes the earthly name Mr. Carpenter, befriends a nice widow (Patricia Neal) and, during a global shutdown of electrical power the half hour the Earth stands still tells her that, if hes apprehended, she must sneak onto the spaceship and give Gort this message: Klaatu barada nikto.

Cannily fusing flying-saucer paranoia with the Christian parable of the Second Coming, The Day the Earth Stood Still establishes Gort and his kind as servants instead of uncontrollable rebels. The movie also sends a plethora of mixed messages, such as: Dont trust your government; trust an alien with elegant bone structure and a posh English accent. At the end, Klaatu leaves Earth with one last message: All nations must live in peace. But if the military belligerence of Earths nations extends into outer space, then robots like Gort will destroy our planet. The decision rests with you. In other words, try to be as peaceful as we, your superiors, are or well kill you.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, 1968. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Written by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.

Whats happening at the beginning? What goes on at the end? Not many science fiction films encourage the audience to ask those questions, as 2001 did. An essay on mans destiny, the film was for some of its late-60s viewers a light show, a head trip, needing no earthbound explanations. But still, wouldnt it be nice to know the explicit meaning of the Monolith, that gigantic slab that revved evolution into fast-forward? In a making-of doc on the 2007 reissue of the film, Clarke explained: The Monolith was essentially a teaching machine. In fact, our original idea was to have something with a transparent screen on which images would appear, which would teach the apes how to fight each other, how to maybe even make fire. So the apes would get a celestial visit from the first computer on Earth. But that was much too naive an idea, Clarke added. So eventually we just bypassed it with a device which we didnt explain they just touched it, and things happened to their brains, and they were transformed.

2001 remains a wonder today, in part because its technological wizards achieved their effects not through CGI magic but in the camera. (For the floating-pen effect, they stuck the pen to a plate of glass and moved the plate slowly in front of the camera; the actress playing the flight attendant then pulled the pen off the glass.) So this was a handmade movie about computers especially the soothing, neurotic HAL 9000, voiced by Douglas Rain. HAL masks insolence with apologies: When astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) orders the computer to Open the pod bay doors, HAL replies, Im sorry, Dave. I cant do that. HAL can do that, and he/it isnt sorry; the lives of Bowman and his partner Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) are only incidental to the mission, which will abort if HAL is disconnected. The machine ends on a terser note: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye. Its the Shut Down command we have all seen on our computers and which, spookily, I am seeing right now. No kidding. Is HAL, or his kin 13 years after 2001, monitoring my writing?

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