In Films, Technology of the Not-So-Distant Future on Display

Samuel Goldwyn Films

In “Robot & Frank," Frank Langella plays a retiree given a robot caretaker by his son.

THERE'S a moment in the film when Frank, an aging retiree with a helper robot installed in his life courtesy of his son, forgets that his caretaker is something other than human. The two are excitedly chatting when Frank gestures at his companion's boxy outfit and asks, absent-mindedly, why he's wearing a silly space helmet.

The dissonance radiating from that scene is twofold. Frank's cognitive stutter pries open the heartbreaking subplot of the film, revealing his slippery grasp on reality and his mind's inability to maintain firm footing in the present; it is sharply recognizable as Frank's advancing dementia.

It's equally discomfiting for reasons beyond Frank's deteriorating condition: the scene offers a mirror to our own dependency on technology.

Who hasn't given a phone an affectionate pat, made room for it at the dinner table, nestled with a laptop in bed or frantically searched for a device gone AWOL, heart racing until its shiny little body is located and stashed somewhere safe? And this is before our devices can carry our groceries, bake us cakes and plant intricate vegetable gardens, as Frank's helper does in the film. What will our relationships with devices and software look like in the future?

This is the crystal ball that the director Jake Schreier and the screenwriter Christopher D. Ford are trying to peer into with their first feature, “Robot & Frank,” due Aug. 17 from Samuel Goldwyn Films. Their vision of the future won't arrive with exaggerated fanfare; it will most likely set up shop nearly unnoticed, possibly even installed in your living room by your next of kin.

“It's not a future where everything is new and has taken over,” Mr. Schreier said during an interview in an ornate meeting room at the Crosby Street Hotel in Manhattan. Instead, the film is set in rural New York, where these advances are “just beginning to creep in.”

Not much is different between the film's world and ours: The cars are a little sleeker and mostly electric-powered, and the phones and tablets are transparent and voice controlled. The interactions between humans and their devices are relatively believable, a struggle for most films and television shows today. Probably no one has ever received a “blast” on a cellphone like the kinds sent in “,” and while plenty of us have accidentally sent an e-mail to the wrong recipient, it probably has never been as mind-bogglingly disastrous as MacKenzie McHale's workplacewide gaffe on “The Newsroom.”

Part of the interpretation of a technology-enhanced future in “Robot & Frank” stemmed from budgetary constraints. It was hastily shot in 20 days for around $2.5 million, so there wasn't much leeway to insert splashy special effects. The displays and menus on the characters' tablets and smartphones were designed by Justin Ouellette, who works at Tumblr, a microblogging site. The robot's costume was designed by Alterian in Los Angeles, the company that also made the dazzling LED helmets worn by the French electro duo Daft Punk. (The robot was voiced by Peter Sarsgaard; Frank is played by Frank Langella.)

The filmmakers found that the rapidly transforming society they were trying to capture was also reflected in their lives. When Mr. Ford started conceptualizing the movie in 2002, the advances he pictured involved tablet computers nicknamed CompuTabs. Fast-forward six years and “during production, everyone had an , so even in that small part of time, part of the script turned from science fiction to reality,” he said. “So then we're all holding our iPads, looking over at the robot going ‘Hmm, how long is that going to take?' ”

Such advances are already under way. On YouTube you can see videos from scientists showing robots folding laundry, performing elegant dances, blinking in confusion and smiling in greeting. ”We think about robots in terms of manufacturing cars or doing something that repeats the same movement over and over again, but there's been a boom in robotics where they're starting to have smarts, and can do complex things like pick fruit,” said Andrew Ng, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and co-founder of an education start-up called Coursera. “We could see them in homes in 10 to 20 years.” By trying to stay a step ahead of science Mr. Schreier and Mr. Ford join a long line of filmmakers who have attempted to envision the world we may inhabit, and the droids that may someday coexist with us, from the sentient but murderous HAL 9000 in “2001: Space Odyssey” to Skynet's terrifying armies of human hunters in the “Terminator” franchise to the lovable, b umbling droids in and “Wall-E.”

The director Ridley Scott, who delved into similar issues in also explored the blurry philosophical line separating humans from their synthetic counterparts in “Prometheus.” That expansive science-fiction epic, set somewhere in the universe, turned a sharp eye to our responsibilities for the technology we create and what happens if we leave our most precious possessions - our lives - in its hands.

Mr. Scott spun this question around an anatomically correct android named David (played by Michael Fassbender) that eats, sleeps, longs to learn and lovingly cares for members of a spaceship crew as they travel into the far regions of the universe, despite their disregard and suspicion of him. David, already autonomous, begins to interfere with the mission. The inability of the humans to control David and their failure to notice his machinations is an apt metaphor for a world in which we are only beginning to understand how the major corporations in which we're placing our trust and data - like Apple, Google and Facebook - could someday be twisted in ways we cannot foresee.

“People have embraced the convenience of technology, but I don't know that the average person understands the potential of the data that is being aggregated through our devices,” said Barbara Kahn, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “The enormity of it is amazing. This is just the first wave. The next step is the Internet of things. It's not just GPS knowing where I am, it'll be devices knowing what I'm doing.”

While the future in which is set exists much further along the timeline than “Robot & Frank,” there are traces of those hyperadvanced technologies visible in our lives even now. It's easy to glimpse the sophisticated, 3-D navigational charts used by the Prometheus spaceship crew in the holographic performance by Tupac Shakur this summer at the music festival. The United States Navy already uses autonomous drones to sweep underwater terrain for mines - not entirely dissimilar from the flying “pups” that map out the topography of the film's temple. And David's less-than-subservient attitude to his human counterparts is reminiscent of the sassy responses that Apple programmed into its virtual assistant software, Siri. But while “Prometheus” and other films offer a dystopian view, showing us how close we are to a world full of technology gone haywire or spiraling out of control, “Robot & Frank” isn't trying to impart such lessons. “It's wrong to be afraid of t he future in a knee-jerk way,” Mr. Schreier said. “You almost always end up on the wrong side of history by the end of it.”

He and Mr. Ford merely wanted to examine the implications of our increasingly intimate symbiosis with technology. “It's not bad or good but it will change the way we relate to each other,” Mr. Schreier said. “There's no stopping it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 11, 2012

An article on Page 14 this weekend about robots, movies and the future, misstates the release date for “Robot & Frank,” about an aging retiree who has a helper robot installed in his life by his son. It is scheduled to come out on Friday, not the following Friday, Aug. 24.