5. Why Is The Ship's Autopilot Trying To Prevent Itself From Completing Its Own Mission? - WALL-E (2008)
The Plot Twist: In
WALL-E, a robot named WALL-E - who is the last working robot/thing on a planet Earth that has been abandoned in favour of the human race living on a big spaceship somewhere - falls in love with another robot named EVE, who is sent down from that big spaceship to scout for signs of life. She finds a plant, pockets it, and takes it back up to space to be evaluated. The twist, is, however, that the ship's HAL-9000-like autopilot has been secretly programmed to prevent the human race from
ever returning to Earth.
But, Uh... Which begs the highly important question: why is the autopilot sending robots down to Earth in the first place, if its entire purpose and ultimate mission hinges on the fact that living matter not be discovered? As soon as a plant is put in the spaceship's central chamber, after all, it automatically puts the spaceship back on course for Earth. If you're going to argue that the autopilot is a robot with coded instructions that can't be changed or anything, consider that this thing also decides to inform the human Captain about the plant in another scene, despite the fact that it's visibly obeying its main objective at the time, which is
not to tell the Captain - the one person who is capable of stopping the autopilot's directive - about the plant. Oops.