Short Circuit

Number 5 begins life as one of a group of experimental military robots. He has been built to follow instructions, demonstrate some impressive technology and, ultimately, function as a weapon.

Then lightning strikes.

Something changes inside him.

Instead of simply processing commands, Number 5 starts asking questions. He becomes curious about the world around him and develops an overwhelming desire to learn everything he possibly can.

When he escapes from the NOVA facility, the people who built him understandably want their extremely expensive robot back. But Number 5 no longer sees himself as a piece of equipment.

He believes he is alive.

And once the audience starts believing him too, Short Circuit becomes much more than a comedy about a runaway robot.

Johnny 5 really shouldn't be as expressive as he is.

There is no human face hidden beneath the machinery. He is tracks, metal, cameras, mechanical arms and a wonderfully strange pair of eyebrows.

Yet somehow he can look excited, confused, terrified and ridiculously pleased with himself.

A slight movement of the head or those eyebrows is often enough to tell you exactly what he is thinking.

But it is his personality that makes him unforgettable.

Johnny 5 is fascinated by absolutely everything. The world has suddenly opened up in front of him and he wants to experience all of it immediately.

He doesn't want power. He doesn't want revenge on his creators.

He wants input.

That innocence is the secret to the character. Johnny 5 may have been designed as a military machine, but once he becomes alive, his greatest weapon turns out to be curiosity.

Books don't last very long around Johnny 5.

He tears through information at an incredible speed, desperately demanding more as soon as he has finished whatever Stephanie puts in front of him.

Then he discovers television.

Suddenly his developing personality is being fed movies, commercials, music, jokes and decades of popular culture with absolutely no filter between any of them.

It explains why Johnny 5 can move effortlessly between surprisingly thoughtful observations and complete nonsense.

To him, it is all information.

And underneath the comedy, this is how Short Circuit convinces us that something genuinely unusual has happened.

Johnny 5 isn't merely retrieving information that was programmed into him.

He is learning from it.

Every new experience changes the way he behaves, and gradually Number 5 stops feeling like the name of a machine.

He becomes Johnny.

Ally Sheedy's Stephanie Speck gives the movie much of its warmth.

When Number 5 first appears at her home, she doesn't immediately realise she is dealing with an experimental military robot that has apparently developed consciousness.

But the longer she spends with him, the harder his behaviour becomes to explain as a simple malfunction.

He learns.

He jokes.

He becomes frightened.

He makes choices.

And crucially, he understands the difference between being operational and being alive.

Stephanie reaches the conclusion that the scientists initially struggle to accept: whatever happened during that lightning strike, Number 5 is no longer behaving like ordinary machinery.

Her relationship with Johnny 5 is where the movie really finds its heart.

She isn't interested in what he cost or what he was designed to do.

She simply starts treating him like a living thing.

Steve Guttenberg's Newton Crosby helped create Number 5, which makes his reaction to the robot's transformation particularly interesting.

For Crosby, the idea that one of his machines has genuinely become alive is difficult to accept.

A malfunction makes sense.

A programming error makes sense.

A robot spontaneously developing a sense of self is something else entirely.

That gives Short Circuit a surprisingly interesting science-fiction question beneath all the comedy.

If a machine can learn independently, experience fear, understand death and actively fight to continue existing, when do you stop treating it as property?

The movie doesn't bury us beneath philosophy to answer that question.

It lets Johnny 5 demonstrate it.

Eventually even the people responsible for building him have to consider the possibility that they created something they no longer have the right to simply switch off.

One of the great pleasures of watching Short Circuit today is simply looking at Johnny 5.

He is actually there.

He rolls through rooms, picks up objects, interacts with actors and occupies physical space in a way that gives the character genuine weight.

That matters enormously.

The filmmakers had to find ways of making a mechanical creation communicate emotion through movement rather than relying on a digital face to do the work.

And somehow those limitations became one of Johnny 5's greatest strengths.

His eyebrows became expressions. His camera-like eyes became a face. The angle of his head could completely change his mood.

You never forget that Johnny 5 is a machine.

But remarkably, you also stop thinking of him as just a machine.

Nearly four decades later, that practical physical presence remains a huge part of the film's charm.

There is absolutely no mistaking when Short Circuit was made.

The computers, military technology, clothes, music, television references and general enthusiasm for anything electronic plant it firmly in 1986.

But there is something deeper that makes it feel unmistakably 80s.

It's optimistic.

This is a movie about artificial intelligence becoming self-aware, yet its first instinct isn't to wipe out humanity.

Johnny 5 wants to learn about butterflies.

He wants to read encyclopaedias, watch television, dance and understand jokes.

Considering how often cinema has presented intelligent machines as an existential threat, there is something wonderfully refreshing about an AI whose biggest problem is that the humans won't give him enough books.

Short Circuit looks at advanced technology and asks what might happen if the machine turned out to be nice.

That feels almost radical now.

Johnny 5's education has one fairly obvious flaw.

He has no idea which information is important.

A scientific fact, an advertisement, a movie quote and a terrible joke are all equally valid pieces of input.

The result is a robot attempting to understand humanity after absorbing enormous quantities of television.

Predictably, things get strange.

He mimics voices, repeats phrases, discovers humour and begins developing the wonderfully chaotic personality people remember from the movie.

The joke works because Johnny 5 is completely sincere.

He isn't performing impressions because he wants attention. He is experimenting with the enormous amount of human behaviour he has just downloaded into his brain.

It's essentially a machine trying to assemble a personality from 1980s popular culture.

No wonder he turned out weird.

From the military's point of view, the situation is fairly straightforward.

A sophisticated and potentially dangerous prototype has escaped.

They need to recover it.

The problem is that we have spent enough time with Johnny 5 to understand the situation completely differently.

He doesn't believe he has escaped.

He believes he has survived.

That changes the stakes of every attempt to capture him.

Johnny 5 understands that being dismantled means the end of everything he has only just discovered. His fear of death becomes one of the strongest pieces of evidence that something fundamental really has changed inside him.

For a movie filled with jokes and slapstick, that gives the final pursuit a surprising emotional weight.

We aren't waiting for somebody to recover an expensive robot anymore.

We're hoping Johnny gets away.

Rewatching movies from the 1980s means accepting that occasionally something will appear that lands very differently forty years later.

Short Circuit is no exception.

Some of its humour and particularly some choices surrounding its supporting characters are unmistakably products of another era and can feel uncomfortable to a modern audience.

There's no reason to pretend otherwise.

But acknowledging the things that have aged poorly doesn't mean ignoring everything that still works.

And the central relationship between Stephanie and Johnny 5 remains remarkably effective.

The practical effects are still charming. Johnny's curiosity is still infectious. The basic story still moves beautifully between comedy, adventure and surprisingly thoughtful science fiction.

The movie has aged.

Johnny 5, strangely enough, hasn't aged nearly as much.

There are people who haven't watched Short Circuit for decades who can still recognise Johnny 5 instantly.

That's a pretty impressive legacy for a robot from a 1986 family comedy.

The tracks. The eyes. Those eyebrows.

And of course:

“Johnny 5 is alive!”

The character became one of those unmistakable pieces of 80s pop culture that survived long after video stores disappeared and the technology surrounding him became hopelessly outdated.

A sequel followed in 1988, but the original remains special because this is where we watch the character discover everything for the first time.

Johnny 5 begins as Number 5, a machine designed for somebody else's purpose.

By the end, he has chosen a name, developed friendships and decided what he wants his own existence to mean.

That's quite a journey for a robot who started the day getting hit by lightning.

Mostly, yes — and Johnny 5 is overwhelmingly the reason why.

Some elements of Short Circuit are firmly rooted in 1986, and parts of the comedy inevitably play differently today.

But the heart of the movie remains enormously likeable.

Ally Sheedy brings warmth to Stephanie, Steve Guttenberg keeps the science-fiction approachable and the practical effects give Johnny 5 a physical personality that still works remarkably well.

Most importantly, the movie understands what makes its robot special.

Johnny 5 isn't lovable because he's technologically impressive.

He's lovable because he's excited to be alive.

He looks at ordinary things humans barely notice and treats them like discoveries. He wants knowledge, friendship and another minute to experience a world he didn't know existed yesterday.

For anyone who grew up watching him, all it takes is the movement of those eyebrows and two words to bring the memories flooding back.

Movies in the 80s verdict: Pure 80s robot nostalgia. ★★★★☆