onsider three major studio movies due to release this year: Chappie, Ex Machina, and Avengers:Age of Ultron. All are concerned with the consequences of artificial intelligence run amok.

An ambitious, cerebral psychological thriller, Alex Garland's Ex Machina is an exploration of the relationship between men and machines. Young programmer Caleb is invited to spend a week at the expansive home of Nathan, a brilliant CEO.

His job is to take part in a Turing test - an experiment designed to show that machines can be programmed to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of humans. The experiment begins to unravel when Caleb develops an attraction to Ava, his beautiful android companion.

Avengers: Age of Ultron is the umpteenth film in Marvel's robust library of comic book adaptations and likely the most highly anticipated film of the year. Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, gets more than he bargained for when he creates Ultron, an A.I. robot designed to act as a planetary peacekeeping system.

Ultron's self-awareness leads it to the conclusion that the world would be better off without humans. Stark and his friends learn that even when artificial intelligence is created and designed with the best of intentions, it can still choose to act in a way that is counter to humanity's interests.

Chappie is the third film from District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. His titular android, a decommissioned military robot given life by an energetic young programmer, first appears with the personality of an impressionable young toddler.

When Chappie ends up running with a violent gang, the movie becomes a story of child rearing gone awry, as well as a cautionary tale about the dangers of advanced technology falling into the wrong hands.

Of course, the fear of machines isn't anything new. It's a concept as old as science fiction itself.

The marriage of technophobia and the cinematic medium can be traced back to Fritz Lang's seminal 1927 silent film Metropolis, a depiction of a dystopian city in which technological progress and industrial automation have ruined the quality of life for its working class, who make up the majority of the populace. The influence of technology is shown to be powerful and oppressive.

There is a recurring theme throughout of people being controlled or manipulated by others through the use of technology and machinery. An inventor transforms a woman into an android that then convinces the workers to rise up and destroy the machines. Afterwards, the workers feel the robot has deceived them, and they burn it at the stake.

The perception of technology as unpredictable and dangerous continued through the evolution of sci-fi films in the 50s and 60s, and reached a new height during the Cold War.

Computers had started to push their way into everyday life, and their link to weapons systems was exploited for tension in the 1983 thriller WarGames, where a young hacker unwittingly pushes the world towards the brink of nuclear war. A year later, James Cameron's breakthrough The Terminator presented us with an enemy A.I. so advanced and malevolent that it could send machines back in time to assassinate our future leaders.

Our modern lives, dependent as they are on smartphone technology, workstations, GPS, digital cameras, home security systems and the like, are all of a sudden quite susceptible to turmoil when technology fails.

Anyone who has been vexed by a computer virus or blindsided by a data breach can speak to the difficulties of technology working against us. Cinema, as always, acts as a mirror that reflects our deepest fears, and allows us to examine them on a grand scale. As long as we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to technology, it will make for a scarily effective villain in some of our very best entertainments.