Bicentennial Man (1999), adapted from Isaac Asimov’s novel The Positronic Man and directed by Chris Columbus, casts Robin Williams as Andrew, a household robot who slowly grows into something close to a person. The story runs across 200 years and follows a machine bought to do the chores as it presses, step by step, to be treated as a human being, winning legal recognition only at the moment of its death.
What the story really forces upon us is an old question that remains unanswered: what is it that makes a being a person. Andrew acquires early on the things humans prize most in themselves, curiosity, creativity, humour, and in time love as well. He learns to carve, learns to tell jokes, fits himself with artificial organs that tire and ache, and turns a steel frame gradually into flesh. In ability and in feeling he lacks nothing, and is arguably more human than several of the flesh-and-blood people around him. Yet the World Congress will not grant him the title. The question surfaces plainly. What defines personhood, is it consciousness, emotion, creativity, or something else.
The film’s answer is unexpected, and the most worth chewing over. The Congress recognises Andrew not because he has finally gained some capability, but because he chooses to let his bloodstream age, choosing to die. What makes him human, in other words, is not something he adds but something he is willing to give up. A machine that cannot break down, however human it seems, stands outside humanity, because it never has to face an ending. Death here is not a human defect but a human entry ticket. To be able to lose, to move toward a close, turns out to be the deepest colour in the word person.
This touches a sharper reflection. We have long treated agelessness and deathlessness as the ultimate blessing, promised by religion and pursued by technology. The story suggests instead that an existence without end may be precisely an existence without weight. It is because time is finite that choices carry a cost, that love carries reluctance to part, that each decision counts at all. Andrew trades 200 years of immortality for a life that will wither and end, and what he gains is not merely a legal title but a weight his existence never had before. Only by surrendering the infinite does he lay claim to meaning, a paradox more arresting than any tearful scene.
Andrew’s romance with Portia brings the abstractions down to earth. Portia is the granddaughter of Little Miss, and Andrew has always carried an unspoken tenderness for Little Miss, so that across several generations the feeling reawakens in a new object. Does love spoken by a machine count as love, and if it is indistinguishable from a human heart’s stirring, on what grounds do we call it false. What stings more is the asymmetry. Portia will age and die, while Andrew can remain fixed in place, watching the one he loves wear away inch by inch. It is this asymmetry that leaves him unable to rest in immortality, and his choice of ageing and death is less about claiming a title than about walking the final stretch of the road beside the one he loves.
There is one episode easily taken as a passing detail that in fact carries great weight. After serving the Martin family for many years, Andrew asks of his own accord to buy back his freedom with the money saved from selling his carvings. On the face of it this is almost pointless. He is already treated as family, paid a wage, free to move as he wishes, and what it earns him is the hurt and coolness of his master, Richard. But a freedom lent out of goodwill remains in another’s hand, given when they are pleased and withdrawn when they are not. Andrew would rather pay for it, so that freedom becomes something held in his own name that no one can take back. The heart of freedom lies not in how comfortable your life is but in whom it actually belongs to.
Following that thread, freedom and recognition turn out to be two sides of one question. What Andrew seeks is never a stronger set of functions but to be treated as a subject, to hold his own name and property and to decide for himself. This reminds us that personhood may be less a measurable inner property than a relationship of mutual recognition, a matter of whether a community is willing to draw you inside the circle of us.
It is worth noting that the film flopped on release and the critics were unmoved, costing roughly 100 million US dollars and taking only about 87 million worldwide, a clear loss, long filed away as a slow and overly sentimental misfire. Yet set aside for 20-odd years and watched again in the age of AI, it has grown new weight, and looks more like an underrated film worth thinking through. Machines can already create and converse, and whether they possess consciousness has become a serious debate. The thing Andrew spent a full 200 years asking is now laid in front of us. When a system behaves human in every respect, on what grounds do we say it is not. Is it because it has no consciousness, or because we cannot prove it has any, is it because it cannot die, or because to recognise it would unsettle our attachment to our own uniqueness. The story answers none of this for us. It only hones the question to a finer edge, pressing us, while there is still time, to think clearly about what we use to define a person, and what we are prepared to use to define a machine.
