I called the bartender a robot in the post, but in one of my comments I wrote:

I suppose that technically he’s an android, but an android is a type of robot. And he’s only an android from the waist up; from the waist down he’s pure robot

And I believe that is correct in the case of the movie; is it not?

Technically, no, but you’d be hard-pressed to understand the difference from films.

Historically, in SF, a robot is a mechanical artificial life form. An android is a biological artificial life form — that is, a robot will mostly have gears, metal, wires, motors, perhaps a metal sponge for the brain. An android will have actual muscles, bones, tendons, etc., all the stuff a normal human will have. They just were in no way created by normal human/animal creation processes (e.g., a “vat-grown human” is not an android, unless you at least imprinted its personality directly onto the brain, rather than had it learn as a human does over time).

Most of the idiots in Hollywood have no clue about any of this, so they use the words interchangeably in TV and film.

Tommy, this is pretty SOP in Hollywood. It happens far more than you’d thing, as a direct result of many different possible factors — if the director has one vision, the writer another. Or if the studio has an opinion.

Even Hitchcock wasn’t immune. The ending of Suspicion (1940) was the polar opposite of its intended one, because the studio did not want their rising star, Cary Grant, to be a Bad Guy.

In other cases, there was a crappy script about space battles vs. Bugs. A copyright search noted that Robert Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers was about… fighting bugs. They bought the rights to it, but the director, Paul Verhoeven, hated the book, and stopped reading it well short of the halfway point. So they took some elements from it, and produced a version that depicted the government therein in almost the diametric opposite of what it actually was — Verhoeven even stole a number of ideas for the government from Nazi films he’d seen decades before.

One point that sticks in my craw. The Jennifer Lawrence line, “I’m a journalist, I know people.” That certainly doesn’t describe many of today’s journalists who seem to define people by their own preconceptions rather than knowing them for who they are.”

It certainly describes their conceits, if not their actual capabilities. And as you recall, he disproved her claim in 2 out of three cases.

I mentioned the bartender. I just didn’t call him a bartender. He is the “great robot” of my last paragraph in the post.

I suppose that technically he’s an android, but an android is a type of robot. And he’s only an android from the waist up; from the waist down he’s pure robot.

Michael Sheen is a fine actor and I very much enjoyed his roll as the bartender Arthur. BTW, that whole barroom routine was borrowed from Kubrick’s “The Shining” because one of the filmmaker’s was fond of it. “What’ll it be Mr. Torrance?”

I was especially amused by Sheen’s bartender acting because I had previously read that he was quoted as having said the his character was “a cross between a puppy and a toaster.”

Not that most would care, but I’d rate the physics accuracy at about a B in the first two acts, and a D or F in the third act. The spaceship spin and resulting artificial gravity would not stop just because the electricity fails. Conservation of angular momentum and all that.

As gratuitous as much of that third act “action” was, it did serve the psychological purpose of re-bonding Jim and Aurora through adversity, given that the Act 3 begins with them on the outs.