Life & Wisdom Quote by John Podhoretz

Podhoretz lands the joke with a neat reversal: in a genre obsessed with soulless machines, it’s the humans who can’t convincingly pass for alive. The line works because it doesn’t argue about sci-fi’s themes; it needles its craft. “Great mystery” is mock-grand, the tone of a man pretending to ponder the cosmos when he’s really pointing at bad acting, lazy dialogue, and characters built from prefab parts. The punch is “wooden,” a word that turns the human body into a prop while letting robots, of all things, glide into emotional credibility.

The subtext is a critique of how sci-fi cinema often treats people as mere delivery systems for exposition. Plot mechanics, world-building, and visual spectacle get the obsessive attention; interiority gets outsourced. Robots, meanwhile, arrive pre-loaded with conflict. They’re literally constructed, so questions of identity, autonomy, and morality naturally cling to them. A machine looking for a soul is, paradoxically, an efficient shortcut to pathos. A human character, by contrast, needs writing and performance to earn depth, and too many sci-fi scripts settle for job titles and trauma bullet points.

Context matters: Podhoretz is a cultural commentator with a taste for provocation, and this is criticism as one-liner scalpel. It also captures a broader late-20th/early-21st-century anxiety: audiences increasingly trust the “programmed” character - the robot with constraints and rules - more than the human who behaves like a talking plot device. The barb isn’t anti-sci-fi; it’s a demand that the genre’s humanity match its imagination.