Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov are often considered the “big three” of 20th-century science fiction. Yet only Clarke’s genius has really been translated effectively on the big screen, via his screenplay with Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Heinlein would have detested Paul Verhoeven’s wonderfully bombastic Starship Troopers, which brazenly subverted the original novel’s rather fascistic leanings, and poor Asimov has seen his complex ideas about the development of positronic brains shoehorned into the overly sentimental Robin Williams vehicle Bicentennial Man and the rather ropey Will Smith action entry I, Robot.

Hollywood, it seems, prefers the pulpier concepts imagined by the great Philip K Dick. And who can blame film-makers when Rutger Hauer’s “tears in rain” death speech from Blade Runner sheds more light on the essential humanity of artificial life forms in less than 20 seconds than anything in Asimov’s entire canon? (Dick, for the record, did not write the monologue, and we are talking here strictly in terms of cinematic impact rather than big ideas.)

The other problem with robots, as opposed to the replicants of Blade Runner or Terminators from the film series imagined by James Cameron, is that they are often poorly realised on the big screen. I, Robot’s Sonny resembled a mid-00s iMac, while pre-CGI offerings often looked like they had been assembled by the presenting team of Blue Peter using cardboard boxes and sticky-back plastic.

Michael Bay’s Transformers films don’t really count for the purposes of this article: they’re based on fun toys that were designed to appeal to small children rather than get us thinking about the nature of consciousness, sentience and essential humanity. Steven Spielberg did his best to shed light on the matter with 2001’s A.I., but the film descended horribly into a final act of syrupy bathos.

Haley Joel Osment as child-robot David and Jude Law in A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex

Can Automata, a new science fiction film from the Spanish director Gabe Ibáñez, finally deliver an intelligent robot movie? The film, the first trailer for which has just hit the web, at least seems to be making an effort to avoid overloading filmgoers with saccharine sentimentality or batter our brains into quivering blancmange with a blitzkrieg of pixels and steel. With a decent cast including Antonio Banderas, Robert Forster and Javier Bardem, it might just be worth taking a look at while fans of futuristic visions wait for November’s Interstellar.

Set in 2044, Automata centres on artificial life forms who seem to have been given rules to live by that closely resemble Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. A thuggish attack on a defenceless machine also recalls episodes from the author’s novelette version of Bicentennial Man. But the style and setting of the film – from the flashes of Blade Runner-like cityscapes to the desert vistas where Banderas and his machine companions/captives find themselves on the run – are impressive. There’s also something equally disarming and disconcerting about the design of the machine faces, and the involvement of Bardem (as the voice of the blue robot) would appear to be a good sign, if he’s not just doing someone at the production end a favour.

Of course, the movie may just be a cheap melange of dystopian influences, with a little of District 9’s third world ghetto charm and a splash of Mad Max’s dusty outback glamour thrown in for good measure. Automata doesn’t seem to have a UK release date at this point, and is only set for a limited release in October in the US. But the distributors don’t always call these things right. If the movie picks up strong reviews at the upcoming San Sebastian film festival, we might just get to see it in more cinemas worldwide. Let’s hope so, because the idea of the Spanish bringing Asimovian sci-fi back to the big screen – when Hollywood appears to have forgotten all about intelligent robot movies - is a refreshingly appealing one.