BICENTENNIAL MAN

However, no matter how hard the movie tries, it cannot activate the audience's emotion chip with the apparent ease Data does his in Star Trek - First Contact. And it does try hard . . .

In my review of the previous fantasy-flavoured Robin Williams vehicle, What Dreams May Come, I complained that the screenwriters wanted to elicit an emotional response from audiences by killing off on-screen characters. In Bicentennial Man this presents no problem: like the immortal Connor MacLeod in Highlander, Williams watches a lot of people die of old age throughout the movie's long running time. After all, he does get to live two centuries (hence the title) . . .

And while it would be a cheap shot to complain that the movie also feels that long, the truth is that after a promising start the movie begins to drag. Like its main character, Bicentennial Man is clunky and slow moving. The two centuries he lives through doesn't seem all that interesting either, I'm afraid: one keeps expecting the movie to have some wild fun with the changing fashion, technologies, architecture, etc. the Williams character lives through, but alas it never really materialises.

Here the film-makers could really have let their imaginations soar, but instead the briefly glimpsed cityscapes seems mundanely of The Fifth Element variety while some fashions (and interior decoration) curiously looks very 20^th century. At times the Williams robot seems like a 21^st century figure stuck in the 19^th century!

While I've never read the works on which the movie is based, I have a suspicion that Bicentennial Man left all the stuff that made the material interesting enough to want to film in the first place. Throughout the movie I kept on asking questions ranging from the mundane (just how did the robot open a bank account of his own? How did he get a permit to build that house on the beach?) to the more philosophical (does the robot have a "soul" in any sense of the word now that it has acquired intelligence? What makes one human in the first place?). 

Unfortunately the movie weren't too interested in the questions it kept throwing up and is more intent on staging deathbed scenes set to a thousand strings orchestra (supplied by Titanic composer James Horner). This is, after all, a Robin Williams tear jerker . . .

Ultimately Bicentennial Man can be clumped together with other failed literary science fiction adaptations such as The Postman in that it could have been so much better when one considers the original material at hand. When the Williams character finally dies, one is curiously unmoved, unlike when another computer gets unplugged - namely HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey and he didn't even have a passing resemblance to the tin man . . .

You may have somehow gained the impression from the film's marketing that Bicentennial Man is suitable viewing for small children - wrong! The chances are your offspring would probably be bored out of their little skulls by onscreen proceedings. Plus, with all the people dying throughout the movie you might have some explaining to do. Unlike, let's say, My Favourite Martian, there is very little visual spectacle and no buffoonery whatsoever to hold the little 'uns' attention. Avoid.

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