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I, ROBOT
  
STARRING:
Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Alan Tudyk, James Cromwell, Bruce Greenwood,
Adrian L. Ricard, Chi McBride
2004,
115 Minutes, Directed by Alex Proyas
 The
short stories that comprise Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
barely qualify as science fiction. They’re more like math fiction or logic
fiction. The characters are static and one-dimensional, the prose is direct,
clear, and slightly smirking, and everything is pushed aside to make way for the
central logic problem involving the Three Laws of Robotics. These are the Three
Laws which every robot is programmed to follow with the core of its being, like
physical laws, sort of how we have to obey gravity:
1) A robot may not injure a
human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders
would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not
conflict with the First or Second Law.
And I love the stories because
they’re such marvelous, concise little gems, all the fascinating stuff to do
with logic and nothing flabby in the way. And because, like all stories from
sci-fi’s golden age, you can get to far-off planets using a slide rule. Stories
in I, Robot include what to do with a robot that can read thoughts but
still obeys the Three Laws. How a robot would become locked in a cycle if you
lazily told it to do something really dangerous. How to pick out a robot whose
First Law has been reprogrammed from a group of identical looking normal robots.
Trying to prove whether or not a mayoral candidate is really a robot (and
whether or not that would improve or weaken his platform). And so on,
culminating in the ultimate question, would the world be better off if
everything were run by super-intelligent reasoning machines?
Not every book should be like
I, Robot, but it’s good to have a couple around. Much of modern sci-fi is
indebted to Asimov’s work, including The Matrix and
vast chunks of Animatrix. HAL 9000 is perhaps the
ultimate example of the reasoning machine that comes to run the world and
Robocop’s Three Directives are a parody of the Three
Laws.
I
try never to evaluate a movie based on its fidelity, or lack thereof, to its
source material. People who do that, I suspect, mostly just want to brag about
how they’ve read the book. That the new film I, Robot, only uses ideas,
names, and images from the I, Robot book and its sequels (like Robots
of Dawn), and does not lift any direct storyline from the books, is not to
its discredit. That the movie retreats into the safety of a police procedural is
not necessarily to its discredit. When exploring futuristic and foreign worlds
sometimes it’s best to do so from a place of familiarity, and nothing is more
familiar to moviegoers than the Cop On The Edge (or COTE).
But the film I, Robot,
puts the Three Laws front and center, instead of titles like “Starring Will
Smith.” In effect the Three Laws are the stars of the movie, in the way they
were the stars of the book. And maybe I wouldn’t know all that can be done and
explored with the Three Laws if I hadn’t read the book. But I have a feeling
that a lot of people who enter the movie unfamiliar with the Three Laws will
leave feeling that more could have been done with them in place of quite so many
car crashes and special effects sequences. The movie shows you what a big brain
it has, and then tries impressing you with its brawn instead.
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"I, Robot settled for 'good enough' instead of 'good'." |
It’s the future, and US
Robotics have put robots everywhere, emptying out the trash, bringing us mail,
cooking our food, serving us drinks. The current, about to be obsolete model is
the NS-4, with a robot face circa 1952. But the NS-5 is coming soon, all
plastic, lithe, and with disturbingly human faces. Detective Spooner (Will
Smith) is summoned to US Robotics when its founder (James Cromwell) is found at
the bottom of a fifty-story drop. All the suits, including USR’s president
(Bruce Greenwood), say “it’s suicide!” But the COTE is suspicious, especially
when he and USR’s robopsychologist (Bridget Moynahan) find a robot named Sunny
(voice of Alan Tudyk) who is apparently able to disregard the Three Laws. He
looks like all the other NS-5s … but some things about him are different. He can
joke. He can wonder. He has dreams. Throw in a super computer named VIKI and a
trail of breadcrumbs left by the dead man and the game is afoot.
Will
Smith is right at home in movies like this. He’s like that one really cool kid
in the popular high school crowd who was willing to talk to snivelling
proletarians such as myself and I was so grateful that I would never besmirch
his kindness by trying to initiate a conversation with him. Like Harrison Ford,
he inhabits special effects universe, but is not impressed by them; he lets us
know which parts of the crazy sci-fi world are banal and everyday and which
parts are bizarre and out-of-the-ordinary. He’s also funny as hell in I,
Robot, in an obnoxious, suspect-harassing kind of way, that sets him apart
from the special effects and puts him one step closer to sitting next to us in
the audience.
 Smith’s COTE has a thing
against robots, a distrust made all the more believable and human because of how
inconsistent it is. Sometimes it seems as vile as a racial prejudice, in which
he sees robots as being as complex as humans but simply loathsome, and sometimes
it’s like a cautionary distrust of a Ford Pinto. His apartment is stacked with
“obsolete” stuff, circa 2004. There’s a rather long, early scene of him working
out and taking a shower that may seem to be playing to the ladies in the
audience (the Fresh Prince is ripped). But it shows that he is a human devoted
to his human-ness, who sees everyday on the beat as a chance for humanity to
prove its superiority over technology.
The movie’s previews are not
promising: robots run amok and the Fresh Prince must mow them down with a
machine gun. I, Robot isn’t as bad as all that; the cause of the
amok-running is an intriguing flaw in the Three Laws. Sadly, the solution is not
to outwit the machines with the same logic that got us into this mess but to
shoot it out with them, dangle over a precipice, and jam stuff into a big
glowing orb. During this sequence, I whispered to one of my friends “I think
I’ve played this level before.” I, Robot is also stuck in the predictable
language of a cop movie. Earlier I said this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but
one gets tired of the captain/lieutenant/chief (Chi McBride) asking the COTE for
his badge, and the COTE playing by his own rules, and having a secret from his
past, etc. I also found the procedural stuff to be a little too loose: as an
example, when two truckloads of robots try to run Smith and his car into the
wall of a tunnel and he trashes everything in sight, his superior is really
quick to not believe him when he claims he was attacked.
The
movie has good effects if you just can’t get enough of computer-generated stuff.
It looks good in a flat, jittery kind of way, in which, beyond the Fresh
Prince’s apartment, I could never be convinced that anything was real. There’s a
uniform, almost black-and-white greyness to everything I found moderately
pleasing. The movie’s highpoint is the robots themselves. The obsolete models
are all metal and stiff-moving, with motionless eyes and mouths that flash on
and off when they speak. The new models, which you’ve seen in the previews,
appear to be all plastic, or filled with liquid, or something, and are
remarkably agile during several encounters to the death. Sunny’s face has an
innocent, sweet wonder about it, but never loses the sinister edge it acquires
when Smith finds him in the dead professor’s office. As Sunny is the only
character of interest or sympathy besides Smith, this is important.
Alex Proyas has directed two of
the best and most eye-pleasing fantasy films of recent years:
Dark City, which out-matrixes
The Matrix, and The Crow, my favorite recent comic book movie. It
helps that he co-wrote both of them, which gives them a directness that
committee-written films often lack. With I, Robot he keeps the traffic
moving and composes his shots well, but his visual palette is sparse and bare
compared to the sprawling detail of his previous feasts for the eyes. The only
really memorable shots consist of the robots moving en masse, once as the
glowing-red-with-malevolence NS-5s march through downtown, and again as they are
put into indefinite storage.
I, Robot’s shortcomings
are probably mostly due to a lack of ambition on the part of screenwriters Akiva
Goldman (A Beautiful Mind, Batman & Robin,
Lost In Space) and Jeff Vintar. The differences
between people and machines could be explored more thoroughly, or the idea that
machines could adopt their own feelings, or why exactly Sunny makes the choice
he does near the film’s end instead of just saying “it seems a little
heartless.” Or what happened to that segment of the population that used to
empty out the trash, bring us mail, cook our food, serve us drinks. Like so many
summer movies, it’s gotten a hold of some good ideas and then doesn’t do much
with them—it’s “Ideas Lite.” 2002’s Minority Report,
while not a perfect movie, is a rare thing for the summer: an admirable
combination of intelligence and spectacle. Even A.I., if
also flawed, is daring and ambitious compared to I, Robot. I was engaged
by and enjoyed myself while watching I, Robot, but the pleasure of the
confection was fleeting. It left me saying “it’s about all you can expect from a
summer movie.” It settled for good enough instead of good.
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The Friday &
Saturday Night Critic
If this had been a 1970s movie
starring Charlton Heston as a misanthropic cop who actually sees the point in
robots taking over the planet, then it would probably have been more
interesting. Here it’s just a cop procedural/action flick with a climax taken
straight from a videogame . . .
— James O'Ehley
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