**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, Alan Tudyk, Chi McBride, and James Cromwell
Directed by Alex Proyas & written for the screen by Akiva Goldman and Jeff Vintar, suggested by the book by Isaac Asimov
2004
110 min PG13
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 (let’s get out my paperback of “I, Robot,” $1.75 from Half-Price Books):
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 “The 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.
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 Sonny (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 sniveling 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.
Page two of "I, Robot." Back to home.