I’ve started writing movie reviews for Urban Vancouver (check out their sweet new design). I’ll probably only write two or three a month. I review them in my head anyway, so I might as well write my thoughts down on, uh, pixels. My first review is three-law-safe (I really want a t-shirt that says that), on I, Robot:
Us movie-goers love our robots. From Fritz Lang’s Maria to George Lucas’s C3P0, robots have always been prominent in the American psyche and at the box office. Our love of droids combined with a recent trend toward near-future potboilers made a big budget adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot possible. Add wise-cracking hero Wil Smith to the mix, and the watch the studio’s eyes (and pockets) widen.
Smith stars as Del Spooner, a robot-hating police officer fighting crime in Chicago, 2035. Spooner has some unresolved anger issues around our metal friends, so when his friend and robotics leading light Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell, playing yet another eccentric brainiac spouting Star Trekian tech-speak) apparently commits suicide in his workshop, Spooner is immediately skeptical. Lanning’s death comes on the eve of his employer’s massive rollout of a new generation of domestic robots across the nation. Spooner convinces insider Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) to assist in his investigation. What follows is a pretty typical tale of corporate corruption and car chases.
Wil Smith plays Wil Smith. With rare exceptions, Smith has spent his career as the charismatic leading-man, saving the city/planet/universe with a combination of bravado, instinct and biceps. That’s not a complaint—the world needs a leading man, and we’ve loved Harrison Ford for doing the same thing over the past quarter-century. I just wish we could see more of Smith in films like Ali, where he rose to the challenge of building a believable character.
Bridget Moynahan reminds us immediately of Sandra Bullock, circa The Net. She has little to do but protest Smith’s technophobic attitudes and lone wolf methods. That’s apparently too much to ask, though, as her performance is stiffer than her robotic co-stars.
I, Robot is the bastard child of Minority Report and AI. Unfortunately, it lacks the clever twists of the former and the thematic depth of the latter. No biped—man or robot—pauses to contemplate their humanity for very long. In a rich science-fiction tradition, the robots are depicted as childlike and little else. There are suggestions that Spooner is some kind of robot racist, but the idea is given so little screen time that we forget about it before the third act.
It’s also apparent that I, Robot director Alex Proyas didn’t convene a council of geekery to predict near-future technology, as Spielberg did for Minority Report. Not only does Spooner have two very average-looking flat-screen monitors on his desk, but the police department’s case files are just that, file folders with paper inside them. Likewise, the dialogue has a distinctly 2004 feel to it—apparently no new slang developed in the ensuing 30 years.
I, Robot was shot in Vancouver, but you wouldn’t know it from the movie. In fact, as a Vancouverite, it was refreshing not to recognize familiar landmarks (oh, there’s the library again!). This anonymity was aided by the fact that, in the future, everyone drives underground. Presumably millions of dollars are saved when CGI car chases occur not in busy city streets, but under them in featureless tunnels.
This movie isn’t going to surprise anyone—the world is in peril and Wil Smith is armed with big guns and sass mouth. While it doesn’t measure up to its blockbuster brethren Spiderman 2 and The Bourne Supremacy, you could do worse on a sweaty summer night.
Incidentally, if you haven’t seen Alex Proyas’s Dark City, you’ve missed one of the finer science-fiction films of the nineties.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Isn’t the dead guy played by James Cromwell called Alfred Lanning?
Have you noticed that the robots look like they were made by Macintosh? If the book wasn’t written so long ago I’d say it’s a shameless plug for a Mac “i-bot”.
That’s right, it is Lanning. I think Dr. Miles Hogenmiller is from the original book? Anyway, it’s corrected.
Smith was excellent in Six Degrees of Separation and The Legend of Bagger Vance
I love how they took all of Asimov’s good robot works and ruined the interesting elements.
The robotophobic everyman Elija Baily of The Caves of Steel had depth because he was so ordinary: everybody in the world was robotophobic. By taking that character and placing him in a world where robots are commonplace, they give him false depth. He has to be obviously counter-culture because somebody rising above their social conditioning is too subtle for Hollywood. The original Susan Calvin I, Robot short stories were sad: Susan was a horse-faced woman who was madly in love with a man who didn’t know she existed; her brilliance was channeled into an overtly anti-social vein as a result. She was indeed robotic — that was the point — but making her beautiful completely ruins her character, too.
I wish they’d had the balls to stick to one of the short stories, or to actually remake The Caves of Steel, which was actually a ripping good detective story.
Paolo: I’ll definitely give you “Six Degrees”, but I don’t think anybody was excellent (except, perhaps, Charlize Theron’s fetching calves) in “Bagger Vance”.
I’d like to see what they’d do with a movie of Marge Piercy’s He, She, It. They’d probably tone down the anti-Semitic themes but otherwise it has good meat for the screen, I think.
The Caves of Steel would be an excellent source for a movie. Too bad they didn’t just do that rather than butchering I,Robot.