July 25, 2004
Review: I, Robot
Well, I saw I, Robot last week, and not really by choice, but due to a group outing. I wasn’t too impressed, although it did have a few pleasant surprises.
For the most part, the film is pretty much what I expected. Standard summer action flick stuff with stock elements, predictable plot twists, gaping plot holes, and the “bad guys” making ridiculously stupid mistakes. If you like action movies, you can probably look past all of that. But this wasn’t really my cup of tea.
And yes, I have read Isaac Asimov’s original short story collection that this film is (very!) loosely based on, but I think I was able to keep that from coloring my enjoyment, since it was pretty dang obvious just from the previews that the movie would bear very little resemblance to that work. And obviously, this was partly by necessity, as it was a collection of stories, not one unified work, and most of them were basically logic puzzles revolving around figuring out how and why a robot did something that seemingly conflicted with the three laws of robotics. Not exactly cinematic material.
Oh, for those not familiar, these are the three laws:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or the Second Law.
Seems pretty safe, but Asimov wrote a ton of stories involving unexpected consequences of these seemingly simple and straight-forward rules (and there’s also a new blog that covers the serious problems in the three laws).
The movie, to its credit, does actually cite the laws at the beginning and refers to them numerous times. However, as you could tell from the trailers, the robots end up breaking these laws. To be sure, the plot tries to explain this, but while the explanation was somewhat of an homage to the last short story in I, Robot, “The Evitable Conflict,” I found it to be a bit of a cheat. However, the murder mystery that is at the core of the plot is actually somewhat interesting and threw a couple of twists I didn’t see coming. Although one of them, I probably should have (who was behind everything), and the other one ended up being a little disappointing when it didn’t actually mean what I initially thought it did (the revelation at the end of the car chase). So it does get some things right.
But this movie is, first and foremost, a cop action movie starring Will Smith. If you like Will Smith and want to see a movie where he plays the exact same character he always does, then this is probably you’re cup of tea. For the rest of us, he just grates on our nerves. For the record, his character is a cop named Del Spooner, but for all intents and purposes, it was really just Will Smith being Will Smith. Many of the tired old cop movie cliches are there in droves as well (e.g. Will Smith being asked to turn in his badge, having a “dark” secret in his past that turns out to be rather disappointing, etc.).
But I’d be willing to forgive all that if the action scenes delivered, and I don’t think they did. I like Alex Proyas (Dark City and The Crow), and some of his camera work is pretty creative, like the fight scene with all the catwalks. And I thought the special effects were very well done. The real problem I had was plausibility (which is the same reason I’m not fond of a lot of the James Bond films). And this is coming from somebody who is generally able to immerse themselves completely in a movie and forget that it’s a movie. I can buy the futuristic setting, and even Will Smith wearing a pair of 20th century sneakers. But there were too many situations where the robots should have had Will Smith and let him get away. Unlike good action movies, he doesn’t get out of the dire situations by fighting well or being clever, but because the robots exhibited gross incompetence. Now, I could buy a couple of Jedi with lightsabres slashing their way through an army of robots in Episode I. But a human cop with a gun? And facing robots that are capable of much more advanced physical feats? Sorry, no.
Indeed, the only reason he survives is that the robots come at him a few at a time, allowing him to dispatch each one. If they all went at him at once, he wouldn’t stand a chance, especially if they coordinated their attacks (since these are robots that have an active connection to a central computer, they should be able to communicate much more quickly than any elite military squad of humans). This is painfully obvious in the car chase scene where they 1) fail to slow his car to a halt before he takes manual control of it 2) jump on the car only a few at a time, allowing him time to dispatch them. The last fight scene has similar issues.
This, combined with the fact that we know the robots are computer-generated (although the effects are good enough that this isn’t glaringly obvious), and the film completely lost all suspense for me. I stopped believing Will Smith was actually in any danger, knowing that the director or screenwriter would somehow get him out of it. And that alone was enough to kill the movie for me. Never mind the blatant and rather unbelievable use of product placement and most of the attempts at humor falling flat.
Worth skipping. If you want to watch a good summer action flick, check out Spiderman 2.
Overall rating (of I, Robot, not Spiderman 2): 5.5 out of 10 cute smiley fishies.
