Release Date: July 16, 2004
Starring: Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Alan Tudyk, James Cromwell, Bruce Greenwood, Chi McBride
Directed by: Alex Proyas
Written by: Jeff Vintar, Akiva Goldsman
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (intense stylized action, some brief partial nudity)
I suppose I never thought I’d see the day when Will Smith, king of the Fourth of July blockbuster and publisher emeritus of the smug one-liner (though he still has moments when you can see, in those dancing brown eyes, a lingering yearning to return to television’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), would star in the adaptation of an intellectual work like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, a collection of short stories the author assembled in 1950. (This is no strike against Smith, who is a perfectly intelligent actor, and one who, despite his comedic origins, has the ability to blend his comic approach into dramatic material or forego it altogether.) But then this film version of the anthology, directed by Alex Proyas from a script Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman, is hardly a traditional adaptation -- as the credits explain, it is merely suggested by Asimov’s work. The film is something of a compromise: a thoughtful and at times philosophical story lurking behind an all-too-familiar, supercharged, special-effects-laden curtain designed to sell movie tickets in the middle of the summer.
In this movie, the setting is Chicago, in the year 2035. Lake Michigan has become a landfill, and the population of the nation’s third-largest city has seemingly doubled -- except that all of the extra residents aren’t humans, they’re robots, designed by the technology megacorporation, U.S. Robotics, to aid humankind (as a result of the company’s success, the Chicago skyline now includes a gleaming, monolithic U.S. Robotics Building, which dwarfs the Sears Tower).
To ensure humanity’s safety, these robots have all been programmed with a basic operating system called “3 Laws Safe,” three principles that guide a robot’s behavior above all else. First, a robot cannot harm a human or allow a human being to come to harm. Second, a robot must obey all orders given it by a human, as long as they do not violate the first law. And third, a robot must protect its own existence, as long as doing so does not violate either of the first two laws. It is an ingenious, continuous circle of protection, except that, as readers of Asimov’s novel will know, it is open to interpretation -- if the three laws were applied, for example, not on a case-by-case basis, but to humanity as a whole.
Enter into this picture Chicago police detective Del Spooner (Will Smith), who is assigned to investigate the apparent suicide of Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), the author of the three laws of robotics. Lanning’s death comes on the eve of what one character calls “the largest robotic distribution in history” -- the inauguration of U.S. Robotics’ latest model, the NS-5, and with it, the Gatesian promise to put a robot in every home. (The head of U.S. Robotics is played by Bruce Greenwood, and though there is a whiff of Bill Gates in the performance, you get the feeling that Greenwood’s character could give Gates a good whooping if the two ever got into a fight.)
Spooner, for his part, is immediately suspicious, but then, he appears to be generally suspicious about (and even afraid of) anything to do with robotics, including the idea that robots cannot commit murder because the three laws preclude the possibility. Given Spooner’s anti-robotic sentiments, no one seems very surprised or even convinced at his conclusion that it was a robot who killed Lanning, including Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), a U.S. Robotics staffer assigned to assist him, and John Bergin (Chi McBride), Spooner’s exasperated lieutenant.
Except that after Spooner discovers a robot, which later refers to itself as Sonny (Alan Tudyk), at the scene of Lanning’s death, we start to think maybe he’s on to something. After all, Sonny is clearly capable of disregarding and even disobeying human commands in clear violation of the second law -- and, as another character later suggests, if robots can work around the three laws, then, given humanity’s dependence on them (they’re as prominent as personal computers are today, and a hundred times as useful), they could easily take over the world.
Part murder mystery, part action movie, and part philosophical debate, I, Robot is, by turns, intriguing and infuriating. One of the great struggles in action filmmaking that directors have dealt with since what seems like the dawn of the genre, and one that Proyas deals with here, is the switch from talk to action. On its most basic, grammatical level, this is a transition that has humbled many a director and his editor; when it happens it feels like we’re being fed in blocks -- a spoonful of action, a spoonful of drama, and back, and forth. Needless to say, Proyas has not come up with a solution for this problem I, Robot, and what makes it noticeable is that the action scenes in are far better than the talking ones.
My favorite action scene is the one where Spooner is driving on the highway late at night, and the two robot-carrier vehicles drive up beside him with clear intent to sabotage his investigation; Smith, as Spooner, adds a touch of dry humor to the beginning of the scene (“There’s no way my luck is that bad,” he says). Then the robots start to jump from their carriers onto Spooner’s car as he swerves wildly to avoid not only the carriers and the onslaught of robots but running off the road as well. Proyas, a music video director who also made Dark City and The Crow, is a visual filmmaker who excels with dark settings, and he does better at blending the computer-generated images with the actors than he does blending the action and talk.
It is not the cast’s fault. The actors in this movie are competent, if not exactly memorable. Smith does Spooner well, though mostly because it’s a variation of the same character he’s been playing for his entire career -- the disbelieving authority figure who gets caught up in a mess of apocalyptic proportions, and is really pissed off about it, like he’d rather be playing a round of golf than saving the world. Moynahan, who played Colin Farrell’s manipulative love interest in The Recruit, has no such depth here; she is initially almost lifeless enough to make you think she’s a robot herself. McBride has few scenes as Spooner’s lieutenant, and, remarkably, it is Tudyk as the voice of the robot Sonny who makes the biggest impression.
It will be impossible, of course, to find out what Asimov thinks of this, the first feature-length adaptation of his first novel, since the author died in 1992, but his fans and those of science fiction will be uniformly disappointed, since it is not a traditional interpretation. And how could it be? Asimov’s I, Robot was actually a collection of short stories revolving around the three laws of robotics, and the varying (and often unexpected) interpretations of them. What the screenwriters, Goldsman and Vintar, have done here is simply to add another story to the list -- albeit one that seems designed, in large part, to sell Audi cars and Converse sneakers and U.S. Robotics ... well, robotics.
Moviegoers of a broader sort will probably also have their reservations. Yes, I, Robot is a compromise, an action-packed blockbuster strangled by a plodding drama, or an intriguing thriller interrupted by explosions. But there is plenty of Asimov to go around. Bicentennial Man, from 1999, is worth watching, and the author has written over 450 short stories, novels, and articles from which filmmakers might gleam more movies in the future. Perhaps, like the robots that populate many of the Asimov’s stories, I, Robot is only part of a larger work in progress.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)