I, Robot (review)
Robot Monster
There’s a running joke in I, Robot about so-
That bit of irony is unintended, but surely there’s something more deliberate behind the Irony! of Will Smith’s cop, Del Spooner, suffering from an irrational prejudice against the androids who’ve taken over all manner of menial work in the year 2035. Resenting the ‘bots is totally understandable, in the same way that it was totally understandable that the buggy-
It’s supposed to get a laugh, this black-
Director Alex Proyas (Garage Days, Dark City) doesn’t want you think about context — in fact, he’d prefer it if you didn’t. Ditto screenwriters — I use the term loosely — Jeff Vintar (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) and Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind). They want you to “naturally” sympathize with Spooner, because no matter how little sense he makes, he will “naturally” turn out to be right about that nagging feeling… so “crazy” Spooner conveniently also serves to confirm the general unease much of the audience will have about technology, never mind that most of them will be toting cell phones with more computing power than the space shuttle or that enough computing cycles went into the film’s CGI to figure pi to a billion decimals. Hey, if funky-
No, it wouldn’t do to explore something science fictional that we haven’t really seen onscreen before… like the fact that an enormous segment of the population has been put out to pasture by the arrival of robots who collect the garbage and walk the dogs and deliver overnight packages and wait on tables in divey diners. The world of Chicago in 2035 doesn’t look all that different from the world we know today, except that the cars are a little rounder and the buildings are a little taller and everything’s a little shinier. Proyas and Co. don’t even bother to play with the tremendous possibilities inherent in our, the audience’s, assumption, along with Spooner, that that robot really had actually mugged some little old lady as a way to, you know, get us to reconsider, oh, how we might react differently to technology that has a face or how we’re willing to believe the worst about a situation, or just the human tendency toward the kneejerk reaction at all. Clever screenwriters could have explored these things and still worked in some shootouts and car chases and stuff blowing up real good.
Instead, I, Robot breaks new cinematic ground in the realm of speculative scientific philosophy… for 1953. It consciously and deliberately evokes everything from Brazil and Blade Runner to The Terminator and Robocop to 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Twilight Zone, but only as jokes, as references in the production design, even in plot points. Hell, even the cheesiest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Data pondered his positronic brain had more a-ha! moments than this future-gasm of an action movie. Proyas is only interested in making you laugh or think “Wow, that’s cool!” or jump out of your seat for reasons that, when you think about them, make no damn sense at all. But there’s cars that drive themselves and electronic crime-
Still, some of the idiocy is just too much to take. Like this: Spooner’s friend Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell: Space Cowboys, The Green Mile), who just happens to be the scientific genius behind these phenomenally useful yet entirely nondisruptive-
Of course, the whole destructo-
But hey! Enjoy this gratuitous Will Smith shower-
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MPAA: rated PG-13 for intense stylized action, and some brief partial nudity
viewed at a semipublic screening with an audience of critics and ordinary moviegoers
official site | IMDb
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