I, Robot (2004)
Movie rating: 6/10
“Suggested by” the short story collection of the same name by Isaac Asimov, I, Robot starts out with a lot of promise and intriguing concepts. Unfortunately, the film ends up falling back into standard Hollywood action tropes, and the final act resembles any number of blockbusters we’ve seen before. Despite a good lead performance by Will Smith and ideas that could go in any number of interesting directions, what starts out as an engrossing mystery ends up feeling like a Terminator retread.
The crux of the problem lies in what director Alex Proyas and screenwriters Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman do with Asimov’s ideas: specifically, the Three Laws of Robotics. These serve as a jumping-off point for the film, which takes place in 2035 and depicts a world where intelligent humanoid robots have become a part of everyday life, taking care of all manner of tasks and services. (And yes, the year this movie is set in was far too early even in 2004 and it should have been set decades later.) The robots are programmed according to the three laws, which are as follows:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given 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 Second Law.
When Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), inventor of the robotics technology and co-founder of the firm U.S. Robotics (USR) that builds the robots, is found dead in an apparent suicide, technophobic Chicago police detective Del Spooner (Smith) investigates the case. Spooner comes to believe that a robot has killed Lanning. An attack by a new NS-5 model robot calling himself Sonny (voice and motion capture by Alan Tudyk), who is capable of feeling emotions as well as choosing to disobey the three laws, seems to confirm Spooner’s suspicions. But the detective’s investigation reveals that the case goes far beyond Sonny.
The first hour or so of I, Robot is solid. We’re immediately drawn into this world, and the movie explores what it means when robots are seen as tools like any other (one character likens Sonny to a can-opener). The three laws appear to be a perfect safeguard against any Terminator scenario. Spooner’s police supervisor Lt. John Bergin (Chi McBride) reminds him early on that the total number of crimes committed by robots is zero. “Robopsychologist” Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) serves as a source of exposition for Spooner — and the audience — regarding the robots’ programming and design. When Spooner brings Sonny in for questioning, we learn that robots, as machines, cannot legally commit “murder”. Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood), co-founder and CEO of USR, says that even if a robot killed someone, it should be considered akin to an industrial accident.
Finding out the circumstances of Spooner’s death and the origins of Sonny kept me glued to my seat for the first part of the movie. But the answers to these mysteries prove underwhelming.
Spoilers ahead.
Part of the problem is that when we learn about an impending revolt, it seems to run so contrary to the spirit of Asimov, as Wikipedia notes in comparing the film to Asimov’s novels:
The premise of robots turning on their creators, originating in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. and perpetuated in subsequent robot books and films, appears infrequently in Asimov’s writings and differs from the “Zeroth Law”. In fact, Asimov stated explicitly in interviews and in introductions to published collections of his robot stories that he entered the genre to protest what he called the Frankenstein complex, the tendency in popular culture to portray robots as menacing. His story lines often involved roboticists and robot characters battling societal anti-robot prejudices.
Robertson at one point says that regardless of the reasons Lanning — whom he characterizes as a crazy old man — created Sonny, the latter must be destroyed because a robot capable of bypassing the three laws would destroy the public’s faith in robotics and USR itself, costing the company vast sums of money. This is a more interesting idea than the final reveal that USR’s central AI, VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), has been controlling the NS-5s, and believes that humans will destroy themselves and therefore must be controlled by robots. VIKI justifies the killing of some humans in order, she says, to protect humanity as a whole. All this ends up feeling like a riff on Terminator’s Skynet, as a self-aware computer that turns against humanity — though in this case with the twist that the AI believes it is protecting humanity and justifies its actions through the Three Laws of Robotics, which are designed to keep humans safe from robots.
I can’t help but think there were significant script rewrites in the course of production. Plot threads pop up but have little payoff. Robertson, for example, is set up as a villain before VIKI orders him to be killed; her reasons for ordering his death are unclear. Spooner has a teenage friend named Farber (Shia LaBoeuf), whom we see in one of the movie’s first scenes, but only appears again an hour later when he’s leading a crowd battling the robots. Maybe some scenes were cut, but the character feels extraneous and should have been cut. We learn Spooner has a robotic arm after an injury, but this mostly serves as a way for him to punch robots and slide down VIKI’s core in the climax to inject nanites that will destroy her. More could have been made of how the arm affects Spooner’s fear and hatred of robots.
There are some cool action scenes, especially an inventive car chase in the middle, followed by a one-on-one fight between the injured Spooner and a robot. The visual effects are a mixed bag. The robots have an interesting design and are convincing most of the time. But in action scenes when vast amounts of NS-5s are swarming and attacking humans, the CGI calls attention to itself and the robots appear weightless and cartoony. Similarly, the VFX are a bit rough when Spooner is searching Lanning’s home and attacked by a USR demolition robot.
Despite its flaws, I, Robot has enough going for it in terms of world-building, action, Will Smith’s performance, philosophical questions around robotics and humanity that most viewers will be entertained. It diverges from Asimov, but gets the job done as a serviceable sci-fi action flick that’s more intelligent than most — ironically thanks to the ideas that remain from Asimov.
