Movie Review: "I, Robot"
Jul. 16th, 2004 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrixrefugeeUtterly phenomenal...
Rating: ****3/4 out of *****
Okay, I'd admit there's one or two bolts in the plot line that could have been tightened up, but other than that, this is a top-drawer film!!!
Will Smith plays Dale Spooner, a wisecracking, robo-phobic homicide detective in 2035 Chicago, who winds up being called into investigate the apparent suicide of Dr. Alfred Lanning at the U.S. Robotics plant in the heart of the city... but is it a suicide? Or is it a murder? Is one of the new NS-5 robots responsible for Lanning's death? Is this act the tip of the iceberg of a robot revolution? Or is there someone behind it all, trying to make it look like the robots are rebelling?
This is the kind of movie that grabs you by the ears and just doesn't let go, very much in the same manner as Director Alex Proyas's earlier effort "Dark City" (1999). In fact, the opening scenes, with Will Smith awakening from a nightmare (a nightmare which is later explained), echo a similar opening scene in "Dark City". And the robot protagonist, "Sonny", bears a similar archetypal resemblance to Kieffer Sutherlund's soft-spoken, slightly odd Dr. Schreber: they're both basically harmless individuals who have been trapped in a nightmare situation beyond their control.
"Dark City" isn't the only film echoed in "I, Robot": the art direction and costuming strongly resembles that of "Minority Report" -- Will Smith's character shares a similar black-leather-jacketed fashion sense with Tom Cruise's character in "Minority...", Spooner is a heck of a lot more fun to be with. Even the custom-designed Audi which Spooner drives resembles the custom-designed Lexus that appeared in "Minority..." The lab in U.S. Robotics looks strangely like Dr. Allen Hobby's lab in "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence", complete with unactivated robots on metal racks lining the walls. City streets are jammed with people, ala "Blade Runner", but at least there's no pollution in sight. The robot revolution of course echoes similar revolts in "The Terminator" and the "Matrix" series (there's strong echoes of all three live-action "Matrix" movies, as well as "The Animatrix: Second Renaissence Part One"), but this is dexterously cross-bred with concepts from Murray Leinster's shivery short-story "With Folded Hands" for a genuinely unnerving combination. Some of the robots' moves in the action sequences are straight out of the "Spiderman" movies as well as any recent martial-arts movies (E.g. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"). The silken-voice "female" security computer system might be the daughter of HAL 9000 in "2001: A Spaxe Odyssey." The movie might merely use characters and concepts created by Isaac Asimov, and the element of the robot revolution might irk the Good Doctor, but the ending is almost as Asimovian as you can get.
Character development is different from what Dr. Asimov would have intended, but in some ways, it's a little stronger. Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynihan in a black leather pant-suit with a machine-like cut similar to Sean Young's black dress in "Blade Runner") comes across a little less steely than she is in Asimov's stories, and she seems to trust in the system's perfection just a little too much, ala Tom Cruise's John Anderton in "Minority..." Spooner has a secret which by all logical conclusions should make him more appreciative of robotic designs, but an emotional experience has left him scarred and suspicious, even guilty of a kind of racial -- or compositional? -- profiling (a wonderful bit of irony considering that Will Smith is African-American)... though the suspicion develops into a healthy skepticism... Sonny (and the other NS-5's) looks like the offspring of C-3P0 and an iMac... but he has the heart of a child and the soul of a poet: his questions about emotion and his purpose make him sound very like an adult version of David in "A.I.", a machine body with a human heart and the ability to dream, to think, to make his own decisions for the greater good.
Don't let the robot revolution scenes turn you off: this is not your typical robot movie....
Rating: ****3/4 out of *****
Okay, I'd admit there's one or two bolts in the plot line that could have been tightened up, but other than that, this is a top-drawer film!!!
Will Smith plays Dale Spooner, a wisecracking, robo-phobic homicide detective in 2035 Chicago, who winds up being called into investigate the apparent suicide of Dr. Alfred Lanning at the U.S. Robotics plant in the heart of the city... but is it a suicide? Or is it a murder? Is one of the new NS-5 robots responsible for Lanning's death? Is this act the tip of the iceberg of a robot revolution? Or is there someone behind it all, trying to make it look like the robots are rebelling?
This is the kind of movie that grabs you by the ears and just doesn't let go, very much in the same manner as Director Alex Proyas's earlier effort "Dark City" (1999). In fact, the opening scenes, with Will Smith awakening from a nightmare (a nightmare which is later explained), echo a similar opening scene in "Dark City". And the robot protagonist, "Sonny", bears a similar archetypal resemblance to Kieffer Sutherlund's soft-spoken, slightly odd Dr. Schreber: they're both basically harmless individuals who have been trapped in a nightmare situation beyond their control.
"Dark City" isn't the only film echoed in "I, Robot": the art direction and costuming strongly resembles that of "Minority Report" -- Will Smith's character shares a similar black-leather-jacketed fashion sense with Tom Cruise's character in "Minority...", Spooner is a heck of a lot more fun to be with. Even the custom-designed Audi which Spooner drives resembles the custom-designed Lexus that appeared in "Minority..." The lab in U.S. Robotics looks strangely like Dr. Allen Hobby's lab in "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence", complete with unactivated robots on metal racks lining the walls. City streets are jammed with people, ala "Blade Runner", but at least there's no pollution in sight. The robot revolution of course echoes similar revolts in "The Terminator" and the "Matrix" series (there's strong echoes of all three live-action "Matrix" movies, as well as "The Animatrix: Second Renaissence Part One"), but this is dexterously cross-bred with concepts from Murray Leinster's shivery short-story "With Folded Hands" for a genuinely unnerving combination. Some of the robots' moves in the action sequences are straight out of the "Spiderman" movies as well as any recent martial-arts movies (E.g. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"). The silken-voice "female" security computer system might be the daughter of HAL 9000 in "2001: A Spaxe Odyssey." The movie might merely use characters and concepts created by Isaac Asimov, and the element of the robot revolution might irk the Good Doctor, but the ending is almost as Asimovian as you can get.
Character development is different from what Dr. Asimov would have intended, but in some ways, it's a little stronger. Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynihan in a black leather pant-suit with a machine-like cut similar to Sean Young's black dress in "Blade Runner") comes across a little less steely than she is in Asimov's stories, and she seems to trust in the system's perfection just a little too much, ala Tom Cruise's John Anderton in "Minority..." Spooner has a secret which by all logical conclusions should make him more appreciative of robotic designs, but an emotional experience has left him scarred and suspicious, even guilty of a kind of racial -- or compositional? -- profiling (a wonderful bit of irony considering that Will Smith is African-American)... though the suspicion develops into a healthy skepticism... Sonny (and the other NS-5's) looks like the offspring of C-3P0 and an iMac... but he has the heart of a child and the soul of a poet: his questions about emotion and his purpose make him sound very like an adult version of David in "A.I.", a machine body with a human heart and the ability to dream, to think, to make his own decisions for the greater good.
Don't let the robot revolution scenes turn you off: this is not your typical robot movie....
