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Duncan Shepherd on I, Robot -- Hilarious...

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on July 22, 2004 at 07:41:39

...remarks towards the end.

I, Robot is but a travesty of the science fiction of Isaac Asimov, who pretty much wrote the book on robots, and not only the book of this name, a seminal collection of short stories. Filmmaker Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) retains Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, and -- from the novel The Naked Sun, second in a series of four -- the locked-room mystery of a roboticist's murder that may have been perpetrated, or at any rate not prevented, by one of his own robots, in clear contravention of the First Law. (To quote in full: "A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.") The film has done away, however, with the android cop partner who would continue through the entire tetralogy, even beyond the life span of the human partner, and has instead fixated on a Dirty Harryish lone-wolf detective who, from the outset, carries a boulder-sized chip on his shoulder: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" (These are some of the concerns of an atavistic he-man in Converse high-tops in the Chicago of 2035.) Ensuing developments are more in line with the vision of the original literary inventor of robots, Karel Capek -- a table-turning revolt of the slaves against their masters -- in the stage play of 1920, R.U.R. (A play, by the way, that Asimov deplored.) In place of a bona fide science-fiction classic, then, we get just another one-week box-office wonder, another summer showcase for the swaggering and "styling" of Will Smith, another state-of-the-art portfolio of computer-generated imagery, another wave after wave of overscaled action. The repeated sight of identical robots duplicated on screen ad infinitum somehow seems to symbolize a very different and much more immediate threat to the future of humankind: the manufacture of interchangeable Hollywood blockbusters. Another and another and another and another....

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