Film Reviews - I, Robot
A film with Will Smith in? Well this will be really good
won't it? (Said with an air of sarcasm).
As it turns out this is actually a very good film and one that I enjoyed more or less
all of the way through.
The plot is extremely open and the majority of viewers may well start to see where everything is
going from about halfway and will have most of the plot figured out.
You should certainly see where "Sunny" is going and what
his role in the whole story is about.
The biggest problem that was always going to surround such a film was that there are a
lot of Asimov fans out there just waiting for this film to fail
in every way and to "ruin" the books that they have enjoyed.
I honestly would not envy the role of writer, director or anything
similar on this film.
I've not actually read the books (although I am tempted to do so now that I've watched the film -
you would have thought that is what the Asimov fans would have
wanted) but from what some of the "fans" tell me this film is
"blasphemous" and certainly nothing like the books.
That is fair enough and I think that the writer and director have
attempted to keep to the main essence and storyline but have
made the film into a more enjoyable action film set in the
future rather than attempting to necessarily stay 100% true to
the story.
Will Smith plays Detective Spooner in the year 2035
- a homicide detective who from the very beginning seems to want
to find a robot guilty of something, of any crime.
The world is a much more technologically advanced place to the world we
know now, we created robots to do our work for us and with the
release of the next robot there will be one robot for every five
humans on the planet - a quite amazing number.
The humans are protected by the "three laws" of robotics that all robots must
adhere to, they must never harm a human, they must always do
what a human commands unless it contravenes the first law.
Finally they must always protect themselves unless this goes
against the first two laws - a perfect circle of protection, or
so you would be led to believe.
A dead scientist at "US Robotics" the company behind all of these robots, initially what
looks like a suicide but also a robot "unlike any other" hiding
at the crime scene who appears to not adhere to the three laws
of robotics and would appear to be the most likely suspect of
the murder of this scientist - have the robots learnt a new
trick? Have they learnt how to kill?
A locked room, nobody entering or leaving and no real motive for suicide all lead
Spooner to believe we have the world's first killer robot on the
lose - the corporation on the other hand would rather like their
malfunctioning robot back so they can find out what is wrong
with it but still insist they are looking at nothing more than
suicide from the "slightly mad" scientist Dr. Lanning.
On the eve of the largest roll-out of new robots ever, the NS5 we'd
better hope there is nothing wrong with them - for the sake of
humanity.
And so the film unfolds, we see that the new NS5 may
not exactly be "perfect" at all and that maybe humanity is not
correctly protected by the perfect circle of protection.
We see "Sunny" as killer, then innocent, then killer once more
before again having to make the mental choice in our heads - did
the robot called "Sunny" kill Dr. Lanning? If so how?
The film is fast paced and full of action.
There are some sequences that pay homage to various other films and these are not
necessarily such a bad thing - if it isn't broken why try to fix
it?
The film is quite well cast, I'm still not entirely convinced of Will Smith in the mail role as some of his "one
liners" don't seem at place in a film like this, that aside a
couple of them did get chuckles from around the cinema so they
can't have gone down too badly.
This film is certainly worth seeing.
If you are an Asimov fan than you may well be going to
see this film out of curiosity more than anything and from what
I've been told you are not going to be happy with the end result
- please take that thought in with you as you go to the
cinema/DVD Rental and make sure that you really want to see this
film.
If you like sci-fi or action films then you are going to
love this film, plenty of action sequences and of course it is
all set in the future.
If you are into "thinking" films you
maybe a little bit disappointed, it shouldn't take you too long
to get the plot figured out and to work out who the "bad guys"
are and who is innocent or on the right side and fighting for
humanity.
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