From the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, It's Retro Nerd Girl with a film review for you.
Today I'll be reviewing the movie iRobot released in 2004.
Starring:
Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood
Directed by:
Alex Proyas
Genre:
Action, Mystery, Sci-Fi
Rating:
PG-13
Budget:
$120,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb Rating is currently:
7.1
Synopsis:
In 2035 humanoid robots have become servants of humanity. A murder occurs during the launch of a new advance batch of robots. Detective Del Spooner is assigned to the case with a hunch that the prime suspect happens to be a robot.
Story:
Most people don’t know that I, Robot began as a short story written by Eando Binder going as Earl and Otto Binder. It was published in a issue of the sci-fi magazine 'Amazing Stories' in 1939.
Isaac Asimov wrote the book I, Robot published in 1950 after reading the original short story and writing a series of 9 short stories. Originally he wanted to call it Mind and Iron, but the publisher overruled his wishes to use the title I, Robot, to help to get the book a more reach because of its catchyness.
All of the short stories are based on tales told by Dr. Susan Calvin the chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. speaking to a reporter who acts as the narrator. All of the stories are about a fictional world or possible future of the interpersonal relationships between humans and positronic robots.
- "Robbie" (1940, 1950)
- "Runaround" (1942)
- "Reason" (1941)
- "Catch That Rabbit" (1944)
- "Liar!" (1941)
- "Little Lost Robot" (1947)
- "Escape!" (1945)
- "Evidence" (1946)
- "The Evitable Conflict" (1950)
Another anchor in the short stories are the 3 laws of robotics that Asimov cleverly designed to keep automatons from inadvertently hurting manind. However, the laws lead to many dramatic situations in the book.
- 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 Laws.
A Zeroth law was added by Asimov in later sequels of the book to amend some of the problems with the laws.
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
The laws seemed to trickle into discussions about robotics in the real world as a means to realistically manage the possible actions of robots as they become more advanced.
Through the years the book has been very influential in pop culture and it was inevitable that it would be turned into a movie eventually.
The original name for the movie was “Hardwired” with a screenplay written by Jeff Vintar which was an Agatha Christie style murder mystery. The screenplay bounced around a bit from Disney to Fox and given a huge budget. Alex Proyas was hired to direct it as the studio was impressed with the public response from his films, The Crow and Dark City. Two excellent films.
Once Will Smith was hired, Akiva Goldsman was signed on late in the preproduction to co-write with Vintar to give the film a blockbuster feel.
The result is a story to be added to the collection of stories in newer publications of the book I, Robot, using a few themes and names of characters and points from Asimov’s short stories and sequels.
There is where we get into a little trouble with the story which I will expand upon when I explain my enjoyment of the film.
Pacing:
At 1 hour and 55 minutes, barely shy of 2 hours. It's a bit long and it feels long, but never boring. The pacing has a way of keeping things moving.
About halfway through the film, things change drastically from a serious murder mystery noir to a full blown save the world action movie with tons of killer robots and 1990’s catchphrases.
It seems a lot like 2 films in one, a common thread in many blockbusters… especially the ones that are two hours long.
Challenge:
The challenge here is solving the murder of Dr. Alfred Lanning, a robotics inventor working at U.S. Robotics.
At first it looks as if his personal Nestor class 5 (NS-5) robot, Sonny committed the murder... and indeed he did. Yep, he did it.
Is he a bad robot? Well no actually. It turns out that Dr. Lanning asked Sonny to kill him as a part of a well laid plan to get Detective Del Spooner to discover a very sinister plot against mankind.
It turns out Del was in a car accident and was a former patient of Dr. Lanning, that has an unreasonable (to me) hatred and mistrust for robots. He is the perfect person for Dr. Lanning’s plan to work. Hansel and Gretel is referenced several times as Dr. Lanning has left breadcrumbs for Detective Spooner to follow leading to the truth.
Lawrence Robertson is the CEO of US Robotics and is about to launch a new batch of NS-5 robots created by Dr. Lanning. He seems like the most likely villain. He’s cold, he’s rich, and he will do anything to protect his company assets.
But we can’t get to hung up on that because he is not the bad guy here. He is meant to distract Detective Spooner and the audience. To be honest, I enjoyed that little decoy.
The whole company is actually being run by a computer by the name of VIKI, short for Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence which is a positronic operating core. Her reveal as a sinister mastermind falls into the trope of usual villains where she is the artificial intelligence queen commanding all of the hive of NS-5 robots to do her bidding.
Empathy:
The hero in this film is detective Del Spooner assigned to investigate Dr. Lanning’s murder. However, he is not your typical hero, in fact, he is mostly unlikable for the first half of the film.
Even though, he’s cracking jokes everywhere, he has a very dry humor that doesn’t land with the humans he interacts with and sometimes the audience. It often seems as if he doesn’t care about what’s happening and he’s rude to most humans except his boss and his grandmother affectionately referred to as GiGi. How cute!
He is tortured by his memories which drives the motivation for his character.
In the past, Detective Spooner was in a horrible car accident that was caused by a human drunk driver. A robot saved him but let a child drown in the water with a lesser chance of survival.
This drives his prejudice against robots. He thinks that they cannot be trusted because they do possess humanistic impulses.
Besides that Detective Spooner is on his own and lonely. He’s disembodied from the mindset of his peers, and even ignored as he persists that robots are not to be trusted.
In the second half of the film his character gets a bit more likable as he softens his hatred for robots.
One of my favorite reveals of the film is when we discover that he has a robotic arm which he got from Dr Lanning after he lost his arm in the accident.
It is then that you realise that his sour attitude is because depressed and deeply resents that he is part robot.
Every morning he wakes from the same recurring nightmare and has to rehabilitate his arm that is not really his.
He chooses to do things manually, using old technology, and wearing converse shoes as a way of holding on to his humanity, perhaps even balancing his dependence on technology, which is something it seems most people around him find archaic.
As a protagonist, he may not be the most likable, but he is multilayered. That is something that you’ll catch on to right away. However, in multiple viewings, you’ll notice how meaningful, his behavior is.
Robot psychologist, Susan Calvin is the female sidekick for Detective Spooner and possible love interest who is unfortunately not very likable at first either.
She starts off with a very cold machinelike demeanor.
In many ways she is more comfortable around the robots she works with as she secludes herself from other humans.
It’s never really explained completely, but indicated in one single emotional outburst that she may have experienced something so traumatic in her past that it has taught her that humans were dangerous.
She prefers to be around robots because they are safe, not just physically, but perhaps emotionally too.
That is a very important factor in her characterization.
In the second half of the film, her character arcs as she literally lets her hair down and becomes more open to Detective Spooner’s ideas.
At first you think that they will be romantic partners, but that is left to our imagination. They end up being good friends, helping each other learn how to trust other humans.
Susan is the one person the Detective Spooner needs in his life to help him feel more normal. She is fascinated by his robotic replacements instead of freaked out by it.
Sonny was a great character in the film, being ironically, the most human and likeable. His name is a reflection of Dr. Lanning affection towards him as his son, Sonny. And respectively, Sonny refers to Dr. Lanning as his father several times in the film.
The hologram of Dr. Lanning calls Detective Spooner son twice, making Spooner and Sonny spiritual brothers.
Dr. Lanning intentionally created Sonny differently than the other NS-5s robots.
In the film, Detective Spooner notes that Dr. Lanning created Sonny to keep secrets and have dreams, which he displays in the story. Sonny has a dream of a robot uprising and he lies about murdering the doctor in order to keep Lanning’s secret.
He built Sonny with enhanced armor and the ability to ignore the 3 laws of robotics.
The film wants you to believe that the ability to ignore the laws is what makes him think and act like a human. And that idea is completely up for debate, because, I don’t believe that is the only thing that stands between the thoughts and actions of humans and artificial intelligence. And that is were the writing feels a little incomplete for me because Sonny is a fantastic character with lots of potential to expand upon because he seems to be programmed with a subset of responses that are human-like in appearance.
But what they were successful in doing with the character is showing us that the perceived wink of an eye is a symbol of trust in the context of the way Detective Spooner and Sonny use of it in the film. It is also one of the ways that demonstrate that Detective Spooner eventually learns to trust Sonny giving Detective Spooner a strong arch for his character.
Technical:
For 2004 the CGI was pretty good. It was nominated for the 2004 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and it shows.
The visuals were very sleek.
The design of the older robots, were quite cool, and I liked the stark contrast between them and the new NS-5.
I was very impressed with how Sonny’s emotions were wonderfully animated.
Much of the action sequences are very blurry. It doesn’t completely hold up over time because what I see is a CGI character interacting with real actors in a green screen. But it still looks incredibly imaginative.
The film contains very noticeable product placements for Converse's Chuck Taylor All-Stars, Audi, FedEx, Tecate and JVC among others.The Audi RSQ was designed specially for the film[4] to increase brand awareness and raise the emotional appeal of the Audi brand, objectives that were considered achieved when surveys conducted in the United States showed that the Audi RSQ gave a substantial boost to the image ratings of the brand in the States.[5] It also features an MV Agusta F4 SPR motorcycle.
The vision of this future world is very beautiful and interesting there are lots of cool possible near future technologies that could happen an those details are quite exciting, like the car that drives itself and the spray on skin.
It’s a pretty solid cinematic film, it’s got all of the typical features of a blockbuster with and an incredible score composed by Marco Beltrami for the film.
Performances:
The performances were really good.
Will Smith was great as Del Spooner doing his usual charismatic thing to try to make the character likable It took some time, but eventually he does succeed by the end. He was also the film’s executive producer, so he had a lot of skin in the game to really make this work.
Alan Tudyk really stands out as Sonny providing excellent motion capture and the voice for Sonny.
There is even a small role for Shia LaBeouf as the neighborhood kid with the fresh mouth.
Best:
The best part of the film for me was Del’s reveal that he had a robotic arm and it really gave his character more depth. It was a beautiful revelation.
I even liked the way Del finally tells his story to the audience explaining what happened during the accident.
I also loved the fact that the world was not a dystopia, but more of a busy utopia, dealing with hints of overpopulation and bad human judgement.
Ending:
The ending is filled with a lot of action and as a lover of action movies, I enjoyed it.
The film also sets up a possible rise of the robots replicating a dream that Dr. Lanning implanted in Sonny.
The robots are free now, but to do what? Sonny is the only robot with human-like emotional states of understanding. The rest, he refers to them as, “slaves to logic.” So at the end I was thinking… “so how is that going to work out.”
There are a lot of unanswered questions.
Wish List:
I wish that the reason Del didn’t like robots was because he just didn’t like them, something mysteriously suspicious that he felt. That makes more sense to me than hating all robots because a robot saved his life.
I was also a little depressed that the film rewards Del’s prejudice by making him right all along.
The takeover scenes in this film were very frustrating to watch because the robots charge in violently, when the explanation was that they were trying to keep humans safe. Their take over should have been more sophisticated.
And finally I wish there weren’t so many plot holes in the film and that stems from a lot of background information and story lines that were not revealed on screen.
- Why does Detective Spooner sleep with a gun under his pillow?
- The camera zooms in on pictures of Susan and Dr. Lanning together. Was there a special relationship between the two that wasn’t included in the film?
- Why was Lake Michigan a dried out in just 2035 and how did the bridge get destroyed?
- Why did Dr. Lanning’s perfectly fine house undergo demolition only one day after his death? Why not sold.
- How did Susan switch the Sonny’s body with a blank NS-5 without being discovered by VIKI? We clearly see her kill him on screen. When did the switch actually happen.
- How did Dr. Lanning know that VIKI would evolve and try to take over the world? How did VIKI know that he knew?
- Why did VIKI launch her takeover as soon as she was turned on? Let’s pretend she was still learning, why didn’t she takeover sooner?
- Sonny was given the ability to bypass the laws of robotics, but why did he have emotions? Were they pre-programmed reactions? Is he truly sentient or is it an illusion from his anthropomorphic reactions?
- Is the film insinuating that the NS-5 will create their own society… doing what exactly?
Enjoyment:
The film did well at the box office, but got mixed reviews. One of the biggest gripes of the film was the last half of the film, where the action ramps up and the robots turn bad.
That wasn’t my favorite part either, but there is some relevance to it in the film, and I only came to that conclusion after seeing the film multiple times.
Humanity’s constant fear that the dependence on artificial intelligence could lead to the threat of the evil supercomputer such as Skynet or VIKI and her robot army is a typical trope in books, films, and media. It’s sensational and is profitable, but in writing the book I, Robot Asimov was trying to dispel some of those fears with his stories.
In the case of VIKI, she is not intentionally evil because she wants to protect humans abiding by the 3 laws, which she is programmed with.
However, to me, the laws are indeed cleaver for Asimov’s fictional stories to dramatically prove that mankind’s exploration into robotics will lead to colorful new challenges for the species. However, even the film helps to point out out that they are flawed.
I hate to get nerdy here, but in actuality when VIKI launches her takeover, she is abiding by Asimov "zeroth" law of robotics, that is not directly mentioned in the film, but the filmmakers just tacked it on to the first law listed in the movie opening credits.
This law states that a robot may not harm humanity, or through inaction allow humanity to come to harm. They replace human being with humanity. This law takes away the freedom from humans to choose their own destiny whether it is harmful or not.
It’s up to each individual of age to decide how safe they want to be. A.I. is here to help us make decisions, not make them for us. So to me the rules are too intrusive on mankind.
It would be completely irresponsible to leave this kind of power and authority to any human or artificial intelligence without the fundamental understanding that enduring emotional and physical harm, dangerous risks, hard labor, heartbreak, and loss is how humans grow, evolve, and experience great triumph. Harm is an important part of our design.
I love the conversation this inspires. And although the 3 laws are just a plot point and not the actual discussion there is still more to discuss.
The film wants us to discuss or more or less adopt Detective Spooner’s point of view which is that to be more human, A.I. will have to abide by the 3 laws, but ignore them when necessary to do the “right” thing.
Even that is up for discussion because the “right” thing is subjective and often determined individually from person to person with evidence, as well as many intangibles like intuition, beliefs, upbringing, and moral values.
These are both incredible topics to explore. I, Robot has so much going for it, which makes for a very entertaining film.
My Rating:
8.4
That sums up my review. I hope you liked it. This is Retro Nerd Girl signing off.
Take care movie lovers! I'm off to the next review!
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