I, Robot

February 6, 2005

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 115 min Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Will Smith has quite a knack for picking good summertime movies, and I, Robot is no exception.

I, Robot

Let’s get the whole Asimov thing out of the way first. This movie is not based on any book written by Isaac Asimov, it is not a “theatrical version” of his books and in fact has very little to do with Asimov. In reality it is “proposed by” concepts written by Asimov, specifically his 3 Laws of Robot Behavior. So for those of you who are whining that �it isn’t like the book,� get over it� it’s a movie.

The year is 2035 and Will Smith is Detective Spooner (imagine, Will Smith as a cop, who would have thunkit?) with a distrust of robots. You see, robots are everywhere doing just about everything and society in general is quite happy about this. Robot cooks, maids, garbage men, just about manual labor job you can think of a robot is able to do. What the humans do to make money now isn’t brought up, but you really have to wonder. Or not, it is just a movie after all.

Anyway, Spooner has a thing against robots and happens to land a murder investigation where the prime suspect is (gasp!) a robot. This of course isn’t possible since it would violate the 3 Laws, but this doesn’t deter Spooner from making a case anyway. I have to say that for a sci-fi/action flick the story is actually pretty well done. No huge plot holes, things seem pretty logical, and we actually feel like we get to know the characters and thus care what happens to them. So even if the special effects weren’t all that good the movie would be worth watching just for the story.

Speaking of the special effects though, wow! Sure, there’s some CGI that’s a bit dorky, and not everything flows perfectly, but this is easily the best example of live actors working with CGI characters that I’ve ever seen. You will very quickly forget that the robots aren’t actually on the set and that there’s a ton of blue screen work being done here. Seriously, it’s really good.

The only flaw would be that it’s a little slow in parts and doesn’t make me want to go right back in and see it again, so it’s getting 4 stars instead of 5. It was a close call though, and I highly recommend seeing this one on the big screen.

Posted by John | Filed Under 4 Stars, Action, Alan Tudyk, Bridget Moynahan, Bruce Greenwood, DVD, James Cromwell, PG-13, SciFi, Will Smith