Renegade cop Will Smith tries to prevent sentient robots from slashing and smashing their way to freedom.
By: Bob Brown
Ever since HAL- 9000 threatened to take over in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), movies have grappled with our human inferiority complex. The only thing we’ve got over the machines is emotions. Even that is questionable we swear at our malfunctioning computers as if they were sadists.
In I, Robot, director Alex Proyas (Dark City, 1998) teamed with Jeff Vintar to realize the scriptwriter’s Hardwired on screen. The two later adopted parts of Isaac Asimov’s work ("The Three Laws of Robotics," most prominently) and turned a robot murder mystery into something more socially conscious. Here, as in other robotic dystopias of the near future (Blade Runner, Robocop, A.I., Terminator), all our existing societal ills are solved and new ones created by advanced engineering.
I, Robot crams in the best devices of sheer-entertainment movies: a renegade cop who has to give up his badge; a beautiful but chilly scientist who thaws out; a power-hungry industrialist who wants to take over the world; an unstoppable army of heartless machines who blow things apart; and grandma, who bakes the best deep-dish sweet-potato pie this side of heaven.
The main reason to sit through this mishmash is the nonstop action. These days, most of the excitement, and the credits, go to digital-effects teams, who labor unsung in windowless offices somewhere deep in New Zealand. Every digitized film seems to top the next. This one advances to the next level by giving a screen-generated character a surprising range of emotions. We take the car chases and flying hardware for granted.
It’s 2035 in Chicago. Del Spooner (Will Smith) is easing back into the police force after a harrowing tragedy in the line of duty. As a result of his experience, he no longer trusts the robots, who are taking over the domestic world. They deliver mail, collect the trash, walk dogs, do household chores in short, all the tasks that too many "average" Americans consider beneath their minimum-wage requirements. (It’s curious that the story ignores the real social horrors this robotic invasion must cause in the labor market.)
Everyone thinks Del’s just paranoid. Robots are built only to help humans. But when the respected robotics creator Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) falls to his death, his programmed hologram-memo calls on Del to investigate. Del can’t convince anyone that Lanning’s death was anything but suicide. They dismiss his hunch about an evil robot. But as accidents seem to follow Del around (usually involving the new NS-5 Animated Domestic Assistant models), Del is asked turn in his badge.
With the help of Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), a robot developer/psychiatrist, Del sleuths his way inside the giant U.S. Robotics operation that is developing and distributing the new models on a massive scale. One robot for every five people ought to do it.
The future Chicago of this movie is a clever blend of the familiar and the bizarre. The present-day cityscape is a palimpsest for the futuristic skyline, where U.S. Robotics is the most massive, suggestive-looking column of steel and glass on the horizon. The set designers have attended to little details, too. A coffee shop displays the breakfast special as eggs and hash browns for $30.95.
Otherwise, how are things? It looks like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on Met-Rx supplements. Super-highway tunnels bear automated traffic at high speed beneath the city. Along with U.S. Robotics (talk about product placement in your face), the next most-prominent brand is Audi, which designed a robo-car just for Del to tool around in. No other cars on the street have identifiable company logos, although they all look vaguely Audistic.
A few retro touches identify Del as an outside-the-box mentality: He sports a new pair of Converse All-Star sneakers and listens to disco on his old-fashioned JVC CD-player (unlike everything else, it doesn’t respond to voice commands). The rest of Chicago is quite comfortable accepting their robot world and, unlike Del, they prefer to glide on automatic pilot.
This film calls for no subtle acting, although Smith and Moynahan are serviceable (as the icy Susan warms up, her hair and her collar get looser and looser). Other good performances are Chi McBride as Del’s slow-simmering superior officer, Lt. Bergin, and Bruce Greenwood as Lawrence Robertson, the imperious head of U.S. Robotics.
The prize goes not to a single actor, but to an actor and digital team that created the renegade NS-5 called Sonny. Of all the computer-generated robots in this movie (thousands doing all kinds of things, both benign and destructive), Sonny actually displays the awakening of emotion and changing moods on his plastic features. Actor Alan Tudyk was the model for the performance, what was realized by a team of digital wizards. It’s as if HAL had a face.
The solution to the murder and the resolution are almost anticlimactic. They’re not unexpected. But for stylish mayhem with a bit of tongue in bionic cheek, you couldn’t do much better this summer than I, Robot.
Rated PG-13. Contains intense stylized action and brief partial nudity.