I, Robot: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

Like so many science fiction movies--from Fritz Lang’s great silent film, “Metropolis,” to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report”--Alex Proyas’ “I, Robot” peers into the future and sees a wealth of technology it doesn’t like or trust.

In this case, it sees robots. Millions of robots. One for every five people in the United States alone.

As the film opens, it’s 2035 and these gleaming automatons are everywhere, weaving through Chicago’s crowded streets with their weirdly translucent faces and good manners.

As created by Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), the robots are cheerful and genial, an enslaved race of circuitry and metal that do the work we don’t want to do while abiding by three laws--they must never injure humans or allow them to be injured, they must obey humans unless doing so would injure a human, and they must protect their own existence, unless doing so would go against the first two laws.

For most, that philosophy is sound—it covers the bases. But for Will Smith’s Detective Del Spooner, there are holes in those laws that are worth worrying about.

As Spooner sees it, robots should never trusted—he finds them duplicitous and dangerous. His fears are confirmed at the start of the film, when Dr. Lanning is found dead. While some cry suicide, Spooner has his own ideas.

He believes Lanning was murdered by one of the robots. He also believes that the man responsible for manufacturing them, the billionaire Lawrence Robertson (Bruce Greenwood), knows what Lanning himself might have known--their are flaws in the laws.

Worse for us is that the robots might have recognized those flaws. And if they have, they might be quietly evolving, using the laws to serve their own needs while plotting our own undoing.

Borrowing from a wealth of influences, particularly the 1950 short story collection by Isaac Asimov, the film is hardly original and it gets off to a slow start. Still, when it digs in to deliver the goods, it does so with first-rate action and special effects sequences that are thrilling, especially at the end, when Proyas uses the bulk of his $100 million budget to muscle a strong finish onto the screen.

Smith holds the movie together with a performance he has given before in other, similar films. He’s coasting here, but screenwriters Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldman don’t let him down. They give him enough funny, throwaway lines to make the movie a crowdpleaser.

Bridget Moynahan, Chi McBride and Shia LaBeouf are wasted in slim ancillary roles, but no matter. Unlike “Minority Report,” which offered a brooding, cerebral look at the dangerous level of faith we place on technology, “I, Robot” has no such aspirations. It only wants to be a fun summer blockbuster, crammed with enough eye candy to guarantee a big opening. In this case, it succeeds.

Grade: B+