I, Robot

Home
Smell the Movies
Smell the TV

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2004
Country of origin:	USA / Germany
Director:	Alex Proyas
Genre:	CyberRunner
Starring:	Will Smith, Bridget Moynahan, Alan Tudyk, James Cromwell
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/
Tagline:	What will you do with yours?
Favourite line:	"You have been deemed hazardous. Will you comply?"

Surprisingly good, this.

Will Smith plays Spooner, a cop with a seemingly obsessive dislike of robots.
It's the future, and robots have become commonplace, a company called USR (United States Robotics) supplying the world with all their robotics needs. Spooner attends a suspected suicide at their HQ, just before the new model, the NS5 is about to be rolled out, to cater for mankind's every whim. Being the paranoid deviant that he is, Spooner suspects that it may not be a suicide at all, but a homicide and, worse still, that the perpetrator may well have been a robot.
Could he be right?
Well, of course he is, else this would be one hell of a short movie.

Being something of a mish-mash, this movie lurches from Star Trek style sci-fi philosophising (what is it to be human?) to videogame style CGI sequences that are starkly incongruous, yet never seem to jar too much.
Based on a story by Isaac Asimov, it should come as no surprise that this is more sci-fi heavy than many multiplex pleasers of the last few years, though one could hardly call it intelligent. Instead, we have the kind of questions posed that Star Trek fans have known the answers to for roughly forty years, though it's pleasing to see a mainstream movie ploughing the same furrow.
With echoes of Blade Runner, AI and, not least, the latest incarnation of the Cybermen, this really takes off when the robots decide to take over, with some real nerve jangling sequences as a curfew is enforced by the be-wired ones.
Straddling quasi-philosophy and all out action with some style, this is a way better movie than I expected.
Check it out.