Film Friday: I, Robot (2004)

I was pretty psyched when I heard that I, Robot was coming to the big screen. It was (very, very loosely) based on an iconic book. It starred Will Smith, an actor I like a good deal. It was directed by Alex Proyas, the fantastic director who gave us the incredible Dark City. What could go wrong? Uh, yeah. Was I ever disappointed when the film hit theaters. In hindsight, however, I’ve come to like this film as just mindless fun.

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

The year is 2035 and anthropomorphic robots are everywhere. They do all the dangerous and dirty jobs humanity won’t. Everyone except the really poor have robot servants. But robots are faster, stronger and smarter than humans, and if they were so inclined, they could take over in a heartbeat. Fortunately, robots can’t do that because they’re programmed with three laws which require them to protect human beings and to follow the orders of human beings, except when those orders would involve hurting another person. So everything is fine.

But all of that changes when Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) is called in to investigate the apparent suicide of Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell). Cromwell is the founder of US Robotics and is, basically, the inventor of the robot. Spooner soon suspects that a robot killed Lanning, but no one believes him because everyone assumes robots can’t hurt people because of the three laws. They dismiss Spooner’s claims because he’s the one guy on the planet who doesn’t like robots because of an incident when he was younger. So they write this off as paranoia. Nevertheless, Spooner continues and soon he uncovers a plot by robots to take over the planet.

The Good And The Bad

When I first saw this film, I was disappointed. By and large, it’s nothing more than a generic action film using robots instead of aliens or hired thugs. The thing is awash in product placements too. Moreover, for a science fiction film, the plot lacks depth.

The story is about robots trying to take over the world. The robots aren’t actually malicious, they’ve just misinterpreted their orders. Basically, like liberals, they think that humans are self-destructive and they want to save us from ourselves. And the best way to do that would be to enslave us and then take care of us.

That actually opens the door to several ideas. For example, you could use the robots as an metaphor for liberals and point out that saving us from ourselves is a bad thing. . . “Welcome to Obama-Clinton 2035!” But the film never really shows why people would be unhappy or why the human spirit would die in such conditions. Alternatively, you could point out how we are already dependent on machines, and how that’s getting worse, and you could ask what would happen if we suddenly found ourselves without our machines. But the film doesn’t do that either. To the contrary, it makes no real references to the present. Instead, the film just sticks with the top line idea of “what if we had robots everywhere and they took over!” That’s not particularly satisfying.

The film also seems to rely on a premise that is, at best, naive. Everyone except for Will Smith seems to genuinely believe that robots somehow could never harm a human being. Indeed, we are told constantly, that they are all programmed with these three laws which prevent it. And it comes as a total shock to the humans when they discover that someone found a way around this. Give me a break. Are we really to believe there no hackers who could reprogram a robot? That their software never goes wrong... blue screen of murderous death? That China isn’t turning out knock-off robots with 2.5 laws? Or that some evil company isn’t selling robots without the laws or an after-market kit to remove them? This is just not credible. Heck, US Robotics itself is said to have military contracts, do robot soldiers follow the three laws as well or did everyone somehow just forget about those whenever they think about how robots could never harm us?

And once again, it is the flaw of the shortcut that exposes the problem with the rest of the movie. If the writers have not used this bit of fakery as a shortcut to explaining why people would be surprised by robots, they might have had to deal with the question of the missing point to the film. In other words, if they hadn’t use this crutch about making everyone hopelessly naive, then they would have needed to explain why people would willing allow their potential murders into their lives. That would have raised all the issues that get ignored in this film about human laziness and dependence.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this and I think it’s starting to highlight a very valid point – when you gloss over something in writing your story, you often end up cutting out the need to discuss the things that make the movie interesting. Short cuts make for uninteresting stories.

Now, despite what I’ve said above, I have to admit that I’ve really come to enjoy this film. Will Smith is his usual self. He’s charismatic, funny and very likable. He’s someone you definitely want to know. The story is well paced and doesn’t reveal its plot points too quickly. There are a couple interesting mysteries that help drive the plot – who killed Dr. Lanning, who made Sonny, why is he different, did Sonny kill Dr. Lanning, who is behind the robot conspiracy? The film uses smart foreshadowing too, where the director actually waits to let things pay off later in the film, which always makes a story feel smarter, e.g. Sonny blinking. There are some insightful moments too, like when we’re told the internet destroyed the libraries and a very brief statement (far too undeveloped) about machinery destroying jobs. That’s enough to like the film if you weren’t expecting more.

Ultimately, this film is fun and I like it, I’m just disappointed that the film wasn’t any more than it was.