The movie’s previews are not promising: robots run amok and the Fresh Prince must mow them down with a machine gun. “I, Robot” isn’t as bad as all that; the cause of the amok-running is an intriguing flaw in the Three Laws. Sadly, the solution is not to outwit the machines with the same logic that got us into this mess but to shoot it out with them, dangle over a precipice, and jam stuff into a big glowing orb. During this sequence, I whispered to one of my friends “I think I’ve played this level before.” “I, Robot” is also stuck in the predictable language of a cop movie. Earlier I said this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but one gets tired of the captain/lieutenant/chief (Chi McBride) asking the COTE for his badge, and the COTE playing by his own rules, and having a secret from his past, etc. I also found the procedural stuff to be a little too loose: as an example, when two truckloads of robots try to run Smith and his car into the wall of a tunnel and he trashes everything in sight, his superior is really quick to not believe him when he claims he was attacked.
The movie has good effects if you just can’t get enough of computer-generated stuff. It looks good in a flat, jittery kind of way, in which, beyond the Fresh Prince’s apartment, I could never be convinced that anything was real. There’s a uniform, almost black-and-white greyness to everything I found moderately pleasing. The movie’s highpoint is the robots themselves. The obsolete models are all metal and stiff-moving, with motionless eyes and mouths that flash on and off when they speak. The new models, which you’ve seen in the previews, appear to be all plastic, or filled with liquid, or something, and are remarkably agile during several encounters to the death. Sonny’s face has an innocent, sweet wonder about it, but never loses the sinister edge it acquires when Smith finds him in the dead professor’s office. As Sonny is the only character of interest or sympathy besides Smith, this is important.
Alex Proyas has directed two of the best and most eye-pleasing fantasy films of recent years: “Dark City,” which out-matrixes “The Matrix,” and “The Crow,” my favorite recent comic book movie. It helps that he co-wrote both of them, which gives them a directness that committee-written films often lack. With “I, Robot” he keeps the traffic moving and composes his shots well, but his visual palette is sparse and bare compared to the sprawling detail of his previous feasts for the eyes. The only really memorable shots consist of the robots moving en masse, once as the glowing-red-with-malevolence NS-5s march through downtown, and again as they are put into indefinite storage.
“I, Robot’s” shortcomings are probably mostly due to a lack of ambition on the part of screenwriters Akiva Goldman (“A Beautiful Mind”) and Jeff Vintar. The differences between people and machines could be explored more thoroughly, or the idea that machines could adopt their own feelings, or why exactly Sunny makes the choice he does near the film’s end instead of just saying “it seems a little heartless.” Or what happened to that segment of the population that used to empty out the trash, bring us mail, cook our food, serve us drinks. Like so many summer movies, it’s gotten a hold of some good ideas and then doesn’t do much with them—it’s “Ideas Lite.” 2002’s “Minority Report,” while not a perfect movie, is a rare thing for the summer: an admirable combination of intelligence and spectacle. Even “A.I.,” if also flawed, is daring and ambitious compared to “I, Robot.” I was engaged and enjoyed myself while watching “I, Robot,” but the pleasure of the confection was fleeting. It left me saying “it’s about all you can expect from a summer movie.” It settled for good enough instead of good.
Finished July 26, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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