I, Robot

I, Robot
by Ed Owens

I, Robot's road from page to screen has been a rocky one. In 1969, Hollywood optioned the rights to Asimov's seminal work on the nature of robots, told through a collection of nine short stories that the author wrote for various magazines early in his career, but made little progress until fellow sci-fi author Harlan Ellison was tapped to write the screenplay in 1977. Dubbed by some as “the greatest science fiction movie never made,” the script was buried, eventually being published as I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (the script's relatively sordid tale is fascinatingly chronicled in the introduction).

The film in its current form has itself undergone a great deal of “growth” before finally finding wide release. Beginning as a spec script by Jeff Vintner optioned by Disney and attached to Bryan Singer, the story finally landed at 20th Century Fox under the steady hand of Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City). Vintner's original story remained largely intact, though Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) was brought in to help shape the finished product. By the time Will Smith joined the cast & crew, sci-fi message boards the world over were already buzzing about the travesty that was sure to ensue. Over thirty years after the original acquisition, I, Robot has finally been released, and the film, while not an instant classic, is hardly the bastardization many feared.

Will Smith plays Spooner, a Chicago detective with a paranoid perspective of robot-kind that can only be classified as prejudiced (the film manages to skirt some interesting racial issues without falling into overt pretension). When his friend and US Robotics founder Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) turns up dead, Spooner immediately sees murder where everyone else has already written it off as suicide, and the answer lies in a special robot named Sonny and the very nature of the Three Laws of Robotics, guidelines hardwired into every robot to prevent them from harming humans.

Despite the objections of Asimov purists, Proyas has managed to create a film that plays off of the master's ideas in interesting ways that are very reminiscent of the original short story brain-teasers. Vintner's original script was heavily influenced by Asimov's stories (including later works), and was conceived as a tenth story in the canon. Even with its occasional turn to action cliché (stunningly photographed by Simon Duggan, with whom Proyas had worked on Garage Days -- the last twenty minutes are jaw-dropping), the film largely manages to avoid easy answers in favor of a more intelligent approach to the material. It is difficult to discuss without giving away key elements, but suffice it to say that many of the robot characterizations presented by reviewers and critics are alarmingly off, attributing simplistic cinematic tropes to a film that takes great pains to explicitly avoid them.

The film is not without its problem spots. Smith's usual persona is sometimes miscalculated, though he is far more restrained here than usual, while Bridget Moynahan (playing robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin) is so lifeless and stiff as to make you wonder whether or not she's a robot herself. Even more puzzling is the superfluous inclusion of Shia LaBeouf as Farber, a character so unnecessary as to be jarring (a shot of him as ad hoc resistance leader standing in front of a swarming mass of hulking men ready to do battle is actually laughable). The film's mix of sci-fi rumination and action blockbuster is also occasionally a less than clean fit, but none of these lessened my general enjoyment of the overall production. I, Robot is certainly not a “faithful” adaptation of the collection of short stories, but that doesn't mean it is without foundation in Asimov's writings. While the film definitely skews towards the action genre more befitting its summer blockbuster roots (though still a difficult sell -- too much action blockbuster for heady purists, too heady for popcorn escapists), it is not without its own intelligence, one that is certainly worth careful consideration.