a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Director – Alex Proyas.
Writer – Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman, based on a screen story by Jeff Vintar and suggested by the book by Isaac Asimov.
Director of photography – Simon Duggan.
Editor – Richard Learoyd, Armen Minasian and William Hoy.
Music – Marco Beltrami.
Production designer – Patrick Tatopoulos.
Producer – Laurence Mark, John Davis, Topher Dow and Wyck Godfrey.
Released by 20th Century Fox.
110 minutes. Rrated PG-13.
STARRING: Will Smith (Del Spooner), Bridget Moynahan (Susan Calvin), Bruce Greenwood (Lawrence Robertson), James Cromwell (Dr. Alfred Lanning), Chi McBride (Lt. John Bergin), Shia LaBeouf (Farber), Adrian L. Ricard (Granny) and Alan Tudyk (Sonny).
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Poor Will Smith. He worked so hard to be Mohammed Ali for director Michael Mann. And still, many months later, he finds himself stuck back in the July Blockbuster circuit. Once again, he’s playing a cop (Bad Boys 2) who has to turn in his badge and become a man running from a mysterious conspiracy (Enemy of the State), firing big guns at inhuman assailants (Men in Black), trying to save the world from a cold-hearted intelligence (Independence Day). Through most of I, Robot, the new and disappointing sci-fi film by Alex Proyas (Dark City), Smith looks frustrated and lonely. He probably senses that the film’s a dud, and he thus he spends the two hours commiserating with the those of us who are stuck in the theatre for a few bursts of adrenalin that enliven what is otherwise a tired exercise in summer action flick formulas.
I, Robot is a mishmash of other sci-fi films. It looks just like Minority Report, it deals with a lot of the same questions as A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), and the plot line borrows from Blade Runner. Granted, the Issac Asimov story that “suggested” the film has been around a long time, but this film has very little to do with Asimov. Asimov liked technology, and this film sees it as the highway to certain doom. So, once again we’re going through the Frankenstein tale, where what we have invented breaks loose and threatens to take over the world, while at the same time we’re led to feel pity for the one sympathetic monster of the bunch.
Coulda been titled, I, Rehash.
The plot deserves some amount of praise. Where so many science fiction films stumble into long and indulgent action scenes that exist merely to let CG animators dazzle the audience with the latest innovation, Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman’s script sticks to the storyline and moves us a fair distance from beginning to end. The pace remains lively. But things stay so simple that we’re never given any reason to stop chowing down on popcorn and think about what’s happening. Further, there’s only one interesting character, and as noted earlier, he looks like he’s waiting to catch the next bus out of this movie.
Kudos to the person who thought of the budget-saving idea of making the hero a collector of nostalgia. That way the film can be futuristic, while the hero gets around in Converse All-Stars and rides outdated motorcycles to look cool. Nice idea, keeps the film from getting overcrowded with imaginary gadgetry, but it also makes this film a contender for Year’s Most Obvious Product Placement Movie.
It doesn’t help that the film looks awful. The special effects are inconsistent, and often severely unconvincing. The car chase is especially weak. The city, especially in the transportation tunnels, looks way too slick, with a stainless steel and chrome glow to it that mimics Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography in Minority Report but is never as good as that. I personally got over this problem early on, and decided to pretend that it was a film in the same vein as Tron, in which one flesh and blood human must contend with an artificial environment and electronic neighbors. The problem is, in this film, things are supposed to look real, not computer-generated.
Smith should feel lonely. This is one of those movies in which the hero discovers a major conspiracy and can’t get anyone else to believe him. But the things that happen to him are so spectacular, it’s hard to believe that everyone else would be so stupid and refuse to investigate for themselves. Even his only friend in the world, his grandmother, fails him. The primary robot character “Sonny” is voiced by Alan Tudyk, who proved himself to be a great comic talent on TV’s Firefly. He plays the part just fine, but he’s now chalked up two disappointing movies so far this year (including Dodgeball). Somebody put him in a good movie! Shia Labeouf (Holes) plays the role of a kid in the neighborhood that Spooner pals around with, but the character seems to exist for the sole purpose of giving Spooner someone to save during a big action scene. And the less said about Bridget Moynahan’s performance and character the better.
Worse, everyone around Spooner is made to seem really stupid–they’re dull and gullible and able to speak only in sci-fi action clichés. Everything Detective Spooner (that’s his name) says prompts responses to make him look like “the only sane man on earth.” The fact that he has very few truly clever quips and virtually nothing very intelligent to say only makes the film’s verbal exchanges tediously boring.
This is one of those films where the hero’s conversations with people go something like this:
SCIENTIST: My job is to [insert long, convoluted techno-speak].
SPOONER: Yeah, yeah, whatever. Tell me in plain English!
SCIENTIST: I make the robots seem more human.
SPOONER: There. Wasn’t that easier to say?
Yeah, sure, Spooner. It was easier to say, but it was also BORING and completely free of anything that matters.
The Lesson: Scientific jargon is a time-waster and a pretentious, exclusionary language. Anything that’s really relevant to the work of a good detective can be easily explained to a second-grader. Or a summertime moviegoer. God forbid we should have to think hard or try to figure out the vagaries of the film’s technological ideas. God forbid we discover that ethical dilemmas have some “grey areas” that require close attention. Smith declares early on, “Those robots don’t do anybody any good.” And sure enough, he’s right. So, why are we still sitting here two hours later?
Oh, and the jokes are pretty bad too. Someone asks an exhausted Spooner, “Do you ever have a normal day?” He replies, “Yeah. Once. It was a Thursday.” That’s one of the film’s biggest jokes. Seriously.
The film will play well with people who are intimidated by educated people, scientific people, technology-savvy people. It will play well with people who don’t like cops, and who love to see law enforcement shown up as stupid and ignorant.
But the conspiracy theorists and Michael Moore fans to whom the film preaches the loudest probably won’t go for it. As it gets to the end, undeniably “RELEVANT” lines start coming our way: “We decided to take away some of your freedoms in order to protect your freedom.” “We are attempting to avoid human losses during this transition.” The conclusion focuses on a civilian uprising against a heartless government, and it looks a lot like the WTO protests in Seattle a few years back. There’s even a disturbing twist that coaxes us to root for the forces that are trying to “bring down the tower” in the heart of an American city.
Sounds a little funny, such a countercultural commentary coming from a film that is unapologetic about its product placement (Audi, JVC, Converse). It’s also funny considering that, after making such a blanket statement about the way technology and corporations are sticking it to the little guy, the answer that the film comes up with is a vigilante who walks like a gangsta and totes a really really big gun even when his badge has been taken away. “Lead by example,” someone tells him. But at the end, he’s still not much of an example.
I appreciate the attempt at the end of the film to suggest that perhaps technology isn’t all bad… perhaps it can be helpful if used properly. But the film doesn’t have nearly enough guts to really explore how that could be done. It’s more interested in setting up another big action scene to send the popcorn-munchers home happy.
Here’s an idea that could have saved the film. Alex Proyas’s last sci-fi film was Dark City, a brilliant, complex, and underrated work in which a man finds himself trapped in a false reality. What if Spooner had realized that it wasn’t just the robots who were involved in a conspiracy, but everyone else too? What if he discovered that he was trapped in a bad summer movie, beset on all sides by clichés and soulless characters? What if he had to find a way to bust out, like Truman escaping the Truman Show? Not terribly original, perhaps, but at least more interesting than this.
It should be noted that the film’s cool color scheme actually had a pleasant cooling effect on me after a hot summer day. So, for a matinee price, you could enjoy two hours of air conditioning and see some mediocre entertainment. Things could be worse. It’s no Wild, Wild West, thank goodness… but then again, it’s not nearly as satisfying as Men in Black, or even Enemy of the State, either. Better to stay home and read a book, sipping a tall glass of ice tea.