Well, I finally got to see the best movie of the year last night (no, I didn’t go and see 13 Going on 30).
I, Robot stars Will Smith (… good!) and Bridget Moynahan (… bad …) and about a million robots – and if you think I’m joking, you need to go and see the movie. The robots were real!
Or at least, they look so real in the movie that 50 years from now when robots actually are real, people will think these robots were real. Or something like that.
Based on a series of short stories by Isaac Asimov, I, Robot is set in the year 2035, in Chicago, were a scientist at the leading robotics company appears to have been murdered by a robot – the only problem is, robots are bound by 3 laws that provide a perfect circle of protection for humans (presumably to stop robots from taking over the world).
But all is not as it seems, and Det Del Spooner (played by a stereo-typical Will Smith) finds that there may be more going on than meets the eye.
There are many great things about I, Robot and I don’t have time to discuss each one.
Will Smith turns in a great performance as Spooner, a paranoid cop who believes that robots can’t be trusted – if anyone else had played Spooner, the movie would have been unbearably dreary, but Smith gives the film just the right feel for the subject matter.
Bruce Greenwood (one of the best actors around, in my opinion) plays the boss of USR Robotics, and doesn’t get nearly enough screen time. Chi McBride (the principal from Boston Public) plays the police chief, and has some great lines (including the classic from the trailer – “We’re gonna miss the old days … when people were killed by other people”).
I dunno who the actor is, but the robot called “Sonny” is great as well.
The only bad thing was Bridget Moynahan’s performance as Dr Calvin – she looked in over her head a couple of times in the film, and definitely could’ve done a lot better.
The real highlight of I, Robot are the robots themselves. There are literally thousands of robots in this film and each one of them looks like it is actually real – the computer effects are so fluid and detailed that it is near impossible to see any kind of sign that the robots are computer imagery.
Add to that Alex Proyas directorial style, and what you get are some of the sleekest looking scenes from any action movie of the last 10 years (highlights include a fight between Spooner’s car and 100 NS-5 robots, and a fight between Sonny and 2 NS5’s in a hallway).
Overall, I give I, Robot an 9.5 out of 10. As you may have guessed by now, I don’t really analyse anything about the films in enough detail to give it a rating. However, I gave Spiderman 2 a 9.5, and I, Robot was every bit as good, if not better than it.
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