Saturday, July 24, 2004

I just saw "I, Robot," which was essentially what I expected from a near-future suspense-thriller starring Will Smith. Not that it's a bad movie; it's just that I spent most of it roaming over the CGI scenery and taking only peripheral interest in the actual goings-on.

The successes in "I Robot" are minor triumphs in post-"Blade Runner" visual futurism: the artful decrepitude of antique 'bots going about servile tasks; the subtly arresting motion of clockwork behind the robots' translucent skulls; the consummately ergonomic contours of futuristic cars (Smith drives a fetchingly believable self-driving Audi).

At least one reviewer has stupidly commented that the future society depicted in the film is "dystopian" -- far from it. Slender color-coordinated robots do humankind's dirty work with perpetual hardwired smiles; the Chicago skyline, unlike the smoke-clotted industrial hell of "Blade Runner's" cyberpunk Los Angeles, is as bright, sunny, and fundamentally optimistic as "Futurama." We can only hope 2035 is really like this.





The humans, perhaps unavoidably, fail to elicit any real interest. They function solely -- and possibly even appropriately -- as foils for the robots, and allusions to their personal histories invariably come across as cliches. Will Smith's detective, Del Spooner, is likeable but disorienting: Is he a brooding policeman (a la Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard) or an affable wise-ass who just happens to wield a cool-looking electronic badge? At one point in the film, a minor character informs us that Spooner has a history of psychiatric problems -- could have fooled me. (That future Prozac must be damned good stuff.)

"I, Robot" itself suffers from a dose of cinematic schizophrenia. Is the robot theme intended as commentary on ethnic barriers, the commodification of nominally useful handheld gadgets, or a carnivalesque monument to technological hubris?

Robots are a challenging subject; just because they can be convincingly rendered in a digital studio doesn't mean they can be expended as props. "I, Robot" doesn't exactly waste the potential inherent in simulacra, but it's mainly content to casually strip-mine it instead of really digging.

Go see it. Enjoy the sights (those new 'bots really do look like iMacs). But expect a narrative with the same brittle, unsubtle tone of the Asimov short-story collection from which it took its idealogical cues.

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