There have always been ghosts in the machine...

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2017)

I, Robot is one of my top examples for a summer blockbuster movie with a heart and a brain.
Alex Proyas wanted this film to look more like a documentary of our future, so the movie is way less stylized as his previous films "The Crow" and "Dark City". This is why it looks more like a conventional blockbuster to most people, and doesn't quite get the recognition for its very intelligent plot that it deserves.
The movie uses multiple stories by Isaac Asimov, who is something like the father of the word and meaning Robotic. I read all of his writing about this subject matter and have to say that he's a very intelligent man, and that his ideas of the future are very intriguing.
So is the movie, which is named after one of his short stories, but isn't an adaption of it, but of many stories combined to tell it's own suspenseful plot, and it works.
The idea behind the movie is instantly fascinating, and stays this way till the end, with a great reveal.
Apart from the look it got all of Proyas trademarks you want in his movies, great cinematography with one great shot after another, well paced editing, a dark and intense soundtrack (after Graeme Revell and Trevor Jones, now by Marco Beltrami, who shows perfectly what he's capable of), much atmosphere and amazingly choreographed action sequences.
The action in this movie, by god, is stunning, it's other-the-top but in the right way that fits the movie, and all the stunts and effects are accompanied by perfect editing and some of the most intense camera-work you'll see in an action movie.
The movie was also nominated for an Visual Effects-Oscar and lost very close to Spider-Man 2. The effects in this film aged very well, so that the world the movie creates still feels believable.
The best effect in the movie is the robot named Sonny, who was played through motion-capture by Alan Tudyk who is a fairly underrated actor and so unrecognizable that most people haven't realized that it's him for years. (He played another robot most recently in the new Star Wars movie Rogue One)
Speaking of acting: This is my favourite performance by both Will Smith and Bridget Moynahan who play well of each other, with their different characters. One of the best parts in the movie actingwhise, is when Will Smiths Character tells her his tragic backstory which is the reason for his technophobic behaviour. When he's finished both feel very believable. Not to mention James Cromwell as the creator of the robots, who's only seen in videos or as a hologram, but his performance and most of all how he delivers his few lines is so strong and recognizable that i quoted him for years.
I,Robot is a great mix of murder-mystery and sci-fi-actioner and never acts like we audience members are idiots, like most summer blockbusters, and although it seems to be just that, it has contentwhise much more going on. It takes itself serious but is also fun, and tackles a interesting subject matter without losing focus...
(To make it even more clear: The movie "Surrogates" with Bruce Willis is very similar to this film (it also has James Cromwell as the creator and Bruce Willis is the only one who isn't trusting the technology, for example) but just copies the murder-mystery premise without expanding on it's themes, so that the (also similar) ambiguous ending of the film has no real impact.
More interesting: This is a movie i also like and think is worth seeing, but it's not nearly as good as this one)